Sarah Wilson - Violated - A Shocking and Harrowing Survival Story From the Notorious Rotherham Abuse Scandal

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 my parents just weren’t feeding me because I was so skinny and my legs were a weird shape. Mum was horrified. Of course she’d been feeding me – I just couldn’t keep anything down!

Eventually, doctors found two holes and a leaking valve in my heart. Mum was beside herself when they told her I’d have to have heart surgery. She came with me in the ambulance to Leeds Killingbeck Hospital, where I ended up staying for a month. Not only was Mum worried sick about me, she had the boys to think of. Leeds was at least a 45-minute drive away from Rotherham, and that was only when you didn’t hit traffic. Thankfully, family mucked in to help, but Granddad was really ill at this point. He was in hospital with heart problems too, so Mum was really having a terrible time. She stayed at the hospital with me while Dad went back to Rotherham to fetch me some of my toys. Just when things seemed like they couldn’t get any worse, our car was broken into in the hospital car park and lots of my toys were stolen. Mum was gutted, as she’d really scrimped and saved to buy me them.

I had my operation in the middle of March, and thankfully it all went fine. Mum and Dad were both there when I was taken from theatre to intensive care, but Dad disappeared shortly afterwards. He told Mum he was popping back to Rotherham to sort some fresh clothes and get some money, but he didn’t reappear. No one had a mobile phone back then, so Mum couldn’t even ring him to check up on him. We didn’t see him for days, and Mum was absolutely raging, but eventually he turned up again and charmed her out of her bad mood, without really explaining what he’d been up to. That was just how it was with Dad.

A week after my surgery, I was transferred back to the hospital in Rotherham. This suited Mum, as Granddad was being treated there too. She’d often wheel him down the corridor to see me, and by all accounts I was the apple of his eye. But as I started to get stronger, Granddad got weaker. Not only did he have heart problems, but he also had diabetes and asthma. Barely a month after my operation, he passed away. He was only fifty-seven and Mum was heartbroken, but to this day we believe he wanted to give all of the life he had left in him to me.

A few weeks after Granddad’s funeral, Dad was arrested. Mum discovered he’d broken into an insurance brokers’ and stolen a safe. He’d only been caught because some police officers stopped him when they noticed one of the lights on the back of the van wasn’t working. He was sent to jail for six months. Mum was at breaking point. But still he somehow managed to worm his way back into our lives when he got out. Mark and Robert never had much contact with their dad, and Mum didn’t want the same thing to happen to me, so she let him move back in. A few months later, my sister Laura was conceived.

If Dad had been flaky and unreliable before, he was even worse when he got out of jail. I don’t know what happened to him in there, and I probably never will, but Mum knew he’d changed the second he walked through the door, back into our council house with its green-and-white walls.

My earliest memory of him is a little sketchy, but it has stayed with me my whole life. I mustn’t have been two yet, as Mum was heavily pregnant with Laura, but I can vaguely remember her tumbling down the stairs with her huge baby bump, tears streaking her face, and Dad standing on the landing above with a face like thunder. I think I was sitting in my pushchair at the time, watching it all happen in slow motion in front of me, frightened and confused. I’m not sure if that was the first time Dad hit Mum, but it certainly wasn’t the last, and I vividly remember the other occasions as I got older and more aware of what was happening.