Trafficked Girl

by Zoe Patterson

  Suck on my chocolate salty balls.

  Stick ’em in your mouth and suck ’em.

  The next day, Valerie Hampton took me to a family planning clinic, where I was given a morning-after pill, a bag of condoms and a prescription for a contraceptive.

  Everything that happened as a direct result of my plea for help after having been raped seemed baffling and surreal. Why was I given contraceptives, for example? I was 13 years old. I hadn’t wanted to have sex and I didn’t intend to have it again – ever. But the assumption seemed to be that from now on sexual activity would be part of my new life, like cleaning my teeth with a toothbrush. That was just the way it was going to be. So the sole responsibility of the people whose care I had been placed in was to provide me with the means of not becoming pregnant. Now the question that kept going through my head was, had Mum been right all along and I deserved everything bad that happened to me? The answer seemed to be ‘Yes’.

  People sometimes talk about girls who are ‘divas’, who behave as though the world revolves around them and they deserve special treatment and the best of everything. I’ve known girls like that myself and they are irritating. But then there are girls like me, who are at the other end of the spectrum and believe that they don’t deserve anything good at all. It’s difficult to explain what that feels like. One outcome of it is that you accept whatever’s thrown at you, particularly when you discover that summoning all your courage and telling someone you need help doesn’t have any effect at all.

  What was even more shocking than my social worker’s reaction to what I’d told her was the response of another member of staff, who said, ‘I knew something like that was going on.’ She didn’t say it in a tone of voice that suggested she was outraged or felt guilty for not having acted on her suspicions. In fact, she sounded almost triumphant for having been proved right. But even when they did have proof and knew that at least one of the girls in their care had been raped, they still did nothing.

  Despite all the staff at the unit eventually knowing what had happened, not one of them ever spoke to me about it, suggested that I should talk to them if I had any concerns, or told me not to worry because in future they would make sure I was safe. What made it even worse was discovering that my teachers at school knew about it too, after it had been discussed at a review meeting attended by my head of year. So now everyone would think I was the ‘slag’ and ‘slut’ my brother Jake used to say I was long before I even knew what the words meant.

  There was one thing I was certain about though: it wasn’t ever going to happen again. So I started taking great care to avoid Abbie, and spent even more time alone in my room. Then, a few days after she had taken me to the ‘party’, she knocked on my door, and kept on knocking until I answered it.

  ‘I haven’t seen you for a few days,’ Abbie said, picking up a book from the bedside table and flicking through its pages.

  ‘I … I haven’t been feeling very well,’ I told her, hoping she wouldn’t notice the tremble in my voice.

  ‘Yeah, well, I’ve been out a lot.’ She dropped the book on the bed. ‘But, anyway, I thought you might like to meet some more of my friends.’

  ‘No. No, thanks,’ I said, trying to swallow the hard lump of anxiety that seemed to be stuck in my throat.

  ‘What the fuck do you mean, “No, thanks”?’ I recoiled instinctively as she bent down and spat the words into my face. ‘Oh, I get it,’ she said, standing upright again and smiling the way my mum used to do when something bad was about to happen to me. ‘You thought I was asking. Like an invite. Well, I wasn’t. And unless you want your fucking head kicked in, you better be ready to go in ten minutes.’

  Anyone who hasn’t ever had to do something they really, really didn’t want to do probably can’t imagine what it’s like to have no choice. And although it might be true to say that, ultimately, everyone does have a choice about most things, sometimes the potential consequences make you feel as though you don’t. That’s how I felt that night when Abbie paused in the doorway as she was leaving my room and said again, ‘Ten minutes.’

  It was probably nearer eight minutes later when I walked out of Denver House with her and into a life that was more wretched and soul-destroying than any I could ever have imagined.

