Girl for Sale

by Lara McDonnell

  If Mohammed did try looking for me, he would never have found me: I had vanished and I was liberated.

  In the end, it took us six weeks to find a house and move in. It was June 2010 and we had the summer to look forward to. We were preoccupied with house hunting and getting to know the area. The people we were staying with had two large dogs and we had an indoor cat so at times it got hectic, but in a fun way. It was idyllic – Mum was happier than I had ever seen her; we both became a lot stronger. We spent quality time together and got to know each other again without the distractions we had faced in Oxford. When we found our house, we shopped for fittings and set up our new life. We talked about colour schemes and decor.

  When we got the keys, our stuff was still in storage and it took a few days to arrange to get it moved, so on the first night we sat on pop-up chairs in the lounge with a picnic table.

  I started thinking seriously about what I wanted to do with my life. I had left school and so I applied for a college course on public services but it was all theory and no practical training so I stopped going. I still found education hard; I was playing catch up because I’d been thrown out of school at 14 and had missed out on education full stop so most of the people on the course were younger than me. My ambition was to get a life, make decent friends, be a good mum and get closer to Noah and Mum.

  I had a small party for my 18th and was taken to a champagne bar by Mum the night before. I didn’t know anyone in the new town and at first I didn’t want to make friends; I kept myself to myself. I found it hard to meet people because it’s a lot easier to form friendships when you are 10 than at the age of 18 but eventually I struck out on my own and went to the liveliest local pub I could find.

  I’d only been sitting at the bar for five minutes with a glass of wine when a guy bounded up to me, introduced himself as Johnny and told me he loved my long, straight black hair. He introduced me to his group of friends and I met loads of people of all ages. I was guarded about my past and told people I had just moved from Oxford but gave away no more than that. As soon as I mentioned I had a child the conversation was diverted and people wanted to know how old he was and what he was like.

  Johnny was bubbly, fidgety and camp; he was lovely. He was 17 and after that first night we exchanged numbers and he was round my house practically every day afterwards. He was totally different to the kind of friends I’d had in the past; he was doing a course at a catering college. I started to consider my future too and decided to sign up to the same course. I wasn’t necessarily interested in catering but I liked to cook and the course offered me the chance to expand my social circle.

  Noah settled in well and I enrolled him at a local nursery, which he attended for less than a year before he went up to big school. The nursery mums were not so welcoming as I would have hoped, though. Mum was a lot older than many of them and I was a lot younger so we stuck out like an odd couple.

  I also found people in the town could be judgemental. Oxford had been a multicultural city, where I had mixed with people from all races and religions without a second thought. Our new town was predominantly made up of white, middle-class elderly people.

  I was on a bus into town one day and having a singalong with Noah when an elderly woman sitting on a seat opposite exclaimed, ‘Not only is your son black, you are underage.’

  Noah looked at me, then carried on singing but her words stung me: I was shocked. I had never experienced racism before with my son.

  I glared at the woman.

  ‘One, he is not black,’ I said sternly. ‘Two, I am not underage and, three, how dare you talk to me like that!’

  The woman started ranting about how there are too many immigrants in this country and in the end the driver shouted to her and told her, if she didn’t shut up, he would throw her off the bus.

  After that incident I questioned whether it would have been better to have moved somewhere more multicultural for Noah’s sake. When he moved into school, there were a couple of Asian and Oriental children but that was it. In his class he was the only mixed-race person but the pupils, mums and staff were brilliant with him and he loved school so I figured the most important thing was his happiness and comfort. He did look very different to the other children – he had big black curly hair and the staff made a huge deal about how handsome he was. They were also very understanding and non-judgemental about the situation surrounding his father. So many of the stories we read at a young age are all about Mum and Dad living happily together in a home and for many families that’s just not the way it is. Noah did get confused sometimes but he was not the only child who didn’t have contact with his dad. When asked where his daddy was, he explained that he didn’t have a dad, he had a mummy and a granny instead.

  Motherhood was harder because I was doing more and was more involved. All the time I was there being a normal mum, whereas before I was never there. I was learning and discovering what I had missed out on in Noah’s early life. He fell ill with chicken pox and I felt like a real mum then because I was nursing him and comforting him, making sure he was OK. Then he started to respond to me as his mum. Previously, if I’d asked him to do something, he would ignore me and go and look at my mum for guidance. Mum and I worked together; we would discuss decisions and the partnership worked. She always asked me if I was happy with things before she said something to Noah. We developed mutual respect and we argued much less.

  I didn’t miss Oxford at all. I rarely went back but, when I did go back to visit friends, I kept my head down and away from places where the gang would be. Each time, I felt unsettled and anxious and I realised why I had got away. The city of dreaming spires looked like a dump – I didn’t notice the beautiful architecture, I saw the people taking crack in the public toilets.

