by Girl A
He wasn’t alone. He was with two girls aged twelve and thirteen. One was actually a friend of Paige, called Kirsten, two years below me at school. The other was Grace – another victim, I guess, but a girl I’d never heard of.
You know how the police always ask people to keep an eye out for anything suspicious, and to report it? Not to be stupid; just to use their common sense?
Well, that night there was a 23-year-old student from Manchester Met waiting in the queue for some chips, and she noticed this odd grouping ahead of her. An Asian guy, pretty old-looking, with two very young girls. And the guy, she said, had the sort of look on his face that reminded her of a kid at a sweet counter.
‘Have anything you want,’ she heard him telling them. ‘Anything.’ He was all smiles and happy. Behind him in the queue, the student looked uncomfortable. Like, she knew instinctively something was wrong.
The takeaway had a couple of booths for people to use if they were eating in, and the guy collected the food and led the girls to one of them: him facing away from the counter, the older girl at his side, the younger one opposite him.
To the student it all looked weird. Too weird. She made eye contact with Kirsten a couple of times and felt a connection; sensed an unspoken desperation. She just knew she had to intervene.
By this time she’d been handed her chips, but instead of heading for the door she leaned over towards the girls and said: ‘Hey you two, who’s the guy you’re with?’
She glanced at the man. His eyes darted away. Grace did likewise, momentarily, but she recovered enough to say: ‘Our uncle.’
‘Your uncle?’ said the student. Given the man’s colour, it still felt wrong. Grace realised too. ‘He’s my dad’s friend,’ she explained.
The student, out with her boyfriend, wasn’t giving up. She asked the girl for her dad’s number. Then, as she began to dial, she noticed the man reaching for his phone under the table. She had a sixth sense he was turning it off so it wouldn’t ring. Her call went straight to voicemail. She knew, she just knew.
And then she looked at Kirsten, knowing, instinctively, that this man was looking at her too, and asked: ‘So what’s this guy’s name?’
Kirsten wouldn’t answer at first, but then she said: ‘He tells me to call him Daddy.’
The student’s boyfriend had had enough. ‘He tells you to call him Daddy?’ he asked, a menace in his voice.
By now a real scene was developing, and others were starting to get involved, crowding in on the melamine table with a middle-aged guy and two kids sat at it. The student tried to calm her boyfriend, but by now he was a liability. She decided it would be best to take him outside.
A few moments later, out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Shabir Ahmed and the girls – their food abandoned – scurrying away from the takeaway and on towards a pharmacy a little further down on Wilmslow Road.
My rapist was in a silver Honda that night, but just before he headed away the student scribbled the registration number onto a piece of paper and immediately rang the police.
The last image she remembers was of Kirsten looking back at her, seemingly bewildered, from the back of the car.
It turned out that both Kirsten and Grace had been reported missing that night and to their credit the police took the student’s call seriously.
Detectives were knocking on her door just after midnight, and a little while later Ahmed was being arrested at his home in Oldham. He claimed everything had been completely innocent; that the girls had asked for a lift and he’d just been happy to help out.
Kirsten and Grace were spoken to, as well, and neither would make any disclosures. Maybe they, too, had been told he owned them; that they were his bitches. Or maybe they managed to break free before he’d fully groomed them.
The end result was that Ahmed was set free, without charge and without so much as the abduction warning that police might have thrown at him.
The big thing, though, was that his involvement with two young girls at a time he was already raping me had triggered what police call a Force Wide Incident Number. It’s an automatic procedure. An officer logs a FWIN on a computer and there it is, a permanent record. For ever.
So the night I was driven into Rochdale police station for questioning about a smashed counter – the same night I told them Ahmed had raped me – the FWIN from three weeks earlier should have rung massive alarm bells.
It was there for the whole of Greater Manchester Police to see.
And, it gets worse.
The night before I threw that jar of mayonnaise at Chef, Paige had plucked up the courage to come forward and tell police how a guy called Taz had forced her to give him oral sex. And where had this taken place? The Balti House.
So, within twenty-four hours, two of us had told police about separate attacks at a single takeaway in Heywood. And yet it had taken three-and-a-half years to get some kind of justice.
In Paige’s case, the man was charged, it seems, but the investigation fell by the wayside and it never came to trial.
I know now that there had been other mistakes, other oversights, in the days before Operation Span.
The jury never got to hear, for example, about some extra DNA evidence against Kabeer Hassan because the police hadn’t sent my jeans away to be tested.
This, despite me having talked about them being pulled down just before he raped me. By the time the forensic results came back, years later, the trial was about to start and they were ruled inadmissible. The people in Operation Span were gutted, but there was nothing they could do.
