PEOPLE SAW ME AS A HARD MAN...BUT EVERYTHING WAS A MASK TO HIDE HOW THIS BOY RAPED ME
IN AN INCREDIBLY POWERFUL INTERVIEW, BRITISH BOXER CALLUM HANCOCK OPENS UP ON HORRENDOUS CHILDHOOD TRAUMA
THE evening is creeping over Sheffield and Callum Hancock is alone in the gym, working on the bags. He jabs away with his left and then throws a few rights, his hands faster than they are heavy.
That’s his style — volume over force. He’s decent, with nine wins from nine fights and no rounds dropped in his past six.
At this stage it’s hard to say how far he might go.
He’s probably not a world-beater, but Hancock is a promising supermiddleweight, good enough to get on Kell Brook’s undercard last December and capable by his reckoning of reaching British title level, maybe European.
‘ Who knows?’ he says. ‘ I’m unbeaten so it’s all there for me. I’ll be fighting again in June and hopefully a couple more times this year, so I suppose we’ll find out soon enough. It is going to start ramping up.’
But boxing is only part of his story. A small part, actually, and it’s not really why we are here.
‘I want people to understand this s*** and I want it to help others like me,’ he says, yanking off his gloves. ‘If something good is to come out of all this then maybe it will come from talking.’ And so begins a quite devastating tale. CAllum HAnCoCK is 27 now. He was 10 and living in the Birkhill area of Eckington when he was raped by Jason lyttle, a neighbour, four years older than him.
He waived his right to anonymity last September after lyttle pleaded guilty at Derby Crown Court to buggery and two counts of indecent assault, committed between January and July 2001.
Hancock gave up his protection because talking helps — it helps others and it helps himself, especially on his darker days.
Thankfully, those bad times aren’t quite what they were — the suicidal thoughts and attempts have passed, the elaborate plans to capture and kill lyttle have passed, and the bouts of rage that once put Hancock in prison have also largely passed.
But he accepts: ‘This thing will always be with me, haunting me if I let it, so the important thing is not to be afraid of it any more, and that means being open.’
With that, his mind goes back to when he first came into contact with lyttle. ‘I was just a tiny lad, seven or so,’ Hancock says. ‘He bullied me badly the majority of my early life. He’d beat me up, lock me in garages, whip me with sticks, take my stuff.
‘He had never done anything sexual in the early days but he was the worst person in my life. I remember this one time, when I was about eight, there were three or four of them coming for me — Jason lyttle and his brother, who was a couple of years older, and they had two lads with them.
‘They caught me, stripped my clothes off, threw them in this dam and threw me in afterwards. They were awful, those boys. I would always fight back, no matter how many there were.
‘I would be crying on the floor shouting, “I’ll have you when I’m older”, and they would be laughing at me, saying, “oh no, we’re on the Hitman Hancock list”.
‘This stuff went on years and it was awful. I didn’t think it could get worse and then, well, it did.’
The day of the rape is brutally vivid in Hancock’s mind. ‘I was playing in my garden and I used to crawl under the fence to get to this bit of green behind the house,’ he says. ‘I was out there making a den and then I saw Jason.
‘I tried to get back under the fence and he grabbed my legs and pulled me back under. But it was weird — he was being nice to me, saying he would get a hammer and nails and help me make the den. He went off to get them and I can remember thinking, “What’s the catch, why is he being nice?”’
Hancock takes a deep breath and continues. ‘He helped me build this big den and it was in the den that it happened.
‘Afterwards, he kept saying, “This is what everyone does at big school”. He did what he did and I was petrified, wishing my mum or brother would come looking for me. I remember getting my stuff together thinking, “What has happened?” I was crying my eyes out and ran into the house, up to the bathroom and locked the door.
‘The worst thing is, I didn’t tell anyone. on a previous occasion, my dad had been to see Jason’s dad over the bullying and it got worse for me because they said I was a grass. I was 10 and carrying that s*** in my head.’
There were further incidents with lyttle and it didn’t stop until Hancock moved house a few months later. He wouldn’t tell another soul what happened until he was 18. ‘I held this thing inside so long,’ he says. ‘It destroyed me. For years I was terrified it might happen again, scared people would look at me differently if they knew. I was even scared to go to the toilet in big school. It completely changed my personality.
‘This thing crushed me. In the end, I learned to put on a mask to hide how this boy violated me. To my friends I was fun, a joker, larger than life, a tough lad. I took up boxing in my teens and became this thing people saw, a hard man. Inside I was just a scared kid. I wish I had told someone because it rots you from inside.
‘I was 18 or 19 on holiday in Tenerife when I finally told two friends after a few drinks. That next day I woke up sober and I was thinking, “Did I really tell them?”
‘I was panicking and deliberately started distancing myself from them, which was awful because they were my close friends and, looking back, I needed to talk.’
