But I found it hard to keep a check on my emotions: everything made me angry, I could switch from laughter to rage in the blink of an eye. If I didn’t get my own way or if I saw something I didn’t agree with, I flew off the handle. Looking back, it is now obvious that the violence I had witnessed in my early years was having an impact on me and influencing my behaviour. I knew that I would get some sort of reaction by being violent, just as Shane did when he behaved in the same way. He got a reaction from us – fear – and this in turn gave him power.
That fight was to change my circumstances at school. Afterwards the bullies left me alone and I earned a grudging respect from them. The other kids began to look up to me and I started to become someone the other pupils went to for help if they were being bullied. I didn’t want anyone to be scared of me, instead I saw myself as a protector and as someone people could depend on, so I fought people’s battles for them and stuck up for those who couldn’t stick up for themselves. A loyal friend, I always jumped in to help people I knew but this attitude simply marked me out as being even more of a troublemaker. Mum started to become aware of my problems at the end of Year Eight when she got calls from the teachers. She would question me about them and try to find out what was causing this change in behaviour and attitude but I refused to talk and would blame the school and the teachers.
Around this time I began skiving school. I started by skipping individual lessons and progressed to truanting for entire days; I didn’t care about the consequences. Mum tried to entice me back to school with a series of rewards.
‘If you manage a full week, I’ll take you to the cinema,’ she tried.
But it made no difference to me. I lost interest – I didn’t believe the school had anything to offer me and they, in turn, didn’t seem at all bothered about keeping me there. In reality, they didn’t know what to do with me. I started being temporarily excluded in December 2004, which I thought was great – I didn’t want to be there so they were reinforcing my behaviour by telling me to stay away. In the end, I attended a special behavioural unit, which was run by a lovely teacher called Mr Harris, one of the only ones who made an effort to understand me. He was old, approaching retirement, while most of the other teachers were brash and young, but he had time to spend with the troubled children in his care. He was the only one who showed an interest and understanding that I had been adopted and hadn’t been in Oxford for long.
In the unit, we had our own room. I was in there with a bunch of people who were worse behaved than me, around six of us. Classes were for two-and-a-half hours a day, but, by the time Mum came to pick me up at 12.30, I was usually gone. I didn’t worry about getting chucked out of school, I wasn’t scared of anything. I never had an eye on the future: I had no plans, no aspirations, no interest in anything.
When I bunked off I hung out in the park with a group of other kids who always seemed to be there, smoking, swearing and messing around. Some were from my school, others from the various schools in the town and many of them didn’t go to school at all. I was one of the youngest. They ranged in age from around 11 to late teens; I thought they were cool. None of them seemed to be bothered about being seen. My days were spent hanging around with the crowd and reluctantly going to lessons.
The event that ended my school career happened in the spring of the second year. I was in class and I was being disobedient. The class was being taken by a female teacher who eventually tired of my interruptions and told me to leave the room. I refused because it was my favourite lesson, design and technology. We had a standoff during which she became increasingly agitated and I grew more and more abusive and aggressive. Following this, she tried to physically remove me from the lesson and grabbed hold of my arm. She had long, false nails, which dug into my arm. I squirmed and told her to let go, but she tightened her grip and tried to drag me to the door. As I pushed her away, her nails dug deeper into my skin.
The red mist descended. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t free myself from her grasp. I lashed out at her. She let go of me and I stormed out.
Immediately I knew that I had gone too far. The school said they had no option but to exclude me while they tried to find other alternatives. I was never formally kicked out because, if they had done so, they would have had to come up with an alternative plan. Instead, I was left in limbo.
I felt strangely satisfied when I was removed. The whole episode reinforced a deeply held belief that things would always go wrong for me. I believed it was inevitable – there was always a part of me waiting for the drama and the instability. I didn’t realise I was causing things to go wrong; I believed they happened to me, not because of me.
At school I never felt like I belonged. I felt different from the other children. Perhaps it was because I was adopted? I kept quiet about my past – I didn’t want my peers to know that my birth parents were crazy. They all seemed to have normal parents and normal homes. Mine were not. Although I now had a lovely mum, there was always a shadow in my past, and I was embarrassed by it.
I never told anyone about the sexual abuse because I had never been believed.
Chapter nine
OUT OF CONTROL
I was open to trying anything. I had no sense of proportion and no self-preservation mechanism so I never did anything in moderation. A prime example was the first time I got drunk.
I was around 13 and I was with a friend, Jo. She had to look after her 10-year-old sister for the afternoon and they came round to my house. Mum was out preparing for a party we were having – I think the occasion was her birthday. Because of this, there were lots of bottles of wine in the house.
‘Let’s have one?’ I suggested to Jo.
She refused but I went ahead anyway. I had never stolen from Mum or drunk before, so she assumed there was no reason to lock the alcohol away.
I glugged from the bottle just as I remembered Terri doing. After I finished one, I started another. The effects hit me quickly; I became increasingly excitable. Somewhere during the third bottle I lost all concept of reality and can’t remember anything. I only have details from what I have since been told. At some point I ran out of the house into the street. I was staggering around in the middle of the road, manically shouting. I threw the bottle I was holding and it smashed onto the pavement; I fell down next to it and started drinking what was left from the broken glass. I ran up to strangers and grabbed them.
