Girl for Sale

by Lara McDonnell

  Mum was at the end of her tether; she knew something was happening and she had her suspicions that I was disappearing to see an older man, but in those early days she did not know the full extent. She was careful never to challenge me when I was upset because I tended to go wild and, although I always bottled up my emotions, when I returned home from being prostituted, I did get emotional. I was scared and ashamed.

  After Mohammed had broken me down, got me hooked on drugs and turned me to prostitution I was reintroduced to Spider, the man I had met in the park almost a year ago. I was told that I also had to work for him. Spider knew Mohammed had been grooming me; he monitored my progress. Sometimes he turned up outside the flat in his car and Mohammed went down to speak to him.

  There was no choice but to do as Spider told me: he had a fearsome reputation and he also knew where I lived. He wasn’t worried about the police and I was terrified that he would turn up at my house and tell Mum what I’d done. After I had finished at Riverside Court, I was sent across town to Cowley Road, where Spider and Jammy would have men waiting for me. Although they were rivals in the drug trade, they put their differences aside and worked together when the business was girls.

  I was petrified of Spider. When I was with him I became scared and timid; I was his slave and he ran a modern-day slave trade.

  Each day there would be a man to go with, usually more than one. And the men running this industry were brazen. Mohammed thought nothing of calling my home number and wasn’t at all concerned when my mum answered the phone. She would question him and he would abuse her and tell her to put me on the line; she would then tell him I was underage and threaten to call the police. She thought that maybe I was mixed up with an older man but didn’t know the full extent of what was happening. There were occasions when she raised concerns with the police and social services, but because there was no proof of anything I wouldn’t cooperate, and no action was taken. Mum was pulling her hair out and frantic with worry. I told her he was just a friend and that she was being paranoid. One day Spider turned up outside the house. He sat outside in his car. On seeing him, I panicked – I didn’t want Mum to see because I didn’t want her to know what I had been doing. I ran out and got in the vehicle and he drove off with me to meet a punter.

  In the moments when my head was clear – which became less and less frequent due to the amount of drugs and drink I was being fed – I wondered who I could turn to for advice. I was still in phone contact with Terri, my birth mother, and one day I confided in her about taking crack.

  Any other mother who heard that from a daughter would be shocked. Terri was almost proud.

  ‘Crack’s fine,’ she said dismissively. ‘You can do that, it’s not strong.’

  I asked her how to stop taking it.

  ‘It’s fine, don’t worry,’ was all she could offer.

  It felt like I was talking to another member of the gang. I didn’t see her as family – I hadn’t called her Mum since I was little. We never spoke like normal people.

  The one person who could have saved me was the person I had been turned against. My feelings were so confused. I loved Mum and I cared about her. Part of me was devastated when I hurt her but still I continued to push her away, literally and metaphorically. I thought she was the enemy but I also knew she would be devastated and would do everything to help me if she knew the full extent of what was going on.

  I was torn in two: I was Lara – the loving child, who wanted to be liked and did normal things and loved her family – and I was Lauren – a disturbed, drug-taking woman-child, who was exploited by sexual predators. It was a battle between the two and Lauren was winning.

  Chapter twelve

  LOST GIRL

  The days were a haze of drugs, drink, danger and aimlessness. I woke around 10, moped about the house in my pyjamas and tried to forget what was happening to me. I smoked cigarettes and waited for my phone to ring. Mum knew I smoked by then and tried to discourage it. I had started around the time I was 12. I began just by experimenting, like a lot of children do when they get to secondary school, but I enjoyed it. I found that, when I was stressed or angry, a cigarette was the only thing that would calm me down. My smoking was the least of Mum’s worries. She even bought me them sometimes, so at least she could control how much I smoked. If I didn’t have any I begged them from strangers so she figured it was the safest option. She also knew they calmed me down when I got cross.

  While I waited for the phone to ring I watched Jeremy Kyle and tried to convince myself that I wasn’t the only person whose life was a mess.

  When the call came, there was an odd sense of relief. I got anxious waiting because I knew what was coming. Once the call came through to tell me what time to be at the flat at least I wasn’t waiting anymore; I got ready and went out. I knew he would call, he always did.

  I spent my mornings with Jeremy Kyle and my afternoons, evenings and nights in a crack den. It was a vile place, no better than a squat, and it reminded me of the house I grew up in.

  After Mohammed had found out all there was to know about me and coerced me to do his will, he hardly talked to me. I sat in the flat watching music channels while he fed me drugs and we waited for the punters to arrive.

  Meanwhile, Mum was pulling her hair out, trying to coax me back into education. I may have been allowed back to school had I shown a willingness and, if not, the local education authority had a duty to provide me with some form of tutoring. I was given incentives all the time – shopping trips, horse riding, a pony, a puppy, a kitten. All I had to do was go to school, come in on time or do something that was good for me. But it was never enough. I’d ask for money as well; I pushed and pushed. I can’t imagine what a shock it must have been for her to have me.

