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In this powerful episode, I, Sammy Woodhouse, share my harrowing journey as a survivor of criminal and sexual exploitation. Growing up in Rotherham, England, I had a happy childhood with dreams of becoming a dancer. However, my life took a tragic turn at the age of 14 when I met Arshad Hussain, a dangerous criminal known to the authorities. What began as an innocent encounter quickly escalated into years of mental, sexual, and physical abuse, as well as criminal exploitation.
Despite the efforts of my parents to report the situation, the authorities failed to recognize me as a victim. I was treated as a willing participant rather than someone being groomed and abused. My life spiraled out of control as I went missing for extended periods, lived in foster care, and was forced into situations that no child should ever endure.
Throughout my ordeal, I faced unimaginable threats and violence, including forced abortions and attempts on my life. The lack of support from the police and social services only compounded my suffering. It wasn't until I became pregnant with my second child that I found the strength to break free from my abuser.
As I rebuilt my life, I encountered further challenges, including suicidal thoughts and a lack of therapeutic support. It took years for me to come to terms with the fact that I was a victim of exploitation. With the help of professionals and my own determination, I began to gather evidence and share my story with the world.
My story, published in The Times, helped expose the widespread child abuse in Rotherham and led to significant criminal investigations and policy changes. However, the fight for justice and support for survivors continues. I have dedicated my life to raising awareness, educating others, and advocating for policy changes to protect children from exploitation.
Through my book and ongoing work, I aim to provide a voice for survivors and ensure that no child has to endure what I went through. Join me in this episode as I recount my journey and the ongoing battle for justice and support for victims of exploitation.
(00:00) Introduction and Early Life
(01:21) The Encounter That Changed Everything
(02:32) Life Under Exploitation
(05:00) The Mechanics of Grooming
(07:13) Attempts to Escape
(10:23) The Turning Point
(14:09) Struggles After Exploitation
(17:28) Seeking Justice
(20:20) Reflections and Advocacy
[00:00:01]
Sammy Woodhouse:
I'm Sammy Woodhouse and I'm a survivor of criminal and sexual exploitation. I grew up in a small town in the north of England called Rotherham. I grew up with both parents and both of my oldest sisters. As a little girl I have so many great memories. I loved to go to school, I had lots of friends, I was bubbly, I was confident, but my dream and my ambitions was to grow up and be a dancer. So I started dancing at just the age of 4 years old and I did that up to the age of 12, and I would go all around the country dancing and competing against other little girls and boys as well.
And I thought I had my whole life mapped out. There was nothing vulnerable about me as a child apart from the obvious, and that was I was just a child. When I was 14 years old, it was just after my 14th birthday, I was on my local shop with a friend and a man started to drive up the street in a silver sports car. He got out of the car and started talking to my friend and she already knew him and I knew his brother a little bit as well, so when he asked us to go for a spin in the car he didn't feel like a complete stranger. And of course as a child I didn't recognize what the dangers and risks could be.
His name was Arshad Hussain, he was 24 years old, and what I didn't know at the time but he was known to all services such as police and social care for being a dangerous criminal. He asked us to go for a spin in the car and we said, Yeah. And I had no idea but that was going to be the moment that would change my life forever and I would go on to be mentally, sexually, and physically abused for several years, and I would also be criminally exploited in committing crimes. Now I started going missing for days, weeks, and months at a time, and of course my parents wasn't happy about this, and just within a few days they reported my new boyfriend, of what I thought at the time, to the police.
The police came out and said that I was making a lifestyle choice and there was nothing that they could do about it. But I was living in hotels, in B and Bs, in his friends' houses, and even in his family home at times as well, and I was missing out on a lot of school, so I missed out on about 9 months of my education. And as a child I was never treated as a victim. I was treated as somebody that was his mistress, his girlfriend, and somebody that was a part of his gang rather than somebody that was a victim to it. When I was 14 and made pregnant I was forced to have an abortion, which is something that I didn't want to do. And of course I was so young, I was just a baby myself.
