My disappearance to London was for much longer than 24 hours and, after Chrissy and I had been gone for several days, the police started to take the case seriously. There was a manhunt and an appeal on television news: as two vulnerable children there was concern for our safety. At one point, I was spotted in a place called Willesden on CCTV walking down a road and the investigation began to centre on London.
Meanwhile, Chrissy was introducing me to the people she knew around the city. Many of them were men. Looking back, it is obvious that she had been trafficked before, but at the time I didn’t know what the term meant. We were being sold and the men using us must have been part of some form of network because often they would take us on to the next customer. We didn’t travel with clothes, we were told to buy them when we got to London and we were told what clothes to buy: sexualised black lacy underwear and corsets.
At one point I was recognised by two police officers when I was walking down a street near the hotel we were staying in but I ran away.
It became exhausting. I was taking drugs that kept me awake and I was being passed around between men. Soon I started to become delirious – I had been awake for days, I wasn’t eating properly. I was still too young to know how to look after myself. After what seemed like a week, we left the hotel. I didn’t know where we were going. Chrissy appeared to have it all covered. We spent the following days with men and with older friends she knew.
One afternoon we were in a part of London called Camden Lock, near a canal, when Chrissy ran into a gang she owed money to. There were four of them, two boys and two girls. In their late teens, they were aggressive and demanded the money. For the first time since I’d met her I looked at Chrissy and realised she was scared. Suddenly she no longer seemed like a streetwise adult; she was a scared child. She tried to reason with them and explain she had nothing on her, but they grabbed her and started going through her pockets. Although terrified, I tried to stick up for her.
They started slapping her but she didn’t fight back. They took the few notes she had left and then they threw her in the canal. Then they grabbed me, went through my pockets and threw me in too. The water was black, oily and freezing; we were only wearing skimpy clothes.
We both struggled to the side and managed to crawl out. Shivering violently and crying hysterically, I just wanted the warmth of home. I wanted to be in my bed with my dog.
‘I’m calling the police,’ I told Chrissy through chattering teeth.
‘No, you’re not,’ she insisted. ‘I’m not getting involved with the law. How much trouble do you think we’ll be in? Do you want to go back into care? The next place they send you will be worse than Meadowside – you’ll go to a detention centre.’
We argued and Chrissy stormed off, leaving me alone, bedraggled and scared. I was terrified the gang would come back and also scared that I had caught something from the filthy water.
The whole incident had been witnessed by many people. It happened in daylight in a very busy part of town. I had no idea where to go and, as I started to walk off down the road, huddled over to try to retain some body heat, a woman who had been watching from a bus stop across the road walked over to me. A big black lady, she was carrying several brown paper Primark shopping bags.
When she called me, I stopped. She looked me up and down, tutting.
‘You’re too young to be homeless,’ she said sadly, shaking her head slowly.
She rummaged through the bags she was holding and thrust some clothes at me.
‘Take these,’ she said. ‘God bless you.’
She handed me a pair of leggings, some socks and a sweater. I took them gratefully and thanked her.
But I had no money and nowhere to go. I felt trapped – I knew that if I went back to Oxford I would have to return to the gang, and I didn’t want to go to a detention centre, like Chrissy said.
A few days before we were pushed in the canal, we had stayed with a man Chrissy knew. He owned a fried chicken shop nearby. A pervert, he was connected to the network we had been passed between but she seemed to know him better than the other men and at least he fed us. It was the only place I could think of that I knew nearby, so I went there.
He welcomed me in when I walked through the shop door and took me upstairs to the flat he lived in. It smelled of fried food but it was warm. I couldn’t stop shaking – the cold had sunk into my bones and I felt like I would never be warm again. He gave me food and told me he would go out later and buy me some more clothes. Then he told me not to leave and said that he would look after me. He begged me to stay and told me the best way to get warm would be to drink – he had different bottles of booze and told me to help myself. He poured me a vodka and Coke and made sure the glass was half-full of vodka and half-full of Coke. I drank and he poured more.
In the four days I was with the man he got me drunk a lot. One night he took me out to Embankment to watch the fireworks on the banks of the River Thames. There was a big group of us – young girls and men. This man was an abuser, too, and he had a partner who came to the flat occasionally and didn’t seem to mind me being there. The group were all strange – all drug addicts and drunks – and I felt increasingly unsafe and uncomfortable as the days wore on. The man was desperate for me to stay and I felt trapped because I had no money and nowhere else to go in the city.
Eventually Chrissy turned up at the flat. She didn’t say where she had been but said it was time to go: the money had run out and she seemed anxious to leave London. I didn’t want to stay with the man and so I did what I always did when my options had run out – I called Mum.
Her voiced cracked when she heard me on the phone.
‘Where are you? Are you safe, are you in danger?’ She told me later about the lengths she had gone to in order to find me. After the incident at the canal, she was contacted by the police. One of the witnesses had reported what had happened and the police had studied the CCTV footage and recognised me. They had told Mum and she had journeyed to Camden to try to find me. For hours she walked the streets, showing shopkeepers and passers-by photos of me to see if anyone recognised me or knew where I was. At one point we later worked out that she passed the chicken takeaway when I was in it – we were literally feet away. She became convinced that I was dead.