  Mum adapted to my moods. She noticed my anger when I got home and waited until she could communicate with me. If I wasn’t high on drugs, I was angry at what was happening to me. After the men, I went for walks before I returned home to try to clear my head because I was so cross with myself and with life. Mum tried so hard to find out what was happening and to find a way for us to get through it, but I clammed up or got aggressive.

  If Mum was home when I got the call or text from Mohammed or Spider I engineered rows; I shouted at her and stormed out. If she tried to stop me, I pushed her out the way. I knew, if I didn’t go to them, they would come and get me.

  Their conversations with me were full of implied threats, not only against me but also against Mum and even Snowy.

  ‘I know about that dog,’ Mohammed would say. ‘It would be such a shame if anything ever happened to it or your mum. She might fall over accidentally or get knocked down.’

  Mum tried to alert anyone who would listen – the police, the local authority, politicians. No one seemed to know what to do. I had an outreach worker whom I saw regularly; we would go and do activities once a week; sometimes we would visit museums or I would go to lessons in a special unit. Social services assumed the problem lay at home and that the relationship between Mum and me was the issue. I learned much later that there was a suspicion I was prostituting or being prostituted, but because I was so obstructive whenever anyone asked, no one knew how to handle it.

  Eventually action was taken, but it was taken on the basis that my home life was the problem. The assumption was that I was running away from something, rather than to something. In reality, on the rare days when I was left alone, Mum and I got on well and enjoyed each other’s company. On the days when I wasn’t required by Mohammed or Spider and Jammy – who I called ‘the gang’ – I didn’t want to go anywhere, I was happy being at home. Still, the course of action that the authorities decided was best for me was to place me under a care order, effectively giving control of my life to social services, and to take me away from the perceived problem area – my home – and send me back into the care system.

  It happened after I had gone missing overnight when it was decided that I must have run away because I didn’t want
to be with Mum, and so a place was found for me with a specialist foster carer for troubled children in the Southeast. I stayed there for a few weeks. It was uneventful and it changed nothing. When I returned to Oxford, I went missing a few days later. Mohammed knew I had returned and he texted me: there were more drugs and more men for me. I was wandering home in the morning, drunk and drugged, when I was spotted by a local police officer and taken to the station. Social services were called. I was questioned, became aggressive and refused to answer their questions. Again, it was decided the best course of action would be to temporarily remove me from my home and so I was transferred to a children’s home in Cambridgeshire. I was taken there in a car by security guards. While Mum was glad something was being done, she was upset that I was being taken away and frustrated because she knew that the problem was not our relationship.

  Although it was supposed to be a special home for children with behavioural issues, there was no security or boundaries; there didn’t seem to be any rules. A big old house, the only residents were me and another girl. It was very fussy, the rooms were all perfect and clean and I didn’t like it at all. When I first arrived there were pyjamas laid out on the bed but they weren’t my pyjamas; it didn’t feel comfortable. We were overseen by four members of staff. There was always an adult in residence, days were structured: there were formal lessons, free time and set mealtimes. For a while I played along with the routine but then I got bored and began to be disruptive after two weeks. I didn’t get along with the other girl who was living there and we started to bicker and argue. She was troubled and so was I; we clashed over everything. Neither of us was trusting and I approached most new relationships and people in my life with suspicion. It was an enclosed environment, we weren’t allowed out and as the days went on, I became increasingly frustrated.

  As a prank one day I squirted her shampoo around the bathroom. She failed to see the funny side and we started an argument, which deteriorated into a fight. It was nasty and violent and the police were called. I was restrained and then taken away.

  It was plain that I couldn’t be returned to the home and so alternative accommodation was sought. I stayed in the police station for several hours after I had been charged with common assault and criminal damage, while social services were contacted and some unfortunate case worker back in Oxford rang round to find me somewhere suitable to stay. The answer they came up with was a similar residential home for disturbed children in Devon. I was never told whether that was the nearest placement or someone had assumed it would be better to send me almost as far away as it was geographically possible.

  The arrangements took several hours to finalise and I was driven away in the early hours across the country to my new temporary home. Initially it was to be an eight-week placement. No one told Mum I had been sent to the West Country until the following day. I wasn’t particularly bothered about where I was going, or what was going to happen to me when I got there; it was an adventure. It is hard to explain to people who have never been in the situation I was in but, apart from the anger that erupted in me regularly, I had no other feelings. I was numb.

  The home was called Meadowside. We arrived in the morning and it was a scary, huge, imposing old building. To me, it looked like something from a horror movie. It was in the middle of nowhere, remote from any towns or villages. There was one other girl in there. Chrissy was around two years older than me and she was a mess: she had been taken to the home because, like me, she kept running away. She lived in Birmingham but was involved with a gang in London. She was being abused, and was also selling herself and being sold.

