Array Girl A - Girl A - My Story

And so it went on. Mulla, Immy’s ‘treat’, all the others. Dozens of them.

The jury heard how Roxanne was different from me: very different. To her, according to her statements to the police, she was just going ‘chilling’ with the men. But she’d been thirteen, and she was lying. There was enough, though, for the jury to know how it actually was: that she was being raped and passed around just like me. Only she said she liked it.

‘Roxanne described herself as having lots of friends,’ said Miss Smith. ‘She said her number would be passed around amongst the Pakistani men in her area. A situation developed where she would get calls from men she did not know who would ask her if she wanted to go ‘chilling’. She’d go to the petrol station or Morrison’s car park and the men would call her and describe their car so she could find them and get in.

‘She said, “Most of the time, I didn’t know who it was. They’d just ring me and say are you coming and I’d go ‘Yeah.’ I didn’t care who they were. I didn’t know them, didn’t know where we were going, I just got in the car with people and then they took me to wherever.”

‘She said she was also taken to houses where men would either be waiting or would arrive afterwards and they would want to “chill with me”. She said sometimes she was persuaded to kiss them and she pretended “to be with them”.

‘The police asked her how the men had got hold of her mobile number. She told them: “When you’ve got Asian friends, numbers get passed and they pass them on to their friends and they pass it on to their friends and you end up with a massive circle; everyone’s got it.”’

Miss Smith, already tall, seemed to rise even higher when she said, ‘The prosecution says that what Roxanne was describing was the group activity of a number of adult men, including these defendants’ – she gestured at the men in the dock – ‘who had spotted the opportunity to sexually exploit children who were vulnerable to that sort of exploitation.’

To Roxanne, Miss Smith explained, the men were her ‘good friends’ who bought her vodka and other gifts because they were ‘nice people’.

She’d drink a litre of vodka, but that was only so she could feel ‘loud and good’. The men were so nice that they’d wait until she was sober before ever having sex with her. And she was the one that wanted it. She was the one who suggested it, not them. And, anyway, she had told the police, they all thought she was sixteen.

The prosecution blew that lie away by showing the jury a photograph of Roxanne when she was thirteen. Poor kid, she looked younger.

Miss Smith then told the court that somewhere in this drunken haze Roxanne had got pregnant by Billy. He denied it, but because she had had a teenage abortion, and certain procedures had had to be followed, the police were able to prove the baby was his. Apparently, Roxanne had started off by saying she’d had a six-month ‘relationship’ with him. Then she said she’d only had sex with him the once. Then that it was four or five times. And, finally, that she was the only one of the girls to have ‘chilled’ with him.

Miss Smith looked over to the jury and said: ‘You will have to decide whether Roxanne was telling the truth at first and that she did have sex with him over several months. If so, you may feel that the accounts she gave later were an attempt to protect him.’

She brought me back into it then, telling the jury how I’d seen Roxanne being abused by the men, and also being hit by Emma if she resisted.

‘Roxanne also told Hannah that she was having sex with Billy and that she was in love with him.’

Girl B, or Leah, had been in a children’s home when the gang got to her. I never met her, but she’d heard of me from Emma. I’m guessing she was one of my replacements, and the thought made me shudder. The gang had kept asking for younger girls, and she was only fourteen when she came to Rochdale.

She used to walk out of the children’s home and not come back for days. And where do you think she went? She went to Harry’s house, and from there, just like me, she’d go out into Rochdale and beyond with Emma. The gang first got to her in the months after I’d escaped.

Again like me, she had lost count of the number of times she was forced to have sex. She’d try to blank it out the same way I’d done – by getting hammered on the vodka they gave her. Sometimes she was so drunk she’d wake up to find men having sex with her. It had got to the stage where she had to have a shot of vodka as soon as she woke up in the morning. The rest of the day, every day, she’d drink more vodka, along with Sambuca, Jack Daniel’s and Lambrini.

In her video evidence that was played to the court, she told police how she and another girl from a care home had been picked up in Manchester by three men in a car, who’d taken them on to Oldham. She had got so drunk she had blanked out. But she knew she’d been raped.

Leah told the court how Tariq liked to slap her face a few times when she got into his taxi, just to make sure she knew not to mess with him.

She was finally rescued after scribbling a note and dropping it down the stairs of her care home for staff to find. It read: ‘Asians pick me up, they get me drunk, they give me drugs, then have sex with me and pay me not to tell anyone. I want to move.’

After that, Social Services sent her off to another place, in the south of England. She’ll be out of there by now.

Girl C was Roxanne, Girl D was Anna. Next, we heard about Girl E, Alicia. Saj, who, it turned out, came from the same village in Pakistan as Tariq, and, of course, his cousin, Aarif, was twenty-eight when he got to her, in 2005. She was thirteen, and they had sex in Nelson once he’d got her drunk on vodka and cola.

It was only a one-off with Alicia but, three years later, he was mauling me. Some time after that, it was Leah’s turn to satisfy his craving for under-age girls.

The really clever thing about Rachel Smith’s opening address was how she made it sound as though the abuse I went through was part of one, almost seamless case. That yes, there were two conspiracies, but that the five victims were all linked. Well, we were, to an extent, but it was only when you looked at her speech in detail, and took in the various dates on the indictment, that you realised my part of the case was historic, and that the suffering of the other girls had either been much more recent or else had come to light more recently.

And what the jury would never have fathomed was that some of those other girls might have been rescued had my case gone ahead when it should have done. In 2009.

Miss Smith was doing her best, quite properly, to convince the jury that the men in the dock were guilty. And it would have made no sense for her to let on that the CPS had initially decided against prosecuting over my own abuse. But looking back, you can sense how relieved the senior people at the CPS must have been to hear the detail of that opening address because, rather conveniently, it glossed over their failure.

The police, too, were spared their blushes. There was a single, brief reference to the failed first investigation. ‘Regrettably,’ Miss Smith told the jury, ‘the police officers who looked into the matter didn’t take the investigation further at that stage.’

The trial would carry on for three harrowing months but, for that first day, Miss Smith was almost done. She turned to the jury and said, ‘This is as much as we feel we can assist you at this stage. The first witness is Hannah…’

I was brought to give evidence that day – 21 February – in an unmarked police car. Social Services had let me stay with Mum and Dad for the five days I was needed at court, but after that I had to go back to the foster place they’d put me in. A detective who introduced herself as Liz knocked on the front door of Mum and Dad’s house at 7.30 a.m., and Mum and I got into the back.