Trafficked Girl

by Zoe Patterson

  I see now that my relationship with Jess was doomed to failure before it even began. We both had problems, past and present, and were using each other: Jess needed somewhere to stay and didn’t want to be on her own, and I was so lonely that I pinned all my hopes for the future on the first person who showed any interest in me and decided immediately that she was ‘the one’. I’d never had a normal relationship with anyone, not even with my own parents, so I didn’t understand about boundaries or what’s acceptable, and what isn’t.

  The fall-out period after Jess, when I was drinking again and spending most of my time in bed, lasted for more than a year. I was depressed and really struggling, and had got to the point of not being able to cope any more when I had an idea that made me think, ‘If I do this, at least I’ll end my life knowing I’ve done one thing that was worthwhile.’

  During the time when I was working as a fitness trainer at the ladies-only gym, I’d devised a 12-week training programme I thought I could use at the boxing gym to help other women who’d been through traumatic experiences. All that remained to be done was for me to put it all together into some sort of coherent form, then find a way of making it available to the people who might benefit from it. I didn’t know if it was going to be possible to do what I wanted to do, but suddenly I had something to focus on that was worth getting out of bed for.

  It was after I’d started writing a business plan that I met Pam. I came across her website when I was looking for information about healthy eating, and when I saw that she does a lot of work in the community and is interested in helping people with various problems, I decided to contact her to see if some of the principles she’s written about and some of the activities she’s involved with could be incorporated into my training programme.

  I was still very depressed – what I was really doing was trying to get things in order before I ended my own life – and I think that was clear to Pam when I contacted her and we spoke for the first time on the phone. I was feeling particularly miserable, so it was nice to be able to talk to someone. But because I rarely spoke to anyone, I had a sore throat for three days afterwards, which made me realise just how isolated I’d become. Then we met in person, and it felt as if she’d thrown me a lifeline just a fraction of a second before I drowned. She was in her late forties when we met, and as well as being sensible and sensitive in a very matter-of-fact way, she was really supportive when I started to open up and talk to her.

  I had tried to get some support for myself before I met Pam, and my GP had given me a phone number and said I needed to refer myself to an alcohol service. But although I did two alcohol detoxes, they didn’t work because I hadn’t addressed the reasons why I was drinking. So then I referred myself to a counselling service for survivors of sexual abuse, and what became apparent during those sessions was that living so close to where all the bad things had happened was preventing me from moving forward with my life. Until I split up with Jess, I’d been repressing the abuse and all the horrible, inhumane things that had been done to me. But after I started going to counselling, the bad things were all I could think about.

  The counsellor was already helping me to see that it wasn’t my fault, and when I met Pam and she became my friend, she encouraged me to see that too, and eventually I began to feel that my life was worth fighting for.

  It was Pam’s idea that I should ask social services for my files. ‘It would have been Children’s Services that were responsible for your care at Denver House and subsequently,’ she told me. ‘And under the terms of the Data Protection Act, you have a right to see the records they kept about you. You’ve obviously got a lot of questions about what happened so maybe it would help you to have some answers. Think about it though. It has to be your decision. And bear in mind that you won’t be able to un-know anything you discover.’

  Pam lived about 50 miles away from the town where my flat was, and when I told her I’d decided to go ahead and apply for my files, she offered me a room in her very nice house, so that I wouldn’t be alone while I was trying to deal with whatever I was going to find out.

  Before I was allowed access to my files, however, I had to have a meeting with the records officer at a local council office, to see if I was ‘strong enough’ to be able to cope with what I might read. Pam went with me for the appointment, but when we got there I asked her to wait in reception, because it suddenly felt like something I wanted to do on my own.

  ‘You’ve got a quite a story,’ the records officer said. ‘I’m a bit concerned that you might read things you don’t know about that could be upsetting for you. So maybe, as well as redacting anything that relates to third parties, we should remove some of that information too.’

  ‘I want to read it all,’ I told her. ‘Even the difficult bits. I feel that I need to know what happened so that I can finally have closure and draw a line under the time I spent in care.’

  I think the fact that Pam had come with me and I wasn’t alone helped to persuade her to let me read everything, except the redacted bits, and by the end of the meeting she’d agreed.

  It was about a month after I’d first applied for my files that Pam and I went back to the council office to collect them. The woman who handed over the three big boxes to me said she knew Denver House and it wasn’t a nice place to live. ‘Just be thankful you didn’t live there for a lot, a lot of years,’ she told me, sounding so much like Cilla Black I had to repress the urge to release the tension that had built up inside me by saying something funny about it not having been ‘a lorra, lorra laughs – Surprise! Surprise!’

