Being left alone and feeling like an outsider made Johanna vulnerable to sexual abuse and exploitation
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Johanna says she was a ‘misfit’ in school.
Keen to be liked, she got a boyfriend, who began raping her when she was 12. This was the beginning of eight years of sexual abuse, exploitation and violence.
Johanna explains that she and her mother had only recently moved into the area before she went to secondary school. She was desperate to fit in with all the other girls who were going out with boys and she thought having a boyfriend would help her do this.
She started seeing a boy who was 16. She walked home with him after school and this is when he began raping her.
Other boys that he knew found out that her mother worked long hours. They would come to her house in the evenings and queue up to rape her in her bedroom, one after the other. She says she tried to ‘blot things out’ of her mind as the boys came in.
When Johanna was about 14, she went to her local GP’s surgery for contraception. She hadn’t told her mother she was doing this. The doctor made her undress, saying he wanted to check for cancerous lumps. He probed her all over her body. She remembers how she felt violated but says she only realised when she was an adult how inappropriate his behaviour was.
Soon after this she began working in a bar. A customer who was in his mid-20s asked if he could take her out, and he began raping her regularly in local woods.
Johanna’s performance at school suffered, when previously she had done well. She began truanting and a social worker came to her house to talk about this. She started going to school again, but her teacher said she was a waste of his time so she left and never went back.
Johanna’s mum arranged for her to attend college in another area. On her first visit, she met a man called Lee in the neighbourhood, and he took her for a drink. She found it hard to fit in at college as the other students already knew each other, and she continued seeing Lee.
Around this time, Lee started being emotionally abusive, not turning up when he said he would and being distant with her. Once he told her that if she slept with his friend he would give her money. She did, because she felt she didn’t have a choice, but he didn’t give her any money.
Soon after, he told Johanna she needed to ‘shadow’ a girl who was working in another city. When she said she couldn’t go, Lee beat her up. She says that the next morning she apologised to him for ‘letting him down’ and that night she went out with the other girl. She sat in a car as the girl had sex with men for money.
The next time she went out, she had sex with ‘punters’. She was arrested for prostitution and cautioned.
She continued working as a prostitute as Lee trafficked her around different towns. Sometimes she worked on the streets, other times in massage parlours.
Johanna was frequently arrested, but by this time she was in her mid teens and she says the police didn’t seem to know what to do with her. Other girls she knew who were arrested were treated as children and had social workers, and Johanna says she felt jealous of them for this.
After a court appearance she was placed in a refuge, but most of the girls there were in the same position as her. Many of them were self-harming and taking overdoses. Johanna says that punters and pimps were constantly at the refuge and staff must have known what was going on.
Lee was sent to prison, and Johanna was ‘taken over’ by a new pimp. He beat her and raped her. She went to the police but they said if she went to court, the court would be told she was a prostitute, so she didn’t proceed and went back on the streets. She said she would try to get picked up by the police as often as possible so she could be safe in a police car.
Around this time she met a boy she had known at school and started a relationship with him. She became pregnant and was excited at the thought of being a mother. When Lee came out of prison, she told him, hoping he would not make her work as a prostitute because of her pregnancy, but he told her to ‘get rid of it’ and beat her viciously.
Johanna took an overdose and ended up in hospital for a week. She saw a psychiatrist but says she didn’t know how to start telling him about her life, and he walked out when she tried.
Johanna has suffered with low self-esteem, depression and anxiety. She has asked to see her files but social services say they have lost them, and the police records contained little detail of all her arrests.
Looking back at her early life, Johanna wishes that there had been support staff at her school that she could have talked to. She feels that social workers and other people involved with children need to start ‘reading between the lines’. She says that if she’d had someone to turn to, she ‘might have been able to get out earlier’.
She adds that her mother, as a single parent, needed more support.
Despite everything, Johanna managed to get a university place via an access course, and has completed a degree.