* * *
At the end of my trial, the Girl A trial, Steve Heywood, the assistant chief constable of Greater Manchester Police, took a lift down from the third floor of the Queen Elizabeth Law Courts in Liverpool and stood in front of the TV cameras to make the sort of glib statement senior officers usually make at the end of big trials.
As soon as he’d finished, he brushed away questions, turned on his heel and went back through the revolving doors. ‘I wasn’t hanging around,’ he was overheard to say as he pressed the lift button to head back to the third floor. ‘If I had, all they’d have done was keep banging on about the race issue.’
His force is now at the forefront of the war against the grooming gangs, Asian or otherwise, but it’s also come under investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission for its handling of the Rochdale case.
Things have changed massively among British police forces, not least the one in Greater Manchester, and there’s certainly a greater awareness of what always was, and remains, a comparatively small pocket of crime.
But in the future they will have to remain vigilant, and they’ll have to be prepared to investigate what they see in front of them: not hide from it because it might make for some uneasy issues to be dealt with.
Mr Afzal justifiably took the plaudits in the aftermath of the Girl A trial and since then he’s gone on to become a passionate campaigner on the issue of child sexual exploitation. But it shouldn’t be forgotten that the CPS did not bring my case to court all those years earlier.
Rochdale Social Services, though, are the people I blame the most. The top brass at Rochdale Council remain so scared of what might still come out of the woodwork that they keep sending a girl from their legal department scurrying from hearing to hearing, trial to trial, so they can be ready to deal with the issues they suspect are heading their way.
Whatever the issues, I’m guessing they’ll be expensive. Steve Garner, the man in charge of children’s social care, left the council ‘with fond memories’. And both he and two former chief executives were hauled up before the Home Affairs Select Committee of the House of Commons.
However, heroines have emerged, namely Miss Crabtree, who tried so hard to help me at school, and Sara from Crisis Intervention. Sara gave evidence to the Home Affairs Committee and, bless her, she told it as it was.
‘It was about attitudes towards teenagers,’ she said. ‘Vulnerable young
people did not have a voice. They were overlooked. They were discriminated against. They were treated appallingly by protective services.’
She had tried her best, she said. ‘I told everybody these children were being abused.’
And then Jane. Jane who has seen so many girls like me that she must have spotted straight away just how vulnerable I was; how at risk.
For all that I tried to throw her off the scent, she battled through even the worst of times to reach out to me: in her office, at school, at the Asda café in Pilsworth, and on all those harrowing journeys to and from the VIPER parades.
Mum and Dad, for so long bewildered and out of their depth, came through for me and are even now fighting desperately hard to help save kids like the one they almost lost.
Sometimes I think about the other girls too. The other victims. About Shannon who’d gone before me; about Roxanne who never stood a chance; about Leah, who might have been saved if only people had acted sooner; and about all the other girls who have over so many years just slipped, unnoticed, between the gaps in the care that was supposed to protect them.
Courtney wouldn’t even admit to me what had happened to her, let alone open up to the police. She’s moved away now and we’ve lost touch. I’ve no idea what happened to Paige, but I fear for her because she’s another of the girls who wouldn’t tell her story to the police.
Nadine’s still out there, still believing herself to be ‘in love’ with the Asian men who see her as easy meat, still refusing to talk to the police about them so they can go on trial for what they did to her when she was twelve and thirteen. Maybe, just maybe, she’ll come forward.
I even think about Emma. Emma the recruiter, who once, a long time ago, was also one of us. I hope that even she has found some sort of peace.
In darker moments I recall that some of the men who abused me are still out there, perhaps because I’d not recognised them in the VIPER parades, sometimes because the police never managed to trace them, or else because they’ve fled to Pakistan. Men like Mulla and Megamuncher, like Boss and Juicy, like the ‘gangster’, Lateef, like Gulshan, and like Ali and the others from Leeds and Bradford.
They and all the others can all go to hell as far as I’m concerned and, in Daddy’s case, I think Lanika would back me on that one. It’s not Christian, I know, and it’s not Muslim either, but I imagine it’s the way we both feel.
Jane is still in Heywood, still doing the same job she’s done for years. She rang me the other day to see how I was.
‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I’m in my own place now with Chloe. She’s thriving and I’m finding that, yes, I actually do have a future. I really do.’
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my mum and dad and all of my family and friends for their love and support. Thanks to the support services that gave me their time and guided me through this experience. And, a special thank you to Nigel Bunyan for his hard work and passion while helping me to tell my story.
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