  I couldn’t have thought of anything funny to say a few minutes later, however, when the records officer helped us carry the boxes out to Pam’s car and I was sitting in the passenger seat, shaking and crying. I’d expected to be upset by what I would read in the files; what I hadn’t anticipated was the effect just seeing them would have on me. That period of my life sometimes seemed like a nightmare, but now that I’d taken possession of the truth that was contained in those boxes, there was no escaping the fact that it had been real. Some people who want to know about their childhood can ask their parents and look at photograph albums. The only record of my childhood was in the files I’d just obtained by making an official request to social services.

  I will always be immensely grateful to Pam for her friendship and for taking me in when I needed somewhere to go where I could feel safe and wouldn’t be alone while I read what had been written about my past. Because the records officer had been right and some of things I discovered were very difficult to come to terms with. I hadn’t known, for example, that my teachers were aware that I was being sold and trafficked; that before he told me not to contact him again, my brother Ben told social services he was concerned for my safety at Denver House; that my dad had been told I was choosing to have sex with ‘adult Asian males’; that a friend of my mum’s had reported to social services a conversation they’d had during which Mum said I needed to be put away in an institution and she wished I wasn’t her daughter; that my nan had written a letter to social services saying there was something wrong with me mentally; that my social worker thought she knew the man who was taking me to Birmingham and that he worked for the prison service; that although I was told I had to leave Highfield when I turned 18 – even though it was reported that I wasn’t ready to live independently – social services could have continued to accommodate me until I was 21, but funding was denied; that despite what my leaving care worker told me about younger children needing her attention and that I should take responsibility for myself now that I was 18, it was my right to ask her for help until I was 21.

  What I also read in my files was that my nan went to Denver House several times while I was living there to tell the staff that I was mentally ill and they shouldn’t take any notice of anything I said. She had plenty to say at the meeting she forced her way into too. According to the notes, one of the things that was discussed at that meeting was the fact that I had recent
ly told a member of staff that the men who were trafficking me had started taking me to houses in Birmingham, which was about an hour’s drive away on the motorway from the town we lived in. Nan didn’t want to know about any of that, however. She hadn’t come to hear about my problems. She’d come to tell the social worker and everyone else who was at the meeting, ‘You do know Zoe tells lies, don’t you? She’s not well. She needs help.’ Which made some sort of sense now that I knew about what Granddad had done to Mum when she was a little girl, and possibly to me too: Nan must have been very anxious for everyone to believe I was a liar, that nothing I said should be trusted, and that I was solely to blame for anything that had ever happened to me.

  There were a lot of things in the files that shocked and upset me, amongst the worst of which were some of the notes I used to leave in my room with pathetic pleas for help and details of addresses, phone and car registration numbers so that they might know where to start looking for me ‘if I don’t come back’. When I found those notes in the files, it was almost as if they related to some other little girl, and I sobbed as I read the words I’d scrawled hastily on them all those years ago, because I knew then that the staff had read them too, and still had done nothing to try to help me.

  As I worked my way through page after page of notes and records, I finally began to understand just how badly I’d been let down. In fact, the only person who really seemed to have cared about what happened to me was Mandy, the nice woman from the NSPCC, who had written a letter to social services saying, in effect, that I was no safer at Denver House than I had been with my mum and dad, that if the situation at the unit had occurred in a family home, the child involved would have been removed instantly, and that she couldn’t understand why it was being allowed to happen. And even then, nobody did anything.

  One thing that struck me as peculiar as I worked my way through the files was that there was no record of anything that had happened during the last three months I was in Denver House. Everything else was there, filed in date order, including all the daily record sheets that had to be filled in by staff at the unit, which attested to meals I hadn’t eaten, baths I hadn’t had and hot drinks I hadn’t drunk every night before I went to bed. It was just those last three months that were missing, which were the worst months of all. In fact, the last entry in the files is a note that says, ‘Zoe is doing a lot better now. She’s not going to Birmingham any more.’ But that wasn’t true. The trafficking never stopped the whole time I was there, and I certainly never told anyone that it had.

  Something else that was missing from my files was any mention of the meeting I’d had with Frances’s boss when I was living at Highfield, after Frances had asked me to babysit overnight for her little boy. It was a formal meeting – with another woman taking minutes – which I realised later had been held because her boss was concerned about our relationship. And although those specific concerns were unfounded, it did seem strange that there wasn’t any record of what was actually very inappropriate behaviour by a member of staff. I don’t know why anyone would bother to remove any mention of it, however, when there was so much other evidence of the fact that no one ever did anything to stop the sexual abuse and trafficking they knew were going on, or tried to make life more bearable for a young teenage girl who kept pleading for their help.