  Although I was wary of her at first, we were both smokers and that broke the ice. On the first day I got there, she asked me if I was going for a fag and we both went outside and started talking. It was superficial stuff about the place and what went on inside it. I never spoke to her about why I was there and what was going on in my life – I never confided in anyone.

  Chrissy told me she was leaving for a temporary visit to her mum later that day and asked if I would straighten her hair, which I did for her. In return, I asked to borrow some of her make-up.

  ‘When I come back, we’ll go out,’ she winked.

  I knew that meant escape.

  The first night I was on my own and that gave me the creeps. The place was big and draughty; it creaked in the quiet and the area around was pitch-black. There was a communal room, with sofas, a television and a pile of board games but the kids who were sent there would not have been the type to sit down and play Monopoly.

  There were two staff on hand throughout the night. I watched some TV and went to bed.

  Later the following day Chrissy returned and told me to pack a small bag for the night – we would be going out. She explained that she knew someone in the nearby town who would be able to get us to London. After the boredom of the previous day and night, I was more than willing; I didn’t want to be left there again on my own. I was ready to go when she knocked on my door after it got dark. It was Halloween night, which added to the sense of fun. The front door was locked and secured; it had a CCTV monitor over it. All the windows had heavy-duty locks on them, except for a small window in the bathroom, which we managed to jump through. We didn’t even make much of an effort to hide what we were doing. The staff on duty that night noticed we had both gone in the bathroom together but didn’t think anything of it until we were outside and running across the field opposite the house. When we got some distance away we stopped and crouched down to see what was happening. The security lights we triggered lit up the front and staff were scurrying around the grounds looking for us but they didn’t look for long and went back inside after 10 minutes. We laughed and ran off into the night.

  It was pitch-black, cold and scary but Chrissy knew where she was going. It took us over an hour trudging through fields and dimly lit country lanes before we came to the town. Chrissy led me to a small, rundown estate on the outskirts and to a grey, depressed-looking house. She rang the doorbell and a man answered.

  He peered round the door and ushered us inside. He looked like a geek: pale and skinny, with long, lank, greasy hair. He wore an old sweater, stained combats and thick, plastic-rimmed glasses. When I saw him properly in the light of the hallway I actually laughed – he looked harmless. But when we followed him inside it immediately became apparent he wasn’t. He led us to an upstairs room with blankets draped across the windows to hide what went on inside. It was set up like a photographic studio, with cameras on tripods. In the middle, there was a bed and strewn around were items of underwear. They were all ladies’ garments and the same style that Mohammed had told me to wear: overtly sexual.

  The man was part of a paedophile ring and I later learned had targeted the home because it was known as somewhere vulnerable children were sent. In paedophile parlance it was a ‘honeypot’, a place where predatory men could find pliable victims.

  Of course now I know how shocking that is, but back then, in the midst of what I was going through with the gang in Oxford, it just seemed like a natural extension of my extreme life. Why wouldn’t I find myself in a house with a runaway and a paedophile, plotting an escape to London? The man made it obvious what he wanted us to do: we were to meet his customers for sex. But first we had to disguise ourselves as he said the police would be looking for us. He kept hair dye in his bathroom and told us to use it. I dyed mine bright red and Chrissy streaked hers black and blonde. Then, just as Mohammed had done when he first started selling me, the man told us to put on the underwear and he took photos. Later, he gave us £500 in cash and told us to get to London. He directed us to a hotel in a place called Great Portland Street and told us to pay for the room in cash and wait there for the customers. Chrissy didn’t question his instructions and neither did I; I followed blindly. I wanted to get away from the home and Chrissy had told me she knew where to get drugs when we got to the capital.

  On the train journey we bought drink and no one questioned us when w
e booked into the hotel, which was clean, small and discreet. I was still just 13. We paid with the notes, as we had been told. Chrissy went off to meet some people she knew and it wasn’t long before we had a supply of drugs.

  The following days were a haze of drugs and drink. Men came to the hotel and abused us. Sometimes we were told by the abusers to go to other men. We travelled around London. When we were not being abused, we would hang around Camden, drinking and taking drugs with a gang of people Chrissy knew. At times I missed Mum, but I never missed Oxford. The fear of Mohammed and what would happen to me when I went back were always at the back of my mind. I never believed I could walk away from him.

  Back in Oxford, Mum was distraught. She had been notified of my disappearance and was worried sick. It must have been awful for her. She was told that I could only be classed as a missing person, or ‘misper’ in police talk, once I had been gone longer than 24 hours. And so she waited until I had been gone long enough for the police to investigate, terrified the phone would ring or there would be a knock on the door and someone would be there to tell her I had been found dead. She was not stupid; she knew I was involved in some form of exploitation and was desperate to help me.