Trafficked Girl: Abused. Abandoned. Exploited. This Is My Story of Fighting Back.. Jane Smith
the bathroom when I was ten. But soon I was cutting myself with anything sharp I could find – a knife from the kitchen, a Stanley knife, a razor, a set of compasses … I always kept the cuts and scars hidden, until one day – I suppose because I knew it was getting it out of hand – I rolled up one of my sleeves and showed my arm to my brother Ben.
‘Why?’ Ben asked me, his expression of shock turning to revulsion as he took hold of my wrist and gently rotated it.
I didn’t know how to explain the feeling I had every time I ran a blade across my skin and watched the blood ooze from between the cut surfaces. ‘Because it makes me feel as though I’ve exhaled after holding my breath for too long,’ I could have told him. But I knew he wouldn’t understand – I didn’t understand it myself. So I just shrugged, then pulled down my sleeve and said, ‘I don’t know.’
I can’t remember if I actually asked Ben not to tell Mum. Maybe not, if showing him the cuts was a cry for help and a way of passing on the responsibility for what I was doing to someone else. I don’t think he told her because he was trying to get me into trouble though. I think he was panicking and didn’t know what else to do. And a couple of minutes later she came stomping up to my room shouting, ‘What the fuck are you doing, you stupid bitch? There’s something wrong with you. You’re evil.’
‘Mum, don’t! Don’t shout at her.’ Ben appeared in the doorway behind her, his face still white with shock. But she ignored him, and continued her tirade of furious abuse.
Mum had always encouraged me to believe that the only place in my home where I was safe was in my bedroom, and as I became more anxious and less able to cope, it was the only place I ever really wanted to be. So I stopped going out with any of my friends – which I’d only done occasionally before then – and gradually became completely cut off from everyone.
I can remember thinking that I seemed suddenly to have lost all control of my emotions: if I was sad, I cried; if I was angry, I got into arguments with my teachers and with other kids at school. So it wasn’t long before no one wanted to have anything to do with me either, and after having been a relatively safe haven for the last nine years, school became somewhere I didn’t want to be, although I did continue to go on some days.
Apart from the one time I showed the cuts to my brother, I always kept my arms covered so that no one could see the ugly red lines that criss-crossed the skin or the scars they left when they healed. I think I had some vague idea that eventually someone would be able to see that I was depressed and desperate, and then I’d get the help I needed. But as the days turned into weeks, then months, and still nothing changed, I decided to show the cuts on my arms to my English teacher.
I didn’t want my parents to get into trouble, so all I told her was, ‘I’m just not happy at home.’ But although she was sympathetic, she said there was nothing she could really do to help me. So then I told my form tutor, ‘My mum hits me,’ and started going to the office at school sometimes to talk to the welfare officer. And although the welfare officer did apparently contact social services, they told her that whatever the problem was, the school would have to deal with it.
I’d added solvent abuse to the drinking and self-harming by that time, and was regularly getting into trouble at school. So, for me, the most immediate problem that needed to be dealt with was the fact that every time I got caught drinking or sniffing glue on school premises, my parents would be informed, my mum would beat me when I got home, I would run away, then I’d have to go home again because I had nowhere else to go, she would beat me again, I would think about taking my own life … and the vicious circle would continue.
The welfare officer did tell me that she was trying to get a social worker to come and see me, and when one did eventually come to the school to talk to me, I told her, ‘I’m not safe at home. I don’t want to live with my parents any more. I’ve always thought everything was my fault. But now I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve done anything to deserve being treated so badly. I keep thinking about killing myself. Not because I want to die. I just can’t think of any other way to make it all stop.’
After a lifetime of not daring to tell anyone about what was happening to me at home, it felt very scary to be talking about it at all. In any other circumstances, I simply wouldn’t have taken the risk, because of what I knew my mum would do to me if she found out. But I truly believed that if I told the social worker, she would take me somewhere I’d be safe and cared for – maybe even loved. So it felt like the end of the road when she said, ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ then everything continued the way it had always been.
I think my teachers were doing their best to help me – some of them, at least – by informing social services about any incidents they became aware of, and in the end I was assigned a social worker called Valerie Hampton, who came to talk to me at home.
A very tall woman in her mid- to late twenties with broad shoulders, big hands and feet, short hair that was dyed a dark henna colour, and a very distinctive nasal voice, my first impression of Valerie Hampton was that she saw herself as the sort of social worker who ‘gets’ young people. To me though, however friendly she might have been, it doesn’t seem very logical to expect a child to be able to talk openly about the reasons they feel unsafe at home while they’re at home! I still felt very protective of my mum too, so I didn’t say much except what I’d said before to my form teacher – that Mum sometimes hit me.
‘Huh! She’s the problem,’ Mum told the social worker, glaring at me as she spoke. ‘She’s the one who causes all the trouble in this family. There’s something wrong with her. She lies about everything.’
It’s the sort of thing you’d probably expect anyone to say when they’ve been accused of something like that. But Mum must have been more convincing than I was, because I found out later that Valerie Hampton decided I was attention seeking and making it all up, although she didn’t seem to ask herself why. Perhaps what also helped to persuade her was my nan getting involved by phoning social services and telling them I was mentally ill, which I also only discovered later.
Eventually, however, I was assessed by someone from Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), who said I had reactive depression – I think that’s what they called it – but that they couldn’t help me until I was in a safe environment. And still nothing was done. So I ended up being off school for about eight weeks, during which time I spent every day and night in my bedroom, sleeping or just staring into space, knowing I couldn’t cope any more, but not being able to think of any way that I might be able to change the situation I was in.
Once, when I’d begun to feel like a caged animal and on the verge of a panic attack, I ran away to a friend’s house and asked if I could stay there. Her parents said I could, then phoned Mum to let her know where I was. So then she and Dad came round, and as soon as she walked in the front door she kicked off, telling my friend’s parents, ‘There’s something wrong with Zoe. She needs to be put in an institution. I don’t know why you’re even bothering with her.’ While Dad just kept saying, ‘It’s all right, Zoe. You can come home. No one’s going to hit you.’ Which isn’t something you’d expect a parent to have to say to their child, although the possibility that by saying it he was rather proving what I’d said didn’t seem to cross his mind.
In the end, I stayed with my friend and her family for a couple of days before going home for a few days, then running away again to stay with another friend, whose parents would have let me live with them for longer if I hadn’t been drinking and had all the other ‘issues’ my social worker told me it wasn’t fair to inflict on them.
I found out later that my friend’s mum had told my social worker she was concerned about me because I seemed to be withdrawn and got very anxious whenever they asked me to sit in the living room with them. The fact was, I was so used to being unwanted by my own family that I felt like an intruder in someone else’s home and didn’t believe they really wanted me to be with them. I feel sad about that now, because her parents were very good to me, and I wasn’t able to accept their kindness.
After Valerie Hampton came to our house, social services did an