  Looking back at that horrific period of my life from a different perspective finally allowed me to see it clearly, and I think it was the first time I’d ever really understood that what had happened to me was wrong. I’d never felt safe at home, but I thought I would feel safe and be safe when I was taken into care. It wasn’t as though there was some reason why they couldn’t take care of me properly: I wasn’t doing any of it willing, and it wouldn’t have required much effort on behalf of my social worker and the staff at the unit to protect me. I still don’t understand why they didn’t do it – for me and for all the other children they must have let down equally badly in various ways. That was perhaps the most difficult aspect of it all – realising that everything could have been so easily prevented.

  That’s what Pam thought, too, when she read my files. ‘I think you deserve an apology for the total lack of care you received,’ she told me. ‘If you want, I can try and find a solicitor who could look at the evidence and see if you’ve got a case.’

  We talked about it quite a lot before I asked her to go ahead. I didn’t really think it would come to anything, but once the idea had taken root, I became almost obsessed by the thought that someone might actually say they were sorry and take responsibility for all the things they’d allowed to happen to me.

  Staying in the room at Pam’s house was only going to be a temporary measure, so I’d kept on the flat I’d lived in for almost the last ten years. Eventually though, when I got a letter from the council saying they’d been informed that I wasn’t living there any more, I was forced to make a decision. Was I going to return to live alone in the flat that was the only place I’d ever known as mine, in the town where I’d grown up and suffered horrific abuse, but where, despite everything, I felt I belonged? Or was I going to move to the town where Pam lived and where she was happy to offer me a room for as long as I needed it? It was a surprisingly difficult decision to make. In the end, I let the flat go, by which time Pam had found me a solicitor.

  Chapter 20

  Leaving my home town meant that I’d be walking away from any possibility there might have been that my mum would ever be any different. I don’t know why I’d clung for so long to the hope that one day she might say she was sorry for the way she’d always treated me and that she realised she did love me after all. I suppose I’d always known deep down that it wasn’t ever going to happen, but it was an incredibly difficult truth to accept.

  What also made me very anxious about giving up the flat and moving was that there were no certainties involved. I didn’t have a job, and although Pam had already done a great deal to help me – more than any member of my own family had ever done – without ever asking for or expecting anything in return, I was still too afraid to trust anyone. So I knew I could easily end up in the same situation I’d been in before, only this time in a town I didn’t know. As things turned out, however, it was probably the best decision I’ve ever made.

  I quite honestly don’t know if I’d still be here today if I hadn’t met Pam when I did. She helped me through a lot at that time, and she’s still there for me today – sometimes as my best friend and sometimes more like the mother I never had. It was as if our meeting was meant to be, for me at least. So I was very relieved when she offered to go with me to London to see the solicitor who’d agreed to look at my case.

  The solicitor’s name was Shamra and she worked with a firm that specialises in serious cases of medical negligence and child abuse. It was quite a trek from the train station to her office lugging the heavy suitcase that contained all my files, and I was very nervous about meeting her. But she turned out to be really nice. So I left the files with her and went back with Pam to her house, where I tried to live as normal a life as possible while I waited for Shamra to read them.

  When the phone call from Shamra finally came, she told me she would take on my case, then added, ‘I feel really confident we can win.’

  I knew there was a long way to go before anything actually happened, and that there were no guarantees. But the fact that an experienced solicitor like Shamra thought I had a case was a vindication in itself, and another step in the process of accepting the fact that it hadn’t all been my fault.

  After the news had sunk in, I managed to contact Debbie – the girl at Denver House who had also been bullied and trafficked by Natalie – to explain what had happened and ask her if she wanted to be included.

  ‘I got my records from social services too,’ she told me when we spoke on the phone. ‘But much as I’d like to be involved, I couldn’t face reliving all those horrendous memories.’

  ‘I understand,’ I answered. ‘I’m really anxious about th
at too. But I think, for me, the need to have someone accept responsibility for what happened and say they’re sorry so that maybe I won’t feel so angry about it any more almost outweighs the fear of what’s going to be involved.’

  Then we talked about other things for a few minutes, before Debbie said, ‘You know, I do have some happy memories of Denver House, of those evenings we got away from everything and shared a bottle of cider.’

  ‘I feel the same,’ I told her. ‘It makes you realise how important it is to have a friend.’

  Meanwhile, the solicitor arranged for my files to be reviewed by an expert social worker, who concluded that I had done more to try to keep myself safe than any of the people who were put in charge of my care had ever done. It made me feel a bit better when he said that, because it was confirmation of the fact that I did try to help myself but that there was very little a frightened, intimidated teenager could do when none of the staff at the children’s homes, none of the social workers and none of the police officers I ever pleaded with for help did anything at all to protect me.

  On my second visit to London for a meeting with the solicitor, Shamra arranged for me to see a psychiatrist, who said I’ve got post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and something called emotionally unstable personality disorder, which is apparently characterised by an unstable sense of self, unstable emotions and unstable relationships with other people – which I suppose pretty much sums it up.