When she heard my voice the relief was overwhelming.
‘Are you coming home, Lara? I’ll come and get you,’ she said.
But I had one condition.
‘I’ll only come if my friend can come back too,’ I said. I wanted to make sure Chrissy was safe – I couldn’t look after her, but I knew Mum would. She agreed and I told her we would meet her at Paddington station. She got the first train she could to London.
When she saw the state of me she fought back the tears. I looked washed out, dirty and tired; I hadn’t bathed for days. I was wearing clothes that made me look like a prostitute.
‘Where have you been? Why did you run away?’ she asked as she hugged me tightly.
She would have known just by the sight of me what had been happening, but still I denied everything and told her I had been with friends.
‘Who are these friends?’ she demanded.
‘They are just friends, Mum. People I know,’ I told her. I could feel myself getting angry and she sensed this and tried to calm the situation.
‘Have you eaten?’ she asked.
She then noticed Chrissy.
‘I’d better take you back as well,’ she said.
When we got back to Oxford, Mum notified social services. Two ladies came round and started trying to explain that Mum needed to fill out certain forms and follow protocol if she wanted to foster Chrissy. Mum became exasperated as she tried to explain that she had removed a vulnerable child from an unsafe situation and was now looking for help and guidance from them, not for permission to foster her. They should have been thanking her.
Listening to them waffle on about regulations and hearing the way they were speaking to Mum, I got angry. I was
eating a sandwich at the time and, in a flash, I picked up the plate and threw it at one of the ladies. Then I began yelling at her and threatening her and she ran out of the house, closely followed by her colleague. Eventually Mum had to meet them down the road with Chrissy, who was taken off and ended up in another placement.
A while later the police arrived to question me: they wanted to know where I had been, what I had done and whom I had met. They were trying to protect me and discover if crimes had been committed but I didn’t trust them and so I only gave them vague details. I told them about the man I had stayed with and gave them the name of his takeaway outlet. I gave two statements and they also questioned Chrissy but, as far as I know, nothing ever happened as a result.
The care order still stood and so, a few days later, I was sent back to Devon to finish my placement. Within the system kids are shipped around while people in offices try to find somewhere for them. No one seemed to know what to do with me.
I was sad to be leaving Mum and she was worried sick, watching me leave because she feared I would run away again. She tried to argue that the problem was not our relationship. We had spent a lovely couple of days together: she took me to the cinema to watch one of the Ice Age films. I slipped back into the life I should have been leading – the life of a child. But social services thought they knew better and so, once again, I was escorted across the country by security guards.
When I got back to Meadowside Chrissy was no longer there and I never ran away again because I didn’t want to be on my own. Other kids came and went. After a few days, a teenage boy came in. I got distressed; I became aggressive and I refused to eat. It unsettled me being in close proximity to any male, no matter how old he was. When he left a week later, I settled down again. On my own, I got on with the staff and did the lessons I was supposed to do.
Mum came to visit me. On several occasions she drove all the way down from Oxford and at weekends I was allowed out to go and stay with her. She always worried about my appearance. I was wearing clothes that were way too small and tight for me; also I dyed my hair purple. She would remind the staff that I was still only 13 and demand to know why they allowed me to wear the sort of clothes I was wearing. They would tell her I was a young adult and it was my choice, so she bought more age-appropriate clothes for me.
So the days dragged on. The original eight-week agreement would have finished before Christmas but, as I went missing for over a week, I was allowed home for the festive season but had to return in January for another week. I left to return to Oxford and, while everyone else was trying to stick to the resolutions they had made, I fell back into the same pattern. Mohammed called, and I went. The gang had too much of a hold over me and two months in Devon had done nothing to break the spell. Mohammed knew when I was back. He lived so near that he would pass my house and, within days of my being home, he began texting. The helter-skelter started up as if it had never stopped.
‘Be here at 4, you have work to do, you little whore,’ the first message read. My heart pounded and I broke out in a sweat. Nothing had changed. Dutifully I went.
My master was calling.
Chapter thirteen
SKIN TRADE
The gang believed they were untouchable. I heard Mohammed once brag that the day he was caught by the police would be the day he died. That mindset made him dangerous – he believed he could be as violent and as blatant as he liked.
Mohammed knew I feared him and he trusted that I would never grass on him. He began to involve me in some of his business dealings; I was completely under his control.
One day he took me to one of his business meetings. It was in a house in a dodgy part of the city called Divinity Road; it was a meeting about drugs. Mohammed had fed me some before we went there to make sure my mind was fuzzy enough not to retain too much detail. The house belonged to a lady called Rachel – I had met her on several occasions when she came to the flat to buy drugs and later I worked out that she was a female groomer. She would help the gang recruit girls by identifying possible targets, gaining their confidence as a mother figure. Many years ago, she would have been me: a vulnerable child sucked into a dangerous world. An addict and a prostitute, she sat there in her bra and knickers, spaced out and waiting in anticipation for some free drugs.