And I remember telling my mum and she said, you know, this just doesn't make sense, how can a baby have a baby? And the reason why I didn't want to have an abortion is because I felt like I was murdering my child. And he told me before the abortion that he would either punch me in the stomach or throw me down a flight of stairs so I would miscarriage. But then he also gave me something, what was called castor oil, and he said if I was to sit in a hot bath and to drink that I would lose a baby, it would be peaceful and everything could go back to normal. And he told me that if he was to go to prison, especially for me, that his family and friends would blame me, I won't be safe, and he wouldn't be able to protect me. So I went through with the abortion.
When I met him I was only 14 years old and he started to groom me. And I always say that grooming is the most dangerous of crimes for two reasons. 1, because it's a silent crime and it happens without you even knowing it's happening, and 2, it can also be an enjoyable crime. So first of all he came into my world and he found out everything there was to know about me, who I was, who my friends were, my family, what music I liked, what kind of movies I liked as well, what school I went to, and it seems we had so much in common because he liked all the same things that I did, and all his friends seemed to know my friends as well. So I never saw him as a perpetrator, as a sex offender, I saw him as someone that was my boyfriend.
Because I was going missing all the time for days, weeks, and even several months at a time, my parents placed me onto a section 20 so I was placed into foster care but they had full parental rights. And I remember the first time when I got placed into a foster home and I cry myself to sleep and Orchard phoned me and he said, don't worry, tomorrow I'm going to come and get you. So the next day he and a woman came to the foster placement and I walked down the stairs with all my bags and I said I was going to go for a walk, and I got into the car and I left and then I became a missing person again.
Now I was missing all the time from home and I was often found by police, but the only times I was returned is when I was missing for large periods of time. In total I was in 3 different foster placements and when my parents thought that they were putting me into care to keep me safe that plan actually backfired and the authorities said that he could have full access to me as long as he picked me up from the top of the street and I was back to the foster placement by 10 o'clock. And they also wanted me to spend some more time in school. So then I started going back to school but it was on a part time table.
Now my whole world started to change and he started to break down all the different relationships in my life, whether that be with parents, with my sisters, with friends. So it just came to the point where I was just arguing and fighting with absolutely everybody. And that was very clever on how we did that because on the times when I needed to reach out to someone it made it very difficult to be able to do that. But there was many occasions when I tried to leave, there was an occasion where he dragged me by my hair into the car, he started speeding to the top of the street, and he was saying that if he couldn't have me no one else could, and he drove through 2 parked cars and into a church wall.
And at that point I was pregnant with my second child. I got rushed into hospital and luckily my son was okay, was safe and well, and I went back to the foster placement. But there was another occasion where again he was saying that he was going to kill me, and we was in the car and he started speeding towards the end of a hilltop that overlooks Rotherham. And he slammed the brakes on right at the edge and he got me out of the car and he hung me over the edge and said that he was gonna chuck me off. And I was that scared, I wet myself. And then he put me into the back of the car and had sex with me so nothing had happened.
And I remember just laying there and I just felt like I was a dead body on a slab, and I had this constant pain there, you know, like in my chest, like all the time, and I knew it was from him. I knew I had to get away from him. I just couldn't I just couldn't picture a way of how to do that because I knew that there was people working for him, you know, such as police and other people. And as silly as this sounds, I knew I think at the time that my mum and dad had helped me, but I didn't want to hear the words of we told you so. And it was just so hard to try and process absolutely everything what was happening.
And I started to really shut down emotionally as well, and What I wanted professionals and other people to see is, you know, when I was this child that was being angry and lashing out and screaming and shouting, there was actually just a little girl underneath all that that was being abused, raped, beaten, and had no one to turn to. And even though I was so young and of course I shouldn't have been having a baby in the first place, I think me getting pregnant again is something that saved me and I always say that my son was sent as an angel because if it wasn't for him I'd probably be dead or in prison.