  In my new life, I even tentatively started having a normal relationship. I met a lovely young man who was in the army. We started seeing each other after we met in town one night. Mum loved him and he was great with Noah. We went out on family trips and the relationship lasted several months. He was the only man who ever told me he loved me and meant it. But everything that had happened to me had an impact and while he was fantastic, I couldn’t have a physical relationship with him. He didn’t care and told me it didn’t matter but, it did to me. It was everything I wanted but I just couldn’t commit and in the end I told him I could only be his friend. He was upset and explained that he would wait for as long as I needed. We stayed friends.

  Some wounds, I knew, would take a long time to heal.

  Chapter twenty

  OPERATION BULLFINCH

  I did my best to try to forget the past and focused on my new life. But my past refused to forget me. In January 2012 I was at college and looking to the future. Everything seemed to be going in the right direction. Since moving I’d had a few problems settling in. At one point I’d briefly been on antidepressants and some days my past hung around my neck like a heavy millstone and weighed me down. But I tried hard not to think about it; I put it in a box and locked it away at the back of my mind and generally I was upbeat. I had the freedom to choose my own future and to make my own decisions.

  And then Mum received a letter. It was sent jointly from Thames Valley Police and Oxford Social Services and asked if she would ask me whether I would agree to talk to a police officer about an investigation the force was conducting into alleged sexual exploitation. It mentioned nothing about suspects, witnesses, trials or charges; it was vague.

  If I’m honest, had I known then that there would be a subsequent trial at which I would be a witness, I would not have agreed to get involved. At that point in my life I just wanted to move on and the psychological shackles the gang had placed on me remained strong; I was still scared. But all the letter asked for was an informal chat.

  Mum said she would support any decision I made and so I agreed to meet them. Initially two people came from Oxford and explained that there was a task force investigating child sexual exploitation, in and around the town
. They had noticed a pattern in many cases and records showed that my experiences might be related to the areas they were investigating. They asked if I would be happy to speak to a police officer. It was the first time that I started to get a definite idea that perhaps there had been more girls like me. While Mohammed had once asked me to be a recruiter and I saw other girls at the barbecue, I never got the impression it was widespread practice.

  They didn’t make it clear but at that point they were fishing to see who would be willing to supply evidence; they needed to build up the trust of the girls they thought might have been victims. Someone had seen a pattern and was linking past cases that were similar.

  I agreed to speak further and the next person who came to see me was WPC Jane Crump. It was lovely to see her again and, away from the gang and with the confidence of a new life, I felt I could be more open with her.

  ‘It’ll just be an off-the-record statement,’ she said. She didn’t tell me anything about the investigation and explained that she was initially just looking for background information that might help them.

  I started to speak about what had happened. Names came up that sent shivers down my spine: Mohammed Karrar, Bassam Karrar, Akhtar and Anjum Dogar. I blurted it all out and it felt good that finally someone was listening. Jane had always suspected that something bigger was happening in the city and finally her suspicions were being investigated. At that point no one mentioned the word ‘trafficking’. I didn’t know what that term meant until later in the process when someone said I was a ‘trafficked person’.

  After that meeting, Jane came down to see me on a regular basis. She is very loud and bubbly, and was easy to talk to. Slowly and skilfully she built up a picture of my life. All the while, I had no idea of the scope of the investigation. I told her about how Mohammed had befriended me, about the men, the trips to London, the drugs, the barbecues and the violence. I was convinced it was all my fault and that I had brought it on myself.

  For about six weeks running, Jane came down once a week and took statements from me. We went deeper and deeper into the story. Every week she would turn up with her tape recorder; we would talk through events, she would go off and listen back and return with more questions she wanted answered. But I never felt under pressure and I felt that I could trust her. As the process expanded, my reservations melted away. It wasn’t easy going back through the difficult details, but Jane made it easier. I discovered that it was easier to talk about it rather than keep it all in, and because of the sensitive nature of a lot of what I was telling her, it was easier to talk to Jane than to Mum.

  I hoped that, by helping the police, I might be able to stop what had happened to me happening to someone else. There had been no mention of a trial and prosecutions. In my naïvety I assumed the purpose of the investigation was to prevent it from happening to other girls and to allow the authorities to spot the signs and identify victims. I wasn’t aware of the huge effort that had been going on behind the scenes for several months before I was even contacted.

  The foundations of ‘Operation Bullfinch’, as it was called, were laid a few months after I moved from Oxford in November 2010. One of the senior police officers in Oxford, a man called Simon Morton, had listened to what Jane had been saying and noted there was a pattern of young girls from similar backgrounds going missing from the city. When they returned, none of them was willing to speak to police or parents about what they had been doing or where they had been. He discovered that there was intelligence that suggested the girls were also mixing with older men.

  It was the first time anyone in a senior position had decided to take a closer look at this pattern to see if there were links between the girls. Simon persuaded his superiors to allocate funds and manpower to the investigation and, in May 2011, a taskforce was set up, which consisted of ten officers and two social workers. The secondment of the social workers to the team allowed both agencies to share information.