Mohammed was meeting another man there. He walked in and looked like the caricature of a pimp: he wore a huge fur-lined coat and oozed seediness. By the way he was talking, it sounded like he was the drugs boss. The meeting was about how he and Mohammed could get people to courier their drugs without looking like what they called ‘bait’. They wanted to get me to ship them around town – I suppose they trusted me because I was always with Mohammed or Spider and so submissive they knew I wouldn’t tell anyone if I was caught. Already Mohammed made me take small packages from the flat to people waiting in cars outside so I was complicit.
The threat of violence wasn’t the only thing I had to fear: Mohammed continued to remind me what I had become. He undermined me and told me everyone would know I was a prostitute and an addict and, even if I did tell anyone what was happening, I wouldn’t be believed anyway because of what he had turned me into. At one stage, I did try to stay away; I had a moment of clarity and realised how dangerous and out of control my life was becoming. For a few days I tried to ignore his calls, which had become increasingly threatening. Then one of my friends called. I knew Briony from secondary school and she had been surfing the internet and noticed something about me online.
‘Have you seen what’s been posted online?’ she asked.
She gave me the address of a page on YouTube and told me I needed to look at it.
I typed the details on my laptop and watched in horror as the crudely made video loaded up: it included photos of me. It said I was a crack addict and a prostitute; it gave my address. Shocked and scared, I was certain where it had come from and why it was there: it was the gang’s way of bringing me back into line. They were yanking the invisible lead, which kept me connected to them.
A reporter at the local newspaper, the Oxford Mail, was tipped off about the content and came to see Mum. He said they would not run the story but warned it was also on Facebook and Myspace. The police also got involved and had it taken down; there was no investigation. The day I found out about it I went straight round to Mohammed, apologised and told him I wouldn’t leave again – I knew it was a warning and a demonstration of how much control they had over me.
There was a constant, implicit implication that they owned me and that I owed them. They held me in a jail they had built in my head. Whenever I was made to meet men, they would tell me that these people had travelled long distances to see me at expense. They had paid for petrol or accommodation. I knew they were making money from me – I would see it being handed over. It made me feel dirty, like a piece of meat. Once, when he was drunk, Mohammed told me I was worth £250 a time or £500 for the whole night.
For Mohammed and Spider, it wasn’t about sex, prostitution or trafficking, it was about making money from me. Every now and then Mohammed would have sex with me. It was another way for him to exert his control over me. I found him repulsive but I had no choice, and he knew: I was just a commodity. The men who turned up knew this too. They were not introduced to me, my name was never mentioned; they just came in, sat down next to me and started touching me. They did it right in front of Mohammed. I recoiled but he fed me more drugs and so I let the men get on with it. High and drunk, I closed my eyes and I couldn’t feel anything.
Sometimes, after they went, he would rub his hands.
‘Nice little bonus,’ he’d say. He was talking about the money. I’d walk past the river on the way home and wonder if I’d die if I jumped in.
The guys were all races and ages. Most didn’t undress. I hated them touching my face and my hair because that was what Pat used to do at Terri’s when I was little. I flinched – it was a business transaction. Afterwards I felt disgusted: I wanted to bathe, I wanted to be
clean. Then I wanted to die.
After many months, I didn’t feel anything anymore: I was a husk, dead on the inside. I wasn’t making rational decisions about my life and I didn’t care what happened to me. One day, after I had been with men for the gang, I went home and started to cut myself in my bedroom. I broke a glass and cut into my arms and wrists with the jagged edge – I did it because I wanted to feel something but I felt no pain at all. I hoped someone would notice and ask me what was wrong. Mum saw the cuts and she cried, and then she hugged me and then she told me off.
The more I became involved, the more I was expected to work. Several months after I had first been sold and a few weeks after returning from Devon, I was trafficked outside Oxford for the first time. Mohammed sent me. Early one evening he texted me and told me to meet him at the flat. He didn’t explain what was going to happen until I got there and had smoked crack.
‘Get on a train at Oxford at 7.45 and go to Paddington station in London. Make sure you are waiting outside the McDonald’s there at 9.30,’ he told me. ‘Don’t do anything stupid. I’ll know exactly what you are doing and, if you misbehave, you’re in a lot of trouble.’
He didn’t come with me and he didn’t give me money for the fare: I was expected to dodge the fare and, if I got caught, it was my fault. Instead, he sent me with drugs.
Mohammed sent the man who was meeting me a photograph of me via text so he would know who to look out for.
I did as I was told and found myself standing nervously in the busy station, waiting for the stranger who was going to take me and abuse me. Tiny and 13, I felt exposed but the concourse was so busy, no one registered me – I was just another face in the crowd. I was shaking due to the combined effects of the cold, the nerves and the drugs, which were now wearing off.
A man in his forties, wearing a suit and an overcoat, sidled up to me. Slightly overweight, he wore glasses and was clean shaven.
‘Can I take your coat?’ he asked.
Girl for Sale Page 14