I was committing crimes that he was getting me to do, and I was also becoming really suicidal. He got locked up when my son was just about to be born, And that was really fortunate for me because it gave me that gap to be able to go home, to build relationships with my family again, and be able to try and break out of the exploitation. And I gave birth to my son just after my 16th birthday whilst he was in prison, and in time I was able to cut off contact. Now when my son was a couple of months old I was in Rotherham Town Centre doing some shopping. He'd just come out of prison and I bumped into him, and he grabbed me by the throat and tried to throw me over the top floor balcony in the shopping center.
2 men that he was with dragged him off but he started screaming and shouting, he was being really racist towards my son. He was saying that he was gonna set us on fire and watch us burn, and he kicked over my son's push chair whilst he was sat inside it. So I grabbed the push chair and I started running, and I pushed my son into a phone box. And I remember phoning my sister and she could hear everything, what was going on, and he chased me as well and he was spitting in my face. And again people dragged him away. And I remember going on record with the police at that time, and I think for my parents that must have been a real moment because for 2 years they've been trying to get me to do official statements.
Now for the first period of time that I knew him I would always deny things and try and defend him, but then once I went into care I was open with professionals because they were allowing it and they said that he wouldn't be prosecuted, so I didn't need to lie and hide things anymore. But I went on record with the police which was a complete waste of time. Even though there was CCTV, there was witnesses, and my statement, and of course DNA from my son, They didn't even go and question him. In fact the police officer turned around and said, well he's got every right to do that because you've stopped him from seeing his son. I then went to court and got a private court order so he couldn't come near me because professionals weren't doing what they should have been doing in helping keeping me safe.
And, he started coming to my flat, he was making a lot of threats and I ended up having to move back home with my family. And I had to cut pretty much everybody off in my life because it was targeting everybody, whether it be my family, my friends. So I pretty much just hid away for a really long time and just tried to get on with life as the best I could. I've never had any therapy, you know, to process things and to be able to deal with my emotions, and I always say that if I would have had therapy at that time, you know, when I was 16 to help me process what had happened. My life could have been very differently, but unfortunately that didn't happen.
So after my exploitation life was at times really difficult for me and as well for me too because I had not been able to process things and as well through other things that had been going on in my life as well. And I became very suicidal at times, there was times when I took tablets, I drank bleach, slit my wrists, tried hanging myself, thankfully none of that worked. But I still went through life, not processing what had happened to me. And I reached out to services for help and they said that I wasn't severe enough, and I was severe enough to be helped because of how suicidal I was. I didn't have, at that point, any support around me because I was no longer in contact with family either.
So I felt like I was really struggling with things and on my own. After my exploitation, I really struggled with a lot of things in life, and I think that was because I'd never come to terms with the fact that I was a victim of exploitation. I always saw this man, for being my boyfriend, and we were just in a violent relationship. It wasn't until I got to about 27 years old where I started to come to terms with the fact that I was a victim in all of this. And I started working with professionals and they started to help me break down, you know, what had actually happened to me in my life. But I was still really struggling with services and getting support for me and my son, and I contacted the police with the help of a professional and the police come out to see me. Now I recognize the police officer straight away from when I was 14 years old, when I was in foster care, but also from other incidents in my life as well.
I started working with professionals and I was really frustrated though with how some people in the services were treating me and my son and I didn't feel supported. But professionals asked me if I would be willing to speak to the police about what had happened to me as a child and I agreed. And the police officer came out and I actually recognized her from when I was a child as well, and I asked her to go away to look what evidence there would be to support me, and she came back with a male officer. Now I decided to record both those police officers on my mobile phone because I didn't trust them, and I was right in doing so. So when I asked them what evidence I had, they said that they could only find one piece of evidence and that was a missing person's report.
I said, well, I have DNA evidence from my son, which of course could prove that he was conceived underage. They said that they didn't want to use his DNA. I asked about my safety. They said they couldn't watch me all the time. So even though they wasn't saying that they didn't want to, deal with it, They just always felt like there was, you know, a barrier to to things that I was asking. I decided because I didn't trust the police not to take it further at that time because I didn't feel supported with the lack of evidence that they said there was.