Hancock started experiencing regular suicidal thoughts when he was 21. ‘I remember october 14, 2013, I had a bad accident at work as a scaffolder and I sat under the bridge that night in Eckington Woods and put a rope around my neck,’ he says.
‘The only thing that stopped me was thinking I couldn’t do it to my mum and dad. no one knew what was happening to me. I had started as a boxer, unbeaten in four fights. To everyone, that is all they saw. But my head was in a dark place.’
The darkness extended to detailed plans for revenge. He knew where lyttle lived and had been watching him for months. ‘It was an awful state of mind,’ he says. ‘It was when I was around 23. I sat and watched him no end of times. At that point, murder and suicide were my best friends — I wanted to kill him or kill me.
‘But how do you take revenge on someone like that? When you get hit, you want to hit back. If you get robbed, you might want to rob them back. But he raped me and I am not a rapist. So you are talking kidnap, high levels of violence, torture and murder.
‘I’m not proud of what I thought, but I want to be honest. I used to sit and watch him and map out where I could go, remote places I could take him and not get caught. I know that sounds bad.
‘one time I had a balaclava on, I had a knuckle duster and I was hiding in the dark near his house. He used to wander out every night around 7.15pm with a fag and this one time I was watching him walking towards me, getting closer. He was about 5ft away and just then a little child came out of the house, calling for him and I stopped. When he left I slumped back, head in hands, crying. I couldn’t do it.’
one of the lowest points for
‘I was hiding near his house with a knuckle duster and a balaclava on’ ‘Telling my parents was the hardest. My mum just screamed No’
‘This thing couldn’t beat me...so I know I have the heart for boxing’
Hancock came in 2015. A close friend committed suicide and it accelerated a tailspin that put Hancock in prison for six months for punching a doorman. ‘My friend’s death broke me,’ he says. ‘ I remember thinking at the funeral I’d be joining him soon.
‘A couple of weeks on, I lay on my bedroom floor crying my eyes out and I wrote a letter saying what had happened to me. I have it now and it has tearprints on it. That night I put it in my safe, went for a shower, put a mask on as the life of the party, and when a doorman jumped on my back, I responded.
‘In some ways, going to prison helped. Three weeks before I went inside I sat down with my parents and told them everything.
‘That was the hardest bridge I crossed. They blamed themselves, which is ridiculous. My mum just screamed, “No, no, no”. I told them there and then I was going to stop this thing from beating me. When I was inside it really hit me what I needed to do. I could see all these people torn apart by anger and taken in different directions.
‘I took a listening course with the Samaritans, where I spoke to other inmates. It brought home how important it was to talk.’
Despite feeling he had made progress, Hancock was still harbouring thoughts of revenge when he was released in spring 2016. They were only exacerbated by a chance meeting with Lyttle that November.
‘He was right there in front of me and I slapped him,’ he says. ‘His family was with him and they all looked confused. My girlfriend had pulled me away and I told her that night what had happened.
‘I went back to his house that same night and had his whole family sit down and demanded he admit what he had done. He kept saying he only remembered bits of it and I was just getting so mad. I was shouting, “I don’t need no judge or jury to tell me what you did”, and I was ready to blow.
‘A few days on, my dad sat me down. He could see I might do something bad and he gave me the most important conversation of my life. He said, “Unfortunately Callum, this is you, you have been raped. You can go and kill him, but you have still been raped, and you will have to deal with that in prison. Or we go down the positive path. Instead of doing something bad, we have kids to come, weddings”.
‘I stopped driving around with a blade in my car and a month later, January 2017, I went to the police.’ Lyttle pleaded guilty and in October 2018 was sentenced to six and a half years in prison. HANCOCK has a complicated relationship with boxing. The sport, and the identity it gave him, was once his shield to the outside world, but by extension it is now tightly linked to a part of his life filled with trauma. It is a reminder of sorts of his pain.
‘Look at my nickname,’ he says. ‘It’s Hitman Hancock, but for me that ties in a bit with Jason and them lads, pinning me down as a kid. Sometimes when I think about boxing, it can feel a bit close to what has gone on.
‘Then when Jason was in court it was also a good distraction. I had two fights late last year while that was going on and it took my mind off this whole thing.
‘But now that Jason is away, I need to heal, to love myself and my loved ones. I have been working with this great group, Survivors Manchester, to get myself right and it’s right that I take this time for myself. It’s important.
‘Then, when I come back to fight, in June, I want to be ready because boxing is a big part of the next stage. I want to put the supermiddleweight division on notice, because if this thing that I’ve lived through couldn’t beat me, I know I have the heart for it. I want to give myself a new story.’
Again, only time will tell how far he goes, and how much he can achieve in his mission to win titles and serve as a role model.
In the context of where he’s been and where he might have ended up, the latter has already been ticked off.