At some point Mum came home to find me wandering in the middle of the road. It was daylight, thankfully, and the drivers of the cars on the busy road could see me and were swerving around me. There was blood on my face from a cut. Mum tried to get me but I turned wild, lashed out and screamed at her before running off through the traffic. She called the police because I was unapproachable. Within minutes a squad car arrived, with its blue lights flashing, and the officers managed to grapple me into the back and belt me in. I was thrashing around and mumbling incoherently. They took me to the station with Mum following and could only think to lock me in a cell to dry out. As the door clanged shut, I screamed and shouted and ran at it repeatedly; each impact jarred my body. I fell and slammed my head on the floor but felt nothing.
After a few hours, they let me out. I was still aggressive and rambling but they sent me home, brusquely helping me out the door into Mum’s car. When we got to the house, Mum tried to calm me down. Our neighbour, Jean, heard the commotion and came over to try to help. A good friend to Mum and a support throughout everything that happened during the subsequent years, she had a partner who didn’t live with her and also had two girls. She was a nurse and cared about other people. Jean would hear our arguments and come in to try to help. Over the years there were times when she came round and literally had to sit on me to restrain me. Eventually she and Mum persuaded me to lie on the sofa, but, as I calmed down and faded into unconsciousness, I started to convulse and fit. Again, the emergency services were called and I was taken to the hospital, where I was scanned. It was discovered that I had sustained a broken hip an
d concussion. I was kept in for several days. That was my introduction to alcohol and I didn’t touch a drop for many months after that.
Around the same time I had started to attract a lot of attention from men, especially older men. Even with make-up on, I looked my age, though. I don’t know what vibes I gave off and it was nothing consciously but a certain type of man seemed to gravitate towards me. I was smiley and friendly and I think that was perhaps construed as being flirty. Easily approachable, I talked to anyone.
Being with Mum didn’t put them off. Once we went to B&Q and I wandered off while Mum was looking at something. After a few minutes, she came to find me and discovered me in another aisle, talking to one of the employees. He was an old man, probably in his fifties, and he was trying to swap numbers with me. Mum was furious.
‘Do you realise how old she is?’ she called out.
Despite Mum’s best efforts, my clothing style had started to change. Automatically, like most young teenagers, I thought that whatever she chose for me was old-fashioned and instead I looked for clothes that I thought Jennifer might like. I had a tendency to buy things that were too tight and too short, possibly a hangover from the way I was dressed by Barbara. When I was with Mum I wore normal things such as T-shirts, jeans and trousers, but, when I was with friends, I started wearing short skirts and skimpy tops. I also wore a lot of make-up. I thought I was grown up, but I was emotionally immature: I was a woman-child.
Mum struggled to hold on to my childhood. After all, I had barely had one and missed out on so much and yet, at 13 and going on 14, I was trying everything I could think of to grow up and be an adult. Throughout my life, adults had chipped away at my innocence. Lumps of it had fallen away, thanks to neglect and abuse. Mum tried so hard to keep what was left intact but, in the summer of 2005, another chunk of it was ripped away.
I was out with Jennifer. I’d had an argument at home – Mum had friends round and I was misbehaving. One of them told me off for doing something. As a result I flew into a rage and stormed out. I met up with Jennifer and we wandered into town. She had been seeing a man and she wanted to go and find him. Her relationships were not forged in the normal way; she was picked up by men who hung around in dodgy parts of town. There was no romance and courtship – they’d ask her to go round to their houses and, if she liked them, she would. In this instance, the man she was seeing regularly loitered around an area called Bonn Square. He was Eastern European and would hang out with a group of men who spent their days in that particular part of town, drinking and attempting to pick up young girls.
As we walked through the square, he saw her and called us over.
‘Let’s go to mine.’
He had a car and his house was on the way to my house so it would just be like getting a lift home, I reasoned. We agreed, walked to where his car was parked and he drove us the short distance back to his house. There were two other men in the car with us. I didn’t know who they were but had seen them hanging around the house; there seemed to be quite a few single men who lived there. They didn’t speak to me but chatted and laughed among themselves in a language I didn’t understand.
We got to the house, followed the men inside and sat for a while chatting. I felt uneasy and sat with Jennifer. After a while, she got up and disappeared into another room with the man she knew and left me in the lounge with the two men from the car. One was greasy-looking. He had thick, black, wavy hair and a rough, unshaven face; he was also stocky. His friend was huge, over 6ft tall. I felt awkward and uncomfortable – they were looking at me menacingly. I went and sat on the sofa and they sat on either side of me. Then they grabbed me. I started screaming and struggling; I called to Jennifer for help but she didn’t answer. One of the men pinned me down. They were talking to each other incomprehensibly. One started pulling at my clothes. Petrified, I screamed again.
Jennifer called out from the other room.
‘I’ll be there in a minute.’