So I decided to get a solicitor and gather my own evidence. I got police records, social care files, medical records, and I also had the tape recording of the police officers. I then contacted a journalist at The Times newspaper called Andrew Norfolk. I shared my story with him. I gave him all my evidence, and in August 2013, he published my story. Now when I contacted Andrew, I'll be honest, I had no idea really what I was getting myself in for, and I think I contacted him just out of sheer desperation. I just felt like I had nowhere to go, and at that point I was suicidal in my life as well. I tried to kill myself, I was on medication, and I was involved with the Mental Health Act as well.
So what I learned was that other professionals and a survivor had also come forward with their evidence before me, but unfortunately they were ignored. Now when my story went to print, I thought I was gonna get ignored as well. Fortunately, I didn't, but what I was able to do with the amount of evidence that I had, I was able to name people. So I named my rapist, Orsha Rasame, I named the then deputy leader of Rotherham Council and Labour politician, Jahangir Akhtar, and I also named a police officer, PC Ali, for his involvement in a no prosecution deal as well. And that triggered the opening of all the criminal investigations in South Yorkshire, which is currently the biggest criminal investigation in regards to child abuse in our history, but it also commissioned the Alexis Jay report which went on to show 1400 children had been groomed, abused, raped, trafficked, tortured, and some even murdered, and the police turned a blind eye to it.
And the majority of the perpetrators were Pakistani Muslim men, and majority of the victims were white female non religious children. So it was said they was afraid of being called racist or Islamophobic. It's been 11 years now since my story were published and 10 years since the election's jury report were published. And at times I feel we have come such a long way because when we look back to 11 years ago, there wasn't even conversations anywhere within our services or our government about children that were victims of exploitation, but I still feel that we have such a long way to go.
Now in those 11 years, I've worked with media all over the world to raise awareness, to try and educate the public about what's happening. I've also worked with police forces, social care, foster carers, schools to try and educate them and give them a better understanding from a victim's point of view, but I've also worked with government to change policy and law. But I feel that even after all the exposures that not only I've done but other people have done, because exposing this was a collective of lots of different people, I feel that we still aren't doing enough for children.
They are children still being criminalized, still being blamed. As a survivor that has a child through this, I had to fight through the courts in trying to change a law to ensure that rapists can't have access to our children. There are still thousands of survivors left with criminal records because we were criminalized as children, the perpetrators wasn't. There's survivors like myself that had children from our abuse, that have had to fight in courts or against professionals because rapists can apply through our courts and have contact and custody to our children.
So there's work that I'm trying to do around children born from rape, but children born from rape still don't have a voice within law. There's still no government research into the needs of mothers and children born from rape. Professionals still have not been trained. There's no support services that are focusing on this. So there's still so much work to be done, and there's still thousands of children in our country being failed. I decided to write a book about my experiences, and the reason why I wanted to do that is because I wanted, again, to raise awareness but to educate people. So at the end of my book I speak a lot about spotting the signs, if you are a parent, who you can report to or what kind of evidence and information you can gather. And I think it's really important that we educate people, as many people as possible, about what grooming is, you know, how we can spot it, who we can report it to, and how we can support victims of abuse because there's still so many people that aren't being supported improperly.
I'm Sammy Wood Woodhouse and I'm a survivor of criminal and sexual exploitation. To support Irvin Scoop and all the work that we're doing, please head over to airbingscoop.nos and click on the supporters button.
I'm Sammy Woodhouse and I'm a survivor of criminal and sexual exploitation. I grew up in a small town in the north of England called Rotherham. I grew up with both parents and both of my oldest sisters. As a little girl I have so many great memories. I loved to go to school, I had lots of friends, I was bubbly, I was confident, but my dream and my ambitions was to grow up and be a dancer. So I started dancing at just the age of 4 years old and I did that up to the age of 12, and I would go all around the country dancing and competing against other little girls and boys as well.
And I thought I had my whole life mapped out. There was nothing vulnerable about me as a child apart from the obvious, and that was I was just a child. When I was 14 years old, it was just after my 14th birthday, I was on my local shop with a friend and a man started to drive up the street in a silver sports car. He got out of the car and started talking to my friend and she already knew him and I knew his brother a little bit as well, so when he asked us to go for a spin in the car he didn't feel like a complete stranger. And of course as a child I didn't recognize what the dangers and risks could be.