  Chapter 8

  It wasn’t long before Abbie was arranging almost daily meetings for me, either with the men she called her friends or with taxi drivers. She knew a lot of taxi drivers. Sometimes they’d come on their own and sometimes there’d be one or even two other men with them when they picked us up almost outside Denver House. Mostly, they ignored me and spoke to each other in their own language. But they always gave me alcohol, either cider or vodka, which I soon learned to start drinking immediately so that the process of numbing my senses was well underway by the time we got to wherever we were going.

  Usually, they would take me to a dismal, dirty house somewhere, or sometimes to a park with a secluded area where we wouldn’t be seen. The houses were all very similar to each other and most of them didn’t seem to be lived in; there would just be a room with a dirty mattress where the men would take me to have sex or to perform oral sex or masturbate them. Most of them hurt me, and usually there were at least two or three of them in every house who came to the room either separately or together.

  I’ve blocked most of them out, but I can still remember some of them and the things they did to me. Like the man I pleaded with not to make me perform oral sex on him who took hold of my hair, pulled my head back until I thought my neck was going to snap and said, ‘You will not like what I do to you if you don’t do what I say.’ Then he forced me on to my knees, thrust his penis into my mouth, and when I kept gagging and then started to choke, raped me instead, so brutally I couldn’t find the alcohol-induced blank space inside my head that might have enabled me to block out what he was doing.

  When the man finished, he told me impatiently to, ‘Hurry up and put your clothes on,’ then took me downstairs into the living room, where Abbie was sitting drinking with some other men, and said to her, ‘You both need to leave now. I can’t take you. You’ll have to find your own way back.’

  ‘Well, we’ll need some money,’ Abbie said, holding her hand out almost underneath his nose. But he swatted it away and said, ‘Just go,’ and as soon as we were outside she turned on me, saying angrily, ‘It’s your fault I didn’t get any money. What did you do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I answered, too ashamed and humiliated to tell her what had happened.

  It was the early hours of a very cold morning and we were a few miles from Denver House, with no option other than to start walking. But we hadn’t gone very far when Abbie stopped near a phone box, shoved some coins into my hand and said, ‘Call them. Tell them we need a lift.’

  ‘There’s no one available to pick you up,’ the member of staff who answered the phone told me. ‘You’ve been reported missing to the police, so my advice would be to keep walking until you see a police car and flag it down or, failing that, until you get back to the unit.’

  Abbie was even angrier with me when I told her what the woman had said, and after ranting and swearing at me for a while, we trudged along the road in silence.

  We must have been walking for at least an hour when a police car drew up beside us. The officers didn’t even ask where we’d been or what had happened to us. They just took us back to the unit, dropped us off on the road outside and drove away.

  It was about 4 a.m. when we rang the bell, and I had school the next day. But when a member of staff woke me up at 7.30, I just couldn’t face it and refused to go. If you stayed off school when you weren’t ill, you were locked out of your room all day, and as all the recreational rooms were locked too, the only place you could go and sit was the dining room. So that’s what I did, with members of staff waking me up every time I fell asleep and treating me as though I’d been out all night having a good time, even though they should have been able to tell just by looking at me that n
othing could have been further from the truth.

  I didn’t ever want any of it to happen. I didn’t want to have sex with any of the men and I never once went willingly to any of the places they took us. I did it because I was scared – of Abbie and of the men themselves – and because, having realised that the people who were supposed to be caring for me didn’t actually care about me at all, I didn’t have anyone else to turn to. The only thing that saved me during those weeks was the alcohol the men gave me. If I drank enough of it quickly enough, I could switch off – to some extent, at least. Otherwise, I don’t know how I would have dealt with the horrible things that were done to me.

  While all this was going on, I did go home a few times, because my social worker kept telling me how important it was for me to stay in contact and visit my parents. I didn’t want to go at all – except perhaps to see my little brother – but she would say things like, ‘I really do think it’s a good idea, Zoe. You don’t want to lose contact with your mum and the rest of your family, do you?’ The honest answer to that question would probably have been ‘Yes’, certainly as far as Mum, Dad and Jake were concerned. But she made me feel as though my reluctance was an indication that there was something wrong with me, rather than a normal response to having been beaten, bullied and made a scapegoat of by my mother for as long as I could remember.

