Array Girl A - Girl A - My Story

Later that morning, Miss Crabtree, the mentor for kids the school thought were struggling, called me into her office. ‘Hannah,’ she said quietly, ‘we’ve heard from the police about the allegation you’ve made about being raped.’ She paused. ‘Do you want to talk about it? I’d be happy to do anything I can to help.’

‘No,’ I said in a whisper, deliberately looking beyond her deep green eyes at a spot over her shoulder. ‘I really can’t.’

She seemed crestfallen, almost hurt. ‘Well, if you ever change your mind, I’ll be here, OK? And if you don’t want to speak to me, we’ll find someone else for you to talk to. A counsellor, maybe.’ She gave me a hesitant smile. ‘Just don’t feel alone, Hannah. We’re here to help you, we really are.’

I shuffled out of her office and into a corridor crammed with kids heading towards their next lessons. I’d wanted to tell her, but I knew I just couldn’t. I was in too deep, and no one, just no one, could rescue me.

By the end of that first week back at school, Tariq was regularly picking me up from near the top gates where, a lifetime ago, I’d smoked my first illicit cigarette. Sometimes Emma was with him, and together they’d take me off somewhere.

Normally at the end of the school day teachers would gather by the gates so they could watch out for any fights – kids were always fighting at our school, either among themselves or against the rival schools in our area.

I’m guessing that some of the teachers had seen me getting into a taxi, Tariq’s taxi, and had begun to put two and two together. They began to question me about it, but I’d just shrug them off.

I then made the mistake of telling Emma that some of my teachers were becoming suspicious. So, instead of being picked up at the end of school, I’d get a phone call or a text to tell me to come out fifteen minutes early.

Emma had hated the idea of me going to school in the first place: she couldn’t see the point of it. Her theory was that by me wagging lessons a quarter of an hour early, the teachers would lose the scent. They’d still be in class and I’d be off, not exactly free like all the other kids off wagging, but out of their sight, sitting in the back of a taxi taking me to a hell they couldn’t begin to imagine.

I’d feel a sense of impending dread as the last lesson of the day came to an end. I knew there’d be a phone call from Emma, or maybe Tariq. It was always a phone call; maybe they thought it safer that way, rather than leaving a trail of text messages.

It wasn’t difficult to leave early. The school regime didn’t help. You might have thought they’d lock the school gates so that once the kids were in they couldn’t get out. What they actually did was leave the gates open all day, so the kids could walk out whenever they wanted: otherwise they knew they’d kick off and they’d have to deal with it.

When it came down to it, the teachers couldn’t control anyone and they knew it. In fact, the staff lived pretty much in fear of the kids they were supposed to be teaching – they would be assaulted on a weekly basis, so you can’t really blame them. The school even gave up trying to exclude the tearaways because they realised some of them were getting excluded deliberately.

It was tough. There were kids at school with pretty chaotic backgrounds. I’d been given values by my parents, but those counted for nothing when I had the gang to contend with.

The school was like a war zone: so tough that they had a policeman on site who had his own office. Maybe I should have gone to him, but I never did.

I didn’t realise then, but Rochdale Social Services knew all about me by this time. Staff at my school – Miss Crabtree, I think – had started ringing Social Services to say I was coming in smelly and dirty and smelling of alcohol, as well as being picked up in taxis.

Social Services also knew about lots of other girls like me, and how they’d been exploited by similar gangs in the local area.

They’d known for years.

They knew because Jane and her boss at Crisis Intervention, Sara, kept on telling them, in report after report, letter after letter. And what had Social Services done for all those girls?

Nothing.

Some of the details about my case would have been put on Social Service desks within hours of me telling police how Daddy and some of the others in the gang had raped me. So it should have rung alarm bells with them, and it should have made them think of all the other cases of under-age kids being exploited by networks of paedophiles. And then they should have done something to try to stop it.

Actually, they did do one thing. That September, they held a strategy meeting at their offices in John Street, Rochdale.

It was either in that meeting, or else just before it, that members of the Safeguarding Children board were given copies of a letter sent to them by Sara. The letter, dated 10 September, marked ‘Private and Confidential’, was a plea for Crisis Intervention to be kept fully in the loop. It mentioned both me and Daddy. It also repeated something Social Services already knew – that one of the places Rochdale Council sent its young mums to live for a bit after giving birth was being targeted by predatory men, almost all of whom were Pakistani, who wanted these vulnerable girls for easy sex. These men were calling at a local single mothers’ housing unit, to either ‘visit’ girls, or else collect girls and young women.

Social Services, however, sat on their hands. They didn’t tell my parents any of what Sara had told them in her letter – Dad was on to Social Services by this time, telling them he and Mum needed help because they’d lost control of me and were worried. They said that for all that I might be unruly, they couldn’t do anything because I was fifteen, nearly sixteen, and therefore nearly an adult. In their minds, it was up to me if I was off with men – nothing to do with abuse, just me making a ‘lifestyle’ choice.

I’d convinced myself that Mum and Dad didn’t care; that they still just saw me as a wild teenager and didn’t have a clue about me being passed around for sex with the gang.

In fact, it had begun to dawn on them that Harry’s place was evil and they were beginning to get frantic. True, I’d stay at home some nights now, but would leave again when I got Emma’s siren call. They would hear my phone vibrating and count the minutes before I tried to bolt to the door and be away. I was so desperate not to upset the gang that I’d sometimes climb out of a bedroom window, shimmy down to the eaves above the front door, and run out into the night. Back to purgatory.

Dad would go to Harry’s house himself to look for me sometimes, though more often than not it would be left to Mum to reclaim her ‘lost’ daughter because he didn’t trust himself not to hit someone. She’d drive up and then wait outside in the car for a glimpse of me, because they’d always deny I was there.

One time she called at the front door to be told I’d left, but with the door ajar she could see me nipping out of the back door. She shouted at me to stop and managed to grab me and bundle me into the car. I went home that time, but soon I was back again, reeled in by Emma’s unhealthy control over what passed as my life.

In the early days, Dad had reacted to my swearing at them by throwing me out of the house – not in a, ‘Here are your belongings, now off you go,’ sort of way, but in an attempt to calm me down and shock me into thinking about how I was behaving.

Now he and Mum just wanted to persuade me to stay at home because they sensed something was horribly wrong. All these years later, they say they’ll never forgive themselves for not trying harder. But there was only so much they could do.