His name was Arshad Hussain, he was 24 years old, and what I didn't know at the time but he was known to all services such as police and social care for being a dangerous criminal. He asked us to go for a spin in the car and we said, Yeah. And I had no idea but that was going to be the moment that would change my life forever and I would go on to be mentally, sexually, and physically abused for several years, and I would also be criminally exploited in committing crimes. Now I started going missing for days, weeks, and months at a time, and of course my parents wasn't happy about this, and just within a few days they reported my new boyfriend, of what I thought at the time, to the police.
The police came out and said that I was making a lifestyle choice and there was nothing that they could do about it. But I was living in hotels, in B and Bs, in his friends' houses, and even in his family home at times as well, and I was missing out on a lot of school, so I missed out on about 9 months of my education. And as a child I was never treated as a victim. I was treated as somebody that was his mistress, his girlfriend, and somebody that was a part of his gang rather than somebody that was a victim to it. When I was 14 and made pregnant I was forced to have an abortion, which is something that I didn't want to do. And of course I was so young, I was just a baby myself.
And I remember telling my mum and she said, you know, this just doesn't make sense, how can a baby have a baby? And the reason why I didn't want to have an abortion is because I felt like I was murdering my child. And he told me before the abortion that he would either punch me in the stomach or throw me down a flight of stairs so I would miscarriage. But then he also gave me something, what was called castor oil, and he said if I was to sit in a hot bath and to drink that I would lose a baby, it would be peaceful and everything could go back to normal. And he told me that if he was to go to prison, especially for me, that his family and friends would blame me, I won't be safe, and he wouldn't be able to protect me. So I went through with the abortion.
When I met him I was only 14 years old and he started to groom me. And I always say that grooming is the most dangerous of crimes for two reasons. 1, because it's a silent crime and it happens without you even knowing it's happening, and 2, it can also be an enjoyable crime. So first of all he came into my world and he found out everything there was to know about me, who I was, who my friends were, my family, what music I liked, what kind of movies I liked as well, what school I went to, and it seems we had so much in common because he liked all the same things that I did, and all his friends seemed to know my friends as well. So I never saw him as a perpetrator, as a sex offender, I saw him as someone that was my boyfriend.
Because I was going missing all the time for days, weeks, and even several months at a time, my parents placed me onto a section 20 so I was placed into foster care but they had full parental rights. And I remember the first time when I got placed into a foster home and I cry myself to sleep and Orchard phoned me and he said, don't worry, tomorrow I'm going to come and get you. So the next day he and a woman came to the foster placement and I walked down the stairs with all my bags and I said I was going to go for a walk, and I got into the car and I left and then I became a missing person again.
Now I was missing all the time from home and I was often found by police, but the only times I was returned is when I was missing for large periods of time. In total I was in 3 different foster placements and when my parents thought that they were putting me into care to keep me safe that plan actually backfired and the authorities said that he could have full access to me as long as he picked me up from the top of the street and I was back to the foster placement by 10 o'clock. And they also wanted me to spend some more time in school. So then I started going back to school but it was on a part time table.
Now my whole world started to change and he started to break down all the different relationships in my life, whether that be with parents, with my sisters, with friends. So it just came to the point where I was just arguing and fighting with absolutely everybody. And that was very clever on how we did that because on the times when I needed to reach out to someone it made it very difficult to be able to do that. But there was many occasions when I tried to leave, there was an occasion where he dragged me by my hair into the car, he started speeding to the top of the street, and he was saying that if he couldn't have me no one else could, and he drove through 2 parked cars and into a church wall.
And at that point I was pregnant with my second child. I got rushed into hospital and luckily my son was okay, was safe and well, and I went back to the foster placement. But there was another occasion where again he was saying that he was going to kill me, and we was in the car and he started speeding towards the end of a hilltop that overlooks Rotherham. And he slammed the brakes on right at the edge and he got me out of the car and he hung me over the edge and said that he was gonna chuck me off. And I was that scared, I wet myself. And then he put me into the back of the car and had sex with me so nothing had happened.