  The team looked at files relating to girls who had been classified as medium-risk mispers (missing persons), both past and present; girls like me, who had a history of disappearing for a few days at a time. When they reappeared an officer was always dispatched to interview them and the reports that were filed usually classed them as streetwise kids and troublemakers. There was also information suggesting that some of the girls were prostituting themselves and having sex with older men. The inference was that this was their own choice. Simon didn’t believe any young girl would choose to sell herself of her own accord and wanted to know why these cases were happening. It was a difficult task because when the investigation was launched there were no complaints, no witnesses and no offenders.

  The first girl who was interviewed had led a life very similar to mine: she came from a vulnerable background and had been a runaway in her early teens. She had never discussed fully what was happening to her at the time but had intimated that one day she would. She grew up, moved away and carved out a career for herself. As the team began to look into past case histories of potential victims, they came across her details and contacted her. She had not been in contact for six years but, when she spoke, her story mirrored what intelligence suggested was happening in the present. She gave details of the same pattern of abuse and gave the police the same names. The officers realised that the exploitation had been going on for many years.

  The operation continued to widen and more past and present victims were identified.

  The case needed to be watertight and so the officers carried out a range of different surveillance. Phones were monitored and the team worked secretly to gather evidence. The meticulous investigation had been leading up to what police called ‘strike day’ – the day when the addresses of all the suspects were raided.

  Just before 6am on 22 March 2012, 14 addresses across Oxford were raided. There were 250 officers involved in the swoop and the 13 men arrested were suspected of crimes including rape and sex trafficking of girls aged between 11 and 15.

  At the time of the arrests, no names were published but I knew the interviews I had given would have related to the raids and the investigation. The men were taken in for questioning. I watched the news nervously, waiting for updates and information. There was a time limit on how long the police could hold the men without charge and that limit was extended to allow them to be further questioned. During that period, WPC Jane Crump came down to see me again. There was very little she could say but she wanted more information and clarification. She explained that some people had been arrested who related to my statement but mentioned no names. I then realised the questioning was not solely about future prevention and protection of other girls going through what I had been through; it was about putting the men on trial. It was a jolt of realisation that frightened me – I worried for my safety and for the safety of Noah and Mum.

  If Mohammed and Spider were in custody, I knew exactly what they were capable of doing if they were released and, despite the fact that there was a massive investigation in process, I still didn’t have complete faith in the police and courts that they would be convicted. I was nervous and I told Jane. I didn’t know there were other witnesses involved. The prospect that I would have to attend court and give evidence had not occurred to me; it was not something I relished.

  Jane reassured me at this stage it was still uncertain whether I would be needed and, if I was, I would be afforded complete anonymity and protection. I still felt uncomfortable but agreed to continue co-operating with the investigation and gave an official statement that would be used as evidence in the case.

  The police were allowed to hold the men for four days and in that time, as well as giving statements, I was asked to go to Abingdon police station, near Oxford, to do a video ID parade. I went on the train with Mum. At the station we were taken to a formal, bare room, where monitors had been set up. The room was full of solicitors representing the men in custody. They looked at me when I walked in and didn’t say anything – they were there to observe me doing the
ID parade. I was asked to look at four line-ups; there were nine men in each. I scanned the first. In the middle of the row stood Mohammed; he looked absolutely crazy – he was grinning, his eyes were wide and staring. He looked as if he had been on drugs. I picked him out immediately. In the following parades, I identified Bassam, Spider and Jammy. The two Dogar brothers were smiling. Bassam looked sheepish and confused, like he’d just been woken up.

  I shivered as footage of each of the evil monsters played out in front of me. Each time I confirmed the identity of one of the men, a solicitor would get up and walk out.

  I had to watch the short clips three times even though on each occasion I was certain on the first showing who was in the line-up.

  Mum also had to identify Mohammed because he had threatened her. She had met him once when he was dealing drugs on the street.

  I was quiet on the way home; the parade had shook me up. I hadn’t seen those faces for a long time and I had thought that I’d left them behind in a previous life I wanted to forget. Yet there they were, staring out at me from a police station monitor, intimidating and crashing in on the new life I had made for myself.

  A few days later Jane Crump called. She was shrieking down the phone.

  ‘We’ve got them, we’ve got them!’

  The men had been charged and among those who would face trial were Mohammed, Bassam, Spider and Jammy. I didn’t know whether to be pleased or to be sick; my stomach lurched. Jane explained that I would be safe and that the men would most probably be held on remand because of the severity of the charges but still I feared for our safety. We were given a special panic alarm, which was linked directly to the police and ensured they would be at our house within minutes if it was activated. For the first time in over a year, I felt I had to look over my shoulder and I began to seriously doubt whether I had done the right thing. I had a nagging worry that the case would be dropped before it got to court or that the men would be found not guilty.