Rotherham scandal
Why I’m campaigning for ‘Sammy’s law’
Sammy Woodhouse had just celebrated her 14th birthday and was joking around with a friend one evening in Rotherham when a sports car drew up and out stepped Ash Hussain. Mad Ash, as the Asian drug-dealer was known, was “a right good-looking guy”, immaculately dressed in blue cord jeans, Ben Sherman boots and a gold gilet. He asked if the girls would like to come for a spin.
As they climbed into his car, Woodhouse remembers feeling excited by its posh, black interior and top-of-the-range stereo. “How good is this?” she thought. “We’re going to have some fun.” It never occurred to her for one second, she says, that her life was about to change forever.
Woodhouse is 32 now, with an air of self-assurance that would have been unimaginable as a teenager. Her long, shiny hair is carefully curled and she’s wearing a fashionable yellow mac, perfect for the trendy London restaurant where we meet: out of victimhood, she has carved a new life. For years, she was a statistic, one of around 1,400 children – most of them young, white girls – who were abused by Asian gangs in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013. She was repeatedly raped, became pregnant and had an abortion aged 14. Under Hussain’s influence, she also turned to crime.
Her evidence was key to securing six convictions as a result of Operation Clover in 2016. At first, her identity was protected but as long as she remained in the shadows she felt that she was part of a “dirty secret”. She decided last year to waive her anonymity and, surprisingly, it has been the making of her.
“It’s as if a massive weight has lifted off my shoulders,” she says. “I used to think staying anonymous would keep me safe but the reality was Ash knew who I was and where I lived. Everyone in Rotherham knew who I was, but I think people view me differently now I’m prepared to speak up as myself.”
She has blossomed into a formidable activist, working with schools, social workers and police officers to help prevent more children becoming victims. Lucy Allan, MP for Telford, said recently – when it was revealed that up to 1,000 children may have been targeted by Asian gangs in crimes dating back to the Eighties – she believed children in the Shropshire town were still being abused. Last week, Telford and Wrekin council voted to launch an inquiry.
Woodhouse also believes child exploitation is a live issue. “When I give talks in schools I can tell straight away who it’s happening to,” she says. “I always advise them to tell somebody. Look what happened to me: once I was believed I started believing in myself, and I wish I’d done it a long time ago.”
When the Government’s Independent Inquiry Into Child Sexual Abuse, chaired by Prof Alexis Jay, published its report into child sexual exploitation in Rochdale it concluded that the authorities showed “a total lack of urgency” towards the problem of child abuse. That, too, was Woodhouse’s experience in Rotherham.
The police raided Hussain’s house and found Woodhouse in bed with him when she was 14 – but she was the one who was arrested when they discovered a weapon Hussain had asked her to hide in her handbag. “I still can’t work out whether the police weren’t interested in the abuse or just didn’t see it for what it was,” she says. “They regarded girls like me as little slags and me in particular as Ash’s mistress, a member of his gang rather than its victim.”
Many teenagers preyed on by the gangs were, like her, not only raped and ill-treated but made to commit crimes. Under Hussain’s influence, she dealt drugs and attacked another teenage girl with CS gas. “I sprayed it in her face as he’d told me to. I could have blinded her. I had no idea. Thank goodness, she was all right,” she says.
Woodhouse is now campaigning for the introduction of a new law – Sammy’s Law – to ensure children cannot be charged with committing crimes while being groomed, and has had a sympathetic hearing from senior police officers and officials at the Ministry of Justice. She says she is lucky that the police decided not to press charges on the offences she admitted to when she came forward to testify against Hussain: a solicitor calculated that if she had been prosecuted she could have faced a total of 102 years in prison. “That’s more than Ash!” she exclaims (Hussain was convicted on 23 charges of rape and indecent assault in February 2016 and sentenced to 35 years). “Girls I’ve talked to can’t go on college courses or work in child care because they’ve got criminal convictions, and that’s totally wrong when they’ve suffered so much already. It’s another way of victim-blaming.”
She is also telling her story in a new book, Just a Child. It describes her very ordinary upbringing, how she became trapped in Rotherham’s web of crime and sexual exploitation, her decision to give evidence and the depression and guilt that followed, which brought her to the brink of suicide. In common with many of the victims in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, Oxford and other cities where similar sex rings have been uncovered, her feelings towards her abuser were a mixture of fear and love. She had a son by Hussain – now 16 – and part of her still feels guilty at helping to put her abuser behind bars.
“People expect me to hate Ash but I can’t. My son is part of him, and if I hated him I would have to hate my son,” she says. “I loved Ash. I had a child with him, and I expected to spend the rest of my life with him. I was that deluded. Nothing my family or anyone else said could make me face the truth.”
Unlike many of the girls, who were in care or from chaotic families, Woodhouse is the product of a stable home and loving parents. As a child, she was a promising dancer and a diligent student. Within weeks of her father learning that she was “hanging out” with older men, he complained to the police – but as far as they were concerned, Woodhouse was making a lifestyle choice and they took no action.
Even Hussain’s own brother tried to warn her off, but she was infatuated, drunk on his glamorous seeming life on the edge of the law, his compliments and presents. That was before he turned nasty. Once she was in his grip, he used a mixture of charm and violence to exert control. Looking back, she believes that when he picked her up in the first place his intention was to traffick her. He took her to a house filled with older, Pakistani men,
‘When he beat me he said: you have no idea how lucky you are’
where she was offered vodka and a drag on a spliff, the standard way girls were lured in before being forced to have sex with multiple men. But perhaps there was something different about her even then, an intelligence or strength of character that has since helped her to overcome her ordeal. Instead of being trafficked, she became Hussain’s girlfriend. “I think he did develop feelings for me,” she says. “I remember him saying to me once, when he was beating me, ‘You have no idea how lucky you actually are’. I didn’t understand what he meant at the time.”
Her eyes were opened when she heard the horrific stories of the cruelty and abuse other children – mainly girls – had suffered. Children as young as 10 were given alcohol and drugs, and then told that they had to repay the “debt” by having sex. If they tried to run away, threats were made to rape their mothers and sisters. One girl was told she was “one bullet” away from being killed, another was doused in petrol and told she was about to die.
Woodhouse insists she had no idea any of this was going on. “I knew he was a bad person because of the stuff he did to me but that just took it to another level,” she says. “He was evil. To think someone I loved was capable of that… well, it doesn’t really bear thinking about at all.”
Just a Child by Sammy Woodhouse is published on April 19 by Blink (£7.99). To order your copy for £6.99 plus p&p call 0844 871 1514 or visit books. telegraph.co.uk