Array Girl A - Girl A - My Story

My face was awash with tears. For a few, eerie moments it seemed as though Steph was speaking not to me but to the people – all those unknown people, prosecution lawyers, defence lawyers, police, jurors – who might one day view this video.

I think Steph realised I’d reached my limit, and that to push me any further would leave me damaged. So she eased back, asking me how old the men had thought I was – and how old I thought I’d appeared to them.

‘I looked younger than I was,’ I said. I hadn’t worn make-up then, I said, and I was dead skinny. And I’d had no boobs until I was pregnant.

Steph asked what I thought about Cassie wanting younger girls like Roxanne and Paige.

‘I would have been glad,’ I said slowly, knowing how bad it would sound but knowing, too, that it had to be said because it was the awful truth. ‘It sounds tight, but…’

‘Why glad?’

‘Because I would not have had to go,’ I replied.

‘Why tight?’

‘Because then it would happen to them, so I’d feel bad.’

I told Steph how towards the end of the abuse I’d be taken to a house in town.

‘I’d go there with Emma and Paige,’ I said. Then I looked up, wide-eyed, horrified and added: ‘They still go and sleep there sometimes.’

I was trying my hardest to come to terms with the abuse the gang had put me through and how it was still affecting me, but I’d get nervy and lose confidence if I didn’t drink. Every time the police asked me to do another identity parade, everything would crowd in on me again: going through all the necessary VIPER parades was bringing ever-more degrading memories rolling back into my already fragmented mind. Of course, I never drank before the interviews, but afterwards I would have to unwind.

It was all a bit up and down, but mostly down, if I’m honest. I was given a provisional offer of a place at university, which was great, but then I got a final warning at the housing unit because they saw me as aggressive, abusive and disruptive. Well, yeah, but wouldn’t they have been?

Social Services, having signed me off their books, were still looking closely at Chloe. I never had got on with Christine, my social worker, but at least she wrote one nice thing about me in the core assessment they did on Chloe. She called me ‘a lovely young parent’ and said she could see I was trying my hardest to give the two of us a better future. They had me marked me down as a ‘high risk’ to Chloe but, at the same time, another of the professionals dealing with me was calling me ‘a devoted young mother’. In one report she wrote: ‘Chloe is always well presented. I have observed she has regular baths and is dressed nicely. Chloe is a credit to her.’ That felt nice.

As I say, a bit up and down.

A week after I’d gone through the latest video interview with Steph, Susan rang with the news I’d begun to despair of ever hearing. That morning police had finally, finally rearrested Daddy at his home in Oldham.

‘It’s an important step, Hannah,’ said Susan. ‘We still can’t give you any guarantees, but we hope it will at least come to trial now.’

Suddenly, the streets seemed a lot safer, and for all my misery, I began to hope I’d see my main abuser brought to justice.

If the Crown Prosecution Service had thought I would have been a flaky witness in 2009, they must have loved me two years later. In the time they’d abandoned me, I’d gone steadily downhill, a mother struggling both with the memories of her past and the alcoholism she’d fallen into to keep them at bay.

For now, my mind was focused mainly on drinking two, sometimes three litres of White Star a night – whenever the benefits money would stretch to it.

Christine, my social worker, would come to my flat to check on me. One day, in late March, she asked if I had any alcohol in the flat.

‘No,’ I said, but I think I must have looked a bit shifty. The next minute she was checking the fridge and finding a big bottle of cider. She went about as mad as a social worker can get. I went red.

As usual, it all went into a report about me.

Social Services called a conference on Chloe towards the end of April 2011. I went with my dad, and we had to sit around a table with fifteen professionals. The police were there, Sara and Jane too, and a couple of people from the housing unit. Christine sent her apologies.

They all agreed that I loved Chloe and was good at looking after her when I was sober. Not only that, they could see that I saw a future for myself. But it was the getting drunk all the time that ruined everything for me. Every night I was getting hammered because of both the new investigation and my memories of the abuse. Overall, it made me a disaster, and that’s why they put Chloe on a protection plan for neglect.

The fifteen of them voted unanimously.

I wouldn’t speak to Jane afterwards. I just brushed straight past her.

What I didn’t know then was that she and Sara were furious with Social Services. Sara had actually written a letter complaining that they weren’t liaising with her team, and that Crisis Intervention hadn’t even been invited to one particular conference. Basically, I think, she wanted them to pull their finger out and help me, rather than seemingly get in the way of everything positive all the time.

Around that time, with Social Services looking for an interim care order, I was sent to see a psychiatrist. He found me really quiet and, I guess, unresponsive, but didn’t think I had a personality disorder. It was just that my emotions had been messed up by the abuse.

According to him, the attacks had left me emotionally ‘quite blunted’. Let him try living my life , I thought. It just all felt relentless, as if I didn’t have any time to get over things. Everything that was going on was constantly there, all the time, reminding me.

There was only so much that Susan and her colleagues could do, and no matter how caring, even loving, they were, it didn’t stop me from trying to kill myself for a second time.

I’d been asked to help with the identity parades, as I say, but I was worried that I had forgotten some of the people because it was so long since it had all happened. I don’t mean the main ones, the ones who took me here and there, or the ones who were always at a particular flat or house. I mean the ones I’d seen only once or maybe a couple of times. I found it harder and harder to remember them, and that’s what was worrying me.

There came the day I was asked to go to the police station to do one of those sessions. This particular VIPER took longer to get through than I’d been used to. We went into a little room with no windows and just a TV screen on which they played the disc. There was a chair in the middle for me, one for a policeman, and one behind for the suspect’s solicitor, if one was present.

With some of the men I identified, a solicitor had been there. Whenever the solicitor couldn’t be there, they’d record me on a separate video so my reactions could be sent to them later.

I really wasn’t expecting to feel the way I did; in fact, I went in thinking everything would be all right, that I was over it now.

The pictures came up on screen, and for a while I wasn’t recognising anyone. Then Aarif’s face suddenly popped up and a wave of fear swept over me. Even though I could only see him on a TV screen, and in the middle of a police station, I felt terrified, and I began to recall scene after scene of what he’d put me through, like in a horror film. I remember I identified seven or eight of them that day; it took two hours to go through them all.

Once the session was over, the police drove me back to my parents’ house so I could collect Chloe. Mum made me a sandwich and afterwards we set off back to the flat in the housing unit. We got back at about 2 p.m. Later on, I put Chloe in her cot.