No one seemed to care about the state of this godforsaken house, just as no one seemed to care about me. When I had been brought there it had been light, and I had been taken straight to this room, where mould streaked the blue walls. I wondered how long the cobweb had been there. Had it been days, weeks, months? I wanted to cry but no tears would come. I wondered how long I’d be left in this filthy room, in a strange town miles from home.
The man said nothing as he writhed around on top of me, only grunting a little. I was too scared to tell him he was being too rough. How could I say that to him? After all, they kept telling me it was all my fault. I was a little slag, they said, I was white trash. I’d brought it all upon myself so this was what I deserved: to lie on a dirty, lumpy mattress, awaiting a never-ending queue of men, all old enough to be my dad.
Gradually, his breathing got quicker and he muttered something in a language I didn’t understand. His hands wandered towards my chest and, as he gripped the breasts just beginning to develop, I asked myself: what does he find attractive about me? I’m only thirteen – and he can’t even see my face.
Eventually, it was over. He put his trousers back on and walked out without a word. Once again, I was alone in the dark room, lying on the filthy, horrible mattress, staring at the cobweb and wondering just how many more men would come before I’d be allowed to go home.
This story probably sounds shocking to many people, but for me, what happened that night was nothing unusual. I was only a child, but even by the age of thirteen, to me it was normal to be bundled into a car and driven around England to be abused by men – paedophiles. Some of these men showered me with gifts and told me they loved me; others didn’t say a single word to me as they lay on top of me, violating me in the most disgusting way imaginable.
All of the men who abused me were of Asian origin, almost all British Pakistanis, but as I lay there night after night, I didn’t care where they came from or what colour their skin was. In years to come, what happened to me, and many other girls, as victims of the Rotherham sex ring would become a national scandal. Professors would write reports, politicians would resign and people on the news would talk about girls like me and how we’d been failed by the very people who were supposed to protect us.
My nightmare began a long, long time before Rotherham was on the front page of the newspapers, and the memory of that time will stay with me long after our town has disappeared from the headlines. Over the years that followed the abuse, I slowly came to realise that I wasn’t a little slag like they’d told me so many times, but a victim. But I refuse to be a victim forever, so I’m sharing this with you now because I don’t want what happened to me to happen again, ever, to any other child. This is my story. It’s the story of a victim but, more importantly, it’s also the story of a survivor.
Chapter One
I suppose it’s fair to say I’ve never had an easy life.
I was born in Rotherham, a big industrial town just a few miles from Sheffield, in September 1991, blissfully unaware that my parents’ relationship was already starting to unravel. My mum, Maggie, and my dad, Mark, had got together in the late eighties. They’d met when Mum’s sister, my auntie Annette, started going out with Dad’s cousin. Dad had come to Rotherham to visit them and he got talking to Mum when she popped round one night. Mum had just come out of an unhappy marriage and was bringing up my older brothers, Mark and Robert, on her own when Dad asked her out for a drink. Mum was petite, with sandy curly hair, and he had obviously taken a shine to her. He said all the right things when she needed a shoulder to cry on, and soon they were an item.
But Mum and Dad were very different people. Mum had lived in Rotherham all her life and was from a traditional, hardworking Yorkshire family, the second of seven siblings. Granddad worked in the local steelworks, while Nan had a job at the KP Nuts factory. Mum followed her there after she left school, although she could never get a permanent contract because there was never enough work.
Dad, on the other hand, was a bit of a tearaway. He was short, with dark hair and tattoos all over his arms and legs. He’d been born in Rotherham too, but his family had moved to Horncastle, a little market town in Lincolnshire, when he was a small child. He’d been expelled from school when he was really young and sent to what they used to call a borstal – a sort of mini-prison for kids that the schools couldn’t control. He never really told us why and we never asked. Growing up, there were lots of things about Dad’s life that seemed to be a big secret. Sure, he could sweet-talk Mum and say all the right things, but the truth was that he hardly ever had a proper job and Mum never really knew what he was getting up to when he went out in his van for hours on end.
Mum says I was a delicate little thing, with a small covering of fair hair, and she fell in love with me straight away. Two days after I was born, she was allowed to take me home to our red terraced house on a street called Psalters Lane, which was a sort of unofficial border between two of the big council estates in Rotherham: Kimberworth and Ferham. Even now, I can remember our house as clear as day, especially the living room. It was decorated with two different types of green-and-white wallpaper separated by a border, as was the fashion back then, but it wasn’t exactly a happy place.
Mum tried her best to make ends meet, working lots of jobs in shops and pubs when there were no hours to be had at the factory. It was real struggle, but it wasn’t like Dad was the only person we knew who was out of work. Rotherham had once been a booming, vibrant town, but by the time I came along a sense of foreboding was spreading across South Yorkshire. The old industries, like coal mining and steel, were in decline, but there were no new ones to replace them, and soon Rotherham would become one of the most deprived parts of Western Europe.
By the early nineties, lots of immigrants had settled in Rotherham, which got some people’s backs up. They were nearly all Asian, mostly Pakistani. They were much stricter with their families than us locals, perhaps because they were such devout Muslims. Most of them would go mad if they caught their kids smoking or drinking. Loads of the kids weren’t allowed boyfriends or girlfriends because their families wanted them to have arranged marriages with other people from their community. That’s not to say the Muslim kids didn’t try to bend the rules; they just had to be a bit more secretive about what they were up to than their friends.
Lots of the Asian families who came to Rotherham were given houses in Kimberworth and Ferham, and gradually they began to open corner shops and takeaways on the otherwise abandoned streets. Some people resented them and ranted that it wasn’t fair on local businesses and they’d come over here to steal our jobs. My family didn’t really think that, though. To be honest, it seemed a bit racist. Most of these people just wanted a better life for their families, and who could blame them for that?
Still, depression and desperation were everywhere in the town, and our house was no different. Mum was frazzled trying to look after Mark, who was eight, and Robert, who was three, as well as tending to a new baby, and Dad wasn’t much help. To make matters worse, I kept developing nasty chest infections and I was always projectile vomiting everywhere. Mum knew something wasn’t quite right and she was never far from the doctors’ surgery. I was given lots of antibiotics but nothing helped, and no one really knew what was wrong with me.
Then, in February 1992, our local surgery got a new GP. She was the first female doctor we’d ever had. Believe it or not, that was a big deal. She clearly knew her stuff, though, because within minutes of examining me she’d looked up some textbooks and called the hospital for a second opinion. She didn’t tell Mum, but she feared I had heart problems. Soon, I was taken to Rotherham District General Hospital, where I’d been born just five months before.
Mum and Dad didn’t know why I had to have lots of tests, and at one point social services were called in. One of the doctors thought