  What made her insistence even more bizarre was the fact that the conclusion of the assessment that had been done – which was the reason I’d originally been taken into care for what was supposed to be just a few weeks – was that my parents were unfit to look after me. So it had been decided that I should remain in care until I was old enough to be independent – legally, if not practically or psychologically.

  The visits usually ended badly. Mum was never happy to see me and sometimes wouldn’t let me in, while Dad just leered and said horrible things to me that would have been creepy and disturbing even if he hadn’t been my father. Then one day, when I was feeling particularly trapped and desperate at Denver House, I decided I’d had enough and that although I didn’t want to go home, it was the only place I could go.

  The house was about a 20-minute bus ride from the unit, although it seemed much longer on that occasion, and several times when it stopped at a bus stop I almost changed my mind and got off, until I thought about Abbie waiting for me back at Denver House. When I got there, Mum answered the door and when she saw me standing there crying, all she said was, ‘What the fuck do you want?’ She didn’t actually slam it in my face though, so I followed her through the house and into the kitchen. My oldest brother, Jake, had left home by that time, but Ben and Michael were there, watching TV in the living room with Dad, who didn’t speak to me at all when my brothers said hello.

  ‘I’m really unhappy at Denver House,’ I told Mum. ‘It’s horrible. Can I come home, Mum? Please.’

  ‘It’s not a fucking hotel,’ she shouted at me, and even when I begged her, ‘Please, Mum. I really can’t live there any more,’ she just looked triumphant and said spitefully, ‘Well, you should have thought of that before you showed those bitches your bruises, shouldn’t you?’ Then she told me to leave, and although Dad and my brothers could hear every word we were saying, they carried on watching TV and didn’t even try to intervene.

  The walk back to the bus stop that day was one of the loneliest walks of my life. If you’d asked me a few weeks earlier whether I would ever have wanted to live at home again, the answer would have been a very emphatic ‘No’. Now though, I knew that there were even worse things in life than being beaten and disliked by your own mother. What I didn’t know until some years later, however, was that my dad had been informed by social services that I was ‘actively engaging in sexual relationships with adult Asian and black males’. I was heartbroken when I discovered he’d been told such a horrible lie, which made it sound as though I was doing it because I wanted to, as if it was my choice, with no mention of what I’d told my social worker about having been raped. It still breaks my heart to know that Dad never knew it wasn’t my fault and that I didn’t choose to have sex with all the disgusting, abusive men who exploited and eventually trafficked me.

  I had gone to live at Denver House not long after the summer holidays started, and just before I went to school for the new term, Abbie left the unit and suddenly it all stopped. For the first few days after she’d gone, I kept thinking I’d wake up one morning and she’d be back. But when I eventually asked a member of staff if they knew where she was, I was told that she’d turned 16, ‘So she isn’t our problem any more.’ Which meant – although I hardly dared to believe it – that she wasn’t my problem any more either, and the whole nightmare was finally over.

  You never really know why people do some of the things they do, and I don’t know how Abbie got involved with those men or why, in effect, she sold me to them – apart from for the money they paid her, of course. She didn’t seem to be frightened of them, so I don’t think she’d been threatened or intimidated into getting me involved. Whatever her reason for doing it, however, I don’t think I could have done that to another girl and I’m still very angry about it.

  It was a huge relief after Abbie had gone to be able to go to school every day and sit in my room in the evenings knowing that she wasn’t going to knock on my door and tell me, ‘You’ve got ten minutes.’ Then, about two weeks later, Natalie moved in.