And I remember just laying there and I just felt like I was a dead body on a slab, and I had this constant pain there, you know, like in my chest, like all the time, and I knew it was from him. I knew I had to get away from him. I just couldn't I just couldn't picture a way of how to do that because I knew that there was people working for him, you know, such as police and other people. And as silly as this sounds, I knew I think at the time that my mum and dad had helped me, but I didn't want to hear the words of we told you so. And it was just so hard to try and process absolutely everything what was happening.
And I started to really shut down emotionally as well, and What I wanted professionals and other people to see is, you know, when I was this child that was being angry and lashing out and screaming and shouting, there was actually just a little girl underneath all that that was being abused, raped, beaten, and had no one to turn to. And even though I was so young and of course I shouldn't have been having a baby in the first place, I think me getting pregnant again is something that saved me and I always say that my son was sent as an angel because if it wasn't for him I'd probably be dead or in prison.
I was committing crimes that he was getting me to do, and I was also becoming really suicidal. He got locked up when my son was just about to be born, And that was really fortunate for me because it gave me that gap to be able to go home, to build relationships with my family again, and be able to try and break out of the exploitation. And I gave birth to my son just after my 16th birthday whilst he was in prison, and in time I was able to cut off contact. Now when my son was a couple of months old I was in Rotherham Town Centre doing some shopping. He'd just come out of prison and I bumped into him, and he grabbed me by the throat and tried to throw me over the top floor balcony in the shopping center.
2 men that he was with dragged him off but he started screaming and shouting, he was being really racist towards my son. He was saying that he was gonna set us on fire and watch us burn, and he kicked over my son's push chair whilst he was sat inside it. So I grabbed the push chair and I started running, and I pushed my son into a phone box. And I remember phoning my sister and she could hear everything, what was going on, and he chased me as well and he was spitting in my face. And again people dragged him away. And I remember going on record with the police at that time, and I think for my parents that must have been a real moment because for 2 years they've been trying to get me to do official statements.
Now for the first period of time that I knew him I would always deny things and try and defend him, but then once I went into care I was open with professionals because they were allowing it and they said that he wouldn't be prosecuted, so I didn't need to lie and hide things anymore. But I went on record with the police which was a complete waste of time. Even though there was CCTV, there was witnesses, and my statement, and of course DNA from my son, They didn't even go and question him. In fact the police officer turned around and said, well he's got every right to do that because you've stopped him from seeing his son. I then went to court and got a private court order so he couldn't come near me because professionals weren't doing what they should have been doing in helping keeping me safe.
And, he started coming to my flat, he was making a lot of threats and I ended up having to move back home with my family. And I had to cut pretty much everybody off in my life because it was targeting everybody, whether it be my family, my friends. So I pretty much just hid away for a really long time and just tried to get on with life as the best I could. I've never had any therapy, you know, to process things and to be able to deal with my emotions, and I always say that if I would have had therapy at that time, you know, when I was 16 to help me process what had happened. My life could have been very differently, but unfortunately that didn't happen.
So after my exploitation life was at times really difficult for me and as well for me too because I had not been able to process things and as well through other things that had been going on in my life as well. And I became very suicidal at times, there was times when I took tablets, I drank bleach, slit my wrists, tried hanging myself, thankfully none of that worked. But I still went through life, not processing what had happened to me. And I reached out to services for help and they said that I wasn't severe enough, and I was severe enough to be helped because of how suicidal I was. I didn't have, at that point, any support around me because I was no longer in contact with family either.
So I felt like I was really struggling with things and on my own. After my exploitation, I really struggled with a lot of things in life, and I think that was because I'd never come to terms with the fact that I was a victim of exploitation. I always saw this man, for being my boyfriend, and we were just in a violent relationship. It wasn't until I got to about 27 years old where I started to come to terms with the fact that I was a victim in all of this. And I started working with professionals and they started to help me break down, you know, what had actually happened to me in my life. But I was still really struggling with services and getting support for me and my son, and I contacted the police with the help of a professional and the police come out to see me. Now I recognize the police officer straight away from when I was 14 years old, when I was in foster care, but also from other incidents in my life as well.