While one of the men held me down, the other one raped me. I struggled and cried and begged them to stop but they just laughed. When he’d finished, he patted me on the head. I pulled my clothes together and ran out of the house. The thoughts inside my head were deafening. It’s OK, I told myself, it’s over now; it’s happened before, it’s no big deal. I took deep breaths and tried to stop myself from shaking. More than anything, I felt angry that I had let it happen – I thought it was my fault. After all, I’d entered the house willingly.
There was a garage next door to the house and I went in there, bought cigarettes and pretended nothing had happened. As I hurried home, I breathed deeply, fighting the panic inside. I ran a bath as soon as I got in and tried to wash the self-loathing away. It felt like I would never be clean again. I knew I wasn’t going to report it because I was scared what people would think of me and what might happen: previously I had never been taken seriously so why would anyone believe me now?
As the weeks passed, I tried to forget what had happened. I told Jennifer and she attempted to brush it under the carpet. Each time I passed the house where it happened I felt a surge of panic. I became quiet and withdrawn. Mum noticed the change in me. We had to drive past their house all the time and I was fed up with seeing it. Each time it reminded me and I was finding it hard to hold things in. I needed someone to know what had happened and there was no one better than Mum. She was always very good at watching the signs, dropping questions in the conversation at the right time and she could tell something was wrong. I knew I could trust her and one day, around a month after the rape, we drove past the house again and she asked if something had happened that I wanted to talk about. I started talking.
‘I’ve been raped,’ I said.
Mum tried to remain calm and began asking general questions until she got a picture of what had happened.
‘We have to report this to the police,’ she told me.
I nodded. She turned the car round, drove me home and called the Oxford Constabulary. They came to the house and then asked me to make a statement. Then they asked if they could do a medical examination on me but I refused – I didn’t want anyone to touch me and I couldn’t see the point as I assumed it would have been too late to collect any evidence. I was taken to a special house, where rape victims go to be examined and I was interviewed by officers trained in speaking to victims of sexual assault. The house was less formal than a police station and set out like a normal, comfortable home with sofas, a kitchen and a bathroom. My interview was recorded – the microphone was hidden in a potted plant so I felt more relaxed. The police subsequently contacted Jennifer and her mother, and they raided the house where the assault happened and arrested the men. They remanded three in custody but eventually let them go and charged one, the man who raped me. I was asked to attend an ID parade, which I did, and then I didn’t hear anything for ages.
Weeks later, Mum got a letter out of the blue from the Crown Prosecution Service. It stated that they could not proceed with the case. She rang to find out why and was told that, although my evidence was clear and consistent and the police believed me, unfortunately Jennifer’s evidence was inconsistent, had changed and contradicted mine on several key points. They felt they would not be able to get a conviction as Jennifer would have been a crucial witness and there was no DNA evidence.
I wasn’t shocked or surprised when the case didn’t go ahead. The past had taught me that a child’s word was never believed over that of an adult; the collapse of the case reinforced my view that it was better to keep quiet. For those reasons I didn’t even hold it against Jennifer. Even if she had been consistent in what she said, I doubted a jury would have believed me.
After the case fell apart I would see the man around Oxford, trying to pick up other young girls. Once Mum saw him with a group of young girls and called the police. She stayed with the girls until they arrived. But it didn’t put the gang off – they were very visible, they didn’t care; they would pluck a child in front of you.
Several
years later, Mum and I were discussing the incident and she reminded me of part of the statement I had given. I was asked to describe the room where the rape took place. I explained that I had been sitting on a chair with Jennifer before the attack. I was sitting on her knee, sucking my thumb. Scared and childlike, yet still the monster raped me.
For the months after that I didn’t see much of Jennifer. My confidence was low, I wasn’t at school, and I was aimless and listless. I became bored easily.
One afternoon I was out with a couple of friends, Sam and Justine – I knew them from school and they were nice girls. I was about to go and babysit for a friend of the family. We were walking over a bridge near home when a man approached us.
‘All right, girls, do you want to go for a drink?’ he asked.
None of us had seen him before; he came out of nowhere and was totally brazen. The others ignored him. One muttered the word ‘sleazebag’ under her breath. So, instead, he addressed me.
‘What do you reckon, then?’ he said, blanking Sam and Justine.
He locked on to me – perhaps he could see something about the way I looked that singled me out as an easy victim.
I was flattered by the attention – he seemed nice. Dark-skinned, he looked Arabic. Tall, with a thin face, goatee beard, brown teeth and big, bulging eyes, he looked to be in his mid-twenties. I thought it was cool that he was talking to me; he seemed friendly. He wore a big puffer jacket, jeans and a hat with flaps hanging over his ears.
It was freezing cold and the other girls were telling me to ignore him and move on.
‘I can’t go now, I’m babysitting,’ I told him.
‘What about another day? I’ll take you to The Swan in Cowley,’ he said. Cowley was a rough part of Oxford – the population was mostly Pakistani, Arabic and Muslim. The thought of going to a pub with an older man excited me.
‘Give me your number,’ he said. ‘I’ll call you.’
Girl for Sale Page 10