  Natalie was a larger, louder, more aggressive version of Abbie who also wore thick make-up and similar clothes, but had a much bigger personality in every respect. Also 15, she was involved with a lot of different men from the ones Abbie knew, and she scared me even more than Abbie had done. It was one thing hitting some girl in a playground who was bullying me, or wrestling a fairly puny boy to the floor to avoid being placed at the bottom of the pecking order that existed in Denver House. But I was actually a very timid little girl, and I knew when I’d met my match or, as was the case with Natalie, was completely out of my depth.

  I’d almost stopped thinking for myself by that time anyway, and had found that if I drank enough alcohol, it masked the unnerving feeling I otherwise had that my soul had disappeared. So I barely even bothered to try to resist when Natalie told me one evening that she was going to take me with her to meet a friend. This time though, it turned out to be true, and although I was very wary of leaving the unit with her, the guy who was waiting for us in a car parked around the corner – who Natalie said was her boyfriend – did just drive us around while we smoked the cannabis and drank the alcohol he gave us.

  We drove around with Pete a couple of times after that, drinking and listening to music. He was a quiet, brooding sort of guy, probably in his late twenties, who didn’t ever really speak to me. In fact, he didn’t say much to Natalie either, just mumbling something occasionally in response to the cheerful chatter she kept up almost without pause as she sat beside him in the passenger seat of his car.

  Then, one day, Natalie told me Pete had a friend who wanted to meet me. ‘It’s all been arranged,’ she said. ‘Pete will pick us up tomorrow evening.’

  I wanted to tell her I wasn’t going to go, but after having seen her lose her temper with one of the boys at the unit, I didn’t dare. I did tell my social worker though, and asked if she could help me. ‘I’m scared of Natalie,’ I confided in her. ‘So can you stop it? Can you ground me or something so that I can’t go?’

  ‘I’ll speak to the staff and see what I can do,’ Valerie Hampton told me.

  All the kids at the unit had ‘issues’ of some sort, and some of the boys would kick off from time to time. But their actions were tame compared to the hurling of tables across rooms and trashing of the building that were Natalie’s responses to someone upsetting her or trying to stop her doing something she wanted to do. So I don’t think it was just me and the other kids who were frightened of her. The staff seemed to be intimidated by her too, so I suppose it was easier for them to avoid antagonising her in the first place, rather than having to
confront her about something and then deal with her reaction. Which I assume is why my social worker didn’t do anything in response to what I’d asked her, or even mention it to me again.

  In fact, the nearest anyone came to acknowledging what I’d said was another member of the staff who told me a few days later, ‘You need to make your own choices, Zoe. It’s up to you to decide what you do or don’t do.’ I did wonder, once again, if they hadn’t understood what I’d said about being scared of Natalie or if they simply hadn’t considered the fact that in order to be able to stand up to her and make my own choices, I would need to know that someone would be there to protect me when she retaliated, which they must have known as well as I did she would do.

  When Pete met us outside the unit the following evening, he drove us to a house to meet his friend. No one told me the man’s name, and I don’t know if he actually lived in the house with the damp living room where we sat drinking for a while before he stood up and said, ‘Come with me.’

  He was a big man, at least 6 foot tall, and I was quite a small, very thin teenager. It wasn’t just his height I found intimidating though. There was something about him I instinctively didn’t like. But when I glanced at Natalie, hoping she’d see how anxious I was and tell me I didn’t have to go, she just stared back at me coldly, as if daring me to refuse. So I got up and followed Pete’s friend up the stairs to a bedroom, where he handed me another drink and started taking off his clothes.

  I had just downed the glass of vodka he’d given me in one gulp when he said, ‘Lie down.’ And because I knew there wasn’t any point in arguing, I lay on the filthy duvet, wondering if a time would ever come when I would be able to live through just one day without being afraid.

  I could barely breathe when he climbed on top of me, because he was heavy and the weight of his body was pressing me into the thin mattress, and because the smell of his sweat was making me gag. Then, suddenly, he pushed my legs up behind my head, and a moment later I felt a sharp stab of pain.