Array Girl A - Girl A - My Story

Once they were inside, and sitting down with a cup of tea, one of them, Anne – the same social worker who’d been dealing with Paige – looked over at me and said, ‘You know why we’re here, don’t you, Hannah?’

‘About the baby?’ I asked nervously, fearful of how the meeting was going to go. ‘And about me being at Harry’s place?’

But it wasn’t that simple. They were also there because they knew I was sleeping with lots of men. Right there in front of my mum and dad, she talked about me being a prostitute, saying I was sleeping with men for money.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s nothing like that. They’re raping me. Just like Daddy did.’

Beside me on the sofa, I could sense my dad getting angry. Mum was wiping away tears, doing everything she could to avoid looking at me.

The social worker carried on. ‘Hannah, this is really serious. Our main priority has to be the baby, and we have to warn you that if you carry on staying at Harry’s place, we’ll have to do a pre-birth assessment. And that could mean us taking your baby into care as soon as it’s born.’

I was sobbing now, scared at what might happen to the baby and mortified that my parents were hearing all this from a social worker.

Anne didn’t seem interested in what I was going through: when I talked about the video interview I’d done for the police and the evidence I’d given about the situation I was in, she said it had nothing to do with Social Services. The police investigation was separate; she was here to see me about the baby.

I felt so helpless that some of the detail I’d hidden for so long started to spill out. I told them frantically that it was specifically Asian men from takeaways and taxi firms who were either organising it or attacking me. I went on desperately, trying to convince them, convince my parents, that it was not my fault.

To this day I am convinced that Social Services knew full well what was going on. They knew about Emma because she’d had a social worker from the age of about ten. And they knew about Roxanne being with the Asian men as well.

The pair of them were only in the house for half an hour, but it felt like a lifetime.

Once they’d gone Dad’s rage – and Mum’s – erupted. For ten minutes they just ranted at me, saying how ashamed they were of me, how I’d let the whole family down, and how none of their other kids would ever have behaved like this.

It seemed they trusted the ‘professional’ social worker’s opinion over mine. They’d been led into thinking I was a prostitute. Even though I was only fifteen.

Weirdly, rather than that making me angry, it made me sad. I felt like I had let them down, but I just couldn’t get them to understand how trapped I’d been – and how I still was. The underworld I’d fallen into had a grip so strong that not even they would have been able to rescue me, or so I thought.

Right at the peak of his rage, Dad said something that cut me to the core. ‘You’re a fucking Paki prostitute,’ he said coldly.

He deeply regrets it now, I know. But whatever his reaction, in the heat of the moment, all my fears about how my parents would react seemed to have come true: they were sickened by me, ashamed of me.

I fled to my room, totally distraught. I now felt there was no one out there for me: not my family, not the police, not Social Services.

The social workers must have known from the police that I’d done video interviews about being raped back in August. But it had only been now, in December, that they had come to see me; and that was only because Crisis Intervention had told them I was pregnant. They weren’t worried about me – just the baby. Once again, I’d learn later that they thought I was making a ‘lifestyle choice’ to sleep specifically with Asian men.

Anne even complained to Jane about her huge workload, saying she needed to focus more on other girls. True, there were younger girls being abused, but I was a kid too, still only fifteen, still under the age of consent. Yet Social Services did nothing to help me, and certainly nothing to help me get away from Harry’s place. They did ask what I’d do if the baby was half-Asian, and when I said I didn’t know, they told me to give them a call once it was born if I decided I didn’t want it. That was it. They just didn’t seem interested.

Over the next few days, feelings of despair washed over me like waves over a shipwreck: one wave fear, one wave guilt, and every now and again a swell of panic and revulsion as I realised I might be carrying the baby of a paedophile who had paid money to attack me.

Physically, the pregnancy was fine. No morning sickness, no cramps, just a craving for fried tomatoes and Philadelphia cheese. Together! But, emotionally, as the infant grew, I was in turmoil, bound to a nine-month purgatory that might yet condemn me to the hell of raising my abuser’s offspring.

I know that some mums, some parents, have a pet name for their baby until they decide what they’ll call it once it’s born. But I had none of that. For me it was just there, inside me, and I didn’t want it to be. I had no interaction with it because I didn’t want to be pregnant at all. I wasn’t interested in it.

I didn’t want to harm it, but why would I want a baby, at fifteen, with my life in a mess and all the time being raped by this paedophile gang? In my mixed-up head, part of me wanted to have a miscarriage, and yet… and yet… something held me back from asking for a termination. It was offered, of course, but for all that I hated myself, and hated my abusers, I couldn’t bring myself to condemn the unborn child inside me. It wasn’t its fault that its life had begun in a moment of sickening depravity.

And that depravity hadn’t ended. Emma still had her sickening hold over me and so, for all that Mum and Dad tried desperately to keep me at home, I would still break away and end up at back at Harry’s place.

I told Emma about it one tea time. In fact, I told Harry first. He was sitting doing his crossword in the kitchen and I sat at the table with him to have one of the cigarettes I’d vowed to give up for the sake of the baby, but was struggling to with all of the pressure.

‘Well, aren’t you daft?’ he said, after I’d told him. He wasn’t nasty, but he wasn’t sympathetic either. When he asked me what I was going to do with it, I said, ‘I don’t know yet.’

Emma came in and asked what we were talking about. I just told her straight off: ‘I’m pregnant.’

At first she starting saying, ‘You’re lying, you’re lying,’ and then she was having a go at me: ‘You little slag, you won’t even know who the dad is. You’ll have to get rid of it.’

She was the one who’d been touting me around, and yet here she was getting angry with me. Maybe she was worried she wouldn’t be able to sell me to the men any more. Whatever it was, she picked up a plate of chips that had been lying there and threw them at me. I just sat there, blank, while Harry told her to calm down.

Emma stormed out, but came back a few minutes later and said something that chilled me to the core: ‘Well, you can’t tell you’re pregnant, so you can still go out.’

The phone calls from the gang kept coming all the way up to Christmas and, as usual, I’d be forced to go with her. Then, more than ever, it felt as though they were doing those things to someone other than me; that it wasn’t my body they were abusing, but someone else’s. I was in no state to defend myself. My will had gone. I was living inside a body that didn’t seem able to reach out.

Mum and Dad would try to keep me at home, but I’d still either escape or just lie by saying I was going to see one of my old friends. I knew they were suspicious, and sometimes they’d check up on me and catch me out. But the bottom line was that they couldn’t watch me 24/7 and I was too brainwashed to resist Emma’s hold over me.