Paedo dad took me on the run after he got me pregnant at 13
head. Then he started punching me. Over the years, he burnt me with an iron, attacked me with a hammer, stabbed me and split my head open.”
Clifton turned her against the rest of the family until she stopped seeing them.
And, then, when she was six years old and isolated from anyone who might help her, the worst torture began.
“He got g me up p in the night g and made me lie on the floor in my nightie,” she says. “Then he lay on top of me and just did it. I felt the worst pain imaginable. I was screaming for him to stop, but he wouldn’t.
“Afterwards I lay there bleeding. I was sobbing so much I could barely breathe.”
The rapes became regular – and the little girl bravely fought back in vain. “He would always say sorry afterwards,” says Shannon. “When he’d finished, I’d play with my toys to distract myself.
“He said it was something all dads did to daughters, but I had to keep it secret. He’d hug me and promise it would never happen again. But it always did. Yet I still loved him. He was all I had.”
The attacks gathered pace, up to four times a day. “He would even make me have sex with him in the woods,” says Shannon.
“He’d film it and once made me watch it. I was crying –it was so horrible.”
At 11, Shannon fell pregnant. Confused and frightened, she hid it the best she could until blurting it out to him at 28 weeks.
“I got beat up really bad and knocked out. I don’t recall it that clearly,” says Shannon. “But I remember one minute I had a baby inside me and the next there was blood everywhere and the baby was gone.”
When she fell pregnant again at 13, Clifton again tried to make Shannon miscarry – even looking up ways online. When it didn’t work, Shannon claims he came up with a
He made my life a nightmare I couldn’t run from, raping and beating me for years
SHANNON ON CHILDHOOD FROM HELL AT THE HANDS OF HER DAD