I started working with professionals and I was really frustrated though with how some people in the services were treating me and my son and I didn't feel supported. But professionals asked me if I would be willing to speak to the police about what had happened to me as a child and I agreed. And the police officer came out and I actually recognized her from when I was a child as well, and I asked her to go away to look what evidence there would be to support me, and she came back with a male officer. Now I decided to record both those police officers on my mobile phone because I didn't trust them, and I was right in doing so. So when I asked them what evidence I had, they said that they could only find one piece of evidence and that was a missing person's report.
I said, well, I have DNA evidence from my son, which of course could prove that he was conceived underage. They said that they didn't want to use his DNA. I asked about my safety. They said they couldn't watch me all the time. So even though they wasn't saying that they didn't want to, deal with it, They just always felt like there was, you know, a barrier to to things that I was asking. I decided because I didn't trust the police not to take it further at that time because I didn't feel supported with the lack of evidence that they said there was.
So I decided to get a solicitor and gather my own evidence. I got police records, social care files, medical records, and I also had the tape recording of the police officers. I then contacted a journalist at The Times newspaper called Andrew Norfolk. I shared my story with him. I gave him all my evidence, and in August 2013, he published my story. Now when I contacted Andrew, I'll be honest, I had no idea really what I was getting myself in for, and I think I contacted him just out of sheer desperation. I just felt like I had nowhere to go, and at that point I was suicidal in my life as well. I tried to kill myself, I was on medication, and I was involved with the Mental Health Act as well.
So what I learned was that other professionals and a survivor had also come forward with their evidence before me, but unfortunately they were ignored. Now when my story went to print, I thought I was gonna get ignored as well. Fortunately, I didn't, but what I was able to do with the amount of evidence that I had, I was able to name people. So I named my rapist, Orsha Rasame, I named the then deputy leader of Rotherham Council and Labour politician, Jahangir Akhtar, and I also named a police officer, PC Ali, for his involvement in a no prosecution deal as well. And that triggered the opening of all the criminal investigations in South Yorkshire, which is currently the biggest criminal investigation in regards to child abuse in our history, but it also commissioned the Alexis Jay report which went on to show 1400 children had been groomed, abused, raped, trafficked, tortured, and some even murdered, and the police turned a blind eye to it.
And the majority of the perpetrators were Pakistani Muslim men, and majority of the victims were white female non religious children. So it was said they was afraid of being called racist or Islamophobic. It's been 11 years now since my story were published and 10 years since the election's jury report were published. And at times I feel we have come such a long way because when we look back to 11 years ago, there wasn't even conversations anywhere within our services or our government about children that were victims of exploitation, but I still feel that we have such a long way to go.
Now in those 11 years, I've worked with media all over the world to raise awareness, to try and educate the public about what's happening. I've also worked with police forces, social care, foster carers, schools to try and educate them and give them a better understanding from a victim's point of view, but I've also worked with government to change policy and law. But I feel that even after all the exposures that not only I've done but other people have done, because exposing this was a collective of lots of different people, I feel that we still aren't doing enough for children.
They are children still being criminalized, still being blamed. As a survivor that has a child through this, I had to fight through the courts in trying to change a law to ensure that rapists can't have access to our children. There are still thousands of survivors left with criminal records because we were criminalized as children, the perpetrators wasn't. There's survivors like myself that had children from our abuse, that have had to fight in courts or against professionals because rapists can apply through our courts and have contact and custody to our children.
So there's work that I'm trying to do around children born from rape, but children born from rape still don't have a voice within law. There's still no government research into the needs of mothers and children born from rape. Professionals still have not been trained. There's no support services that are focusing on this. So there's still so much work to be done, and there's still thousands of children in our country being failed. I decided to write a book about my experiences, and the reason why I wanted