“He got 10.5 years. Got a guilty verdict, still seems surreal saying that.
He’s actually locked up now… so women can be safe for the next 10, well, safe from him, you know, safe from one of them.
And the next day, when I woke up, my waking thought wasn’t I’ve got this guy and he’s locked up; my first thought was he couldn’t go round out there that night. I can’t change what happened – that happened, but for other women…
I hate people who are like him. The fact they prey on women like I was. They know we’re going to get in the car… And it wasn’t the first time that happened to me. He’s the only one I knew I could get because of the registration plate. There’s other stuff that I know will never go anywhere because there’s no proof, it was so long ago…
It comes back to that thing, ‘Oh, you’ve had a drink or you were wearing the wrong thing’ and putting it all back on the women as well. Because the women are already out there, and they’re already judged for being out there it’s definitely, ‘well, you’re selling it anyway. What’s the problem?’ Problem is it don’t give them the right.
You know, when I seen the police not long after it happened and I was bruised up and that and they said to me, ‘What’s happened to you?’ And I said, ‘oh d***head got me.’ They said, ‘but you choose to come out here.’ Yeah, well, heroin made me choose to go back out there.
And then when I went through the court case as well [20 years after the attack], what was brought up to me was that ‘perfect victim’ look: ‘You’ve turned your life around. You’re not on drugs anymore. You’re now the perfect victim.’ And it just made me angry. Really angry. Because I thought of me back then, and that’s why I didn’t [report it]. You’re saying because I’ve turned my life around, I’m more deserving of justice? I don’t think I’m more deserving of justice now than I was 20 years ago, still in the chaos. It’s just that I wasn’t mentally able at that time to go through the trial.
The sad reality is in that life you witness, and you are the victim of so much violence and sexual violence. I got into that life at 14/15, so I’ve witnessed and been victim of so much violence and sexual violence.
Living With Trauma
I experienced violence as a child in the home. I think because of what happened to me, so young, the sexual abuse and physical abuse, I think that path was already there for me. I think the main thing was to just disassociate. I could step away. Same as why I could let men pay me for sex, I could disassociate. I wasn’t in my body. I think if you had childhood abuse then to be someone that sells sex is not too much of a leap because you see sex as something that’s transactional, or something that you endure. You’re more accepting of abuse, more violence, because it’s what’s normal to you. And you’re going to take more drugs to deal with the feelings it’s bringing up; in a bubble where nothing can get to you.
In that kind of family environment at a young age I did anything to get some kind of connection.
My stepdad, when I was young, died of a heroin overdose. I’d say to everyone he’s the best stepdad I ever had, people would be like, ‘…he’s a heroin addict’. But he wasn’t sleazy. And now I can look at it and see, I think he did care for me in a way.
He didn’t put me off heroin. I can remember him being sat in our kitchen when we was younger and he was “gouching out” [going in and out of consciousness while on narcotics] and my Mum was going off on one. I just remember looking at him thinking ‘I want that’. Not the heroin. I just want where I can be in a space where someone could be screaming at me and… nothing. And that was before I was 11. I wanted to get out of my head because it was too painful to be in my head. I wanted what he had, that level of, I just don’t care, all this is going on and I don’t care.
I think once you learn about trauma and you know your own experience and your own childhood, you can look at it objectively as well. I’m not blaming my Mum or Dad; they just should never have f***ing kids. The missing thing is that connection.
The power of connections and One25
That’s what One25 did, even though I didn’t know it at the time, it was putting in little [positive connections] instead of the negative, even though I was still flat out and out on the streets. For so long I didn’t have a family, and this was the family. When I saw the van, it’s just like you’re a normal person, you’re just a woman. On the van that’s what was happening, that little connection – that is someone I can trust.
And I know it’s thrown out ‘oh we’re like a family’, but it is. I don’t think you can overemphasise how much it’s true for women. Because if you don’t have that, it is difficult to turn the corner or even think about turning the corner.
I rely on other people to keep me going and that’s the way it should be.
I know as a One25 woman, I’ve been to all the services. And I went to other groups at other places and I didn’t feel it was my space, because I couldn’t talk about what I needed to talk to about.
That’s why it’s so important that One25 exists because One25 women feel left out and stigmatised and judged in [other] women’s services.
We are targeted, and going to other services as a One25 woman, they say ‘we’re welcoming’ and all that but you can see it on their faces… It’s the way we’re seen as ‘other’. We are still women, at the end of the day. Someone [from another service] said “what should we call you?” I said ‘a woman could be a start…’
Change Must Happen
I would love for the police and all these people who make policies, just for 10 minutes, to drive through the streets and all the women who are out are the age they was when trauma started. Because then if you drove down the street, you’d have children, in some cases babies. I’d have been a child. Would you drive past a child? You wouldn’t, you’d stop and stop the guys doing that to them.
The women who get the judgement and stigma out there – that ain’t a choice. I didn’t go to my career’s officer when I was at school saying, ‘I’d really like to be a heroin addicted prostitute! What college course do I have to do for that?’
You don’t just rock up either as a 50-year-old addict on the street. That’s not where they started. These women are the kids that have been abused, neglected and abandoned. This is the end outcome. So we should care about them as kids but then when they get to adult? It’s fair game because that’s the choice they made? No, it’s not. I made a load of bad choices but if your only choice is s**t and s**t, you’re going to end up with s**t.
If you see this woman, as a child, you’d have so much empathy, so much compassion. You’d want to sweep her off the street, put her somewhere safe. You’d want to give all this wrap around support. But because she’s a 50-year-old and she’s a bit mouthy and defensive and you don’t help her and it’s like she deserves everything that’s happening? No! These are the end products of the girls, the young kids. It comes from a place of trauma.
You can never forget your trauma. You can’t wipe it out or stop it. But you can learn different coping mechanisms and different tools to then be able to live alongside it. I’m in a better place now, I think I’m slowly settling and softening. I’m working through my trauma, reprogramming my trauma responses and am finding peace with who I was and who I am now. And I can now say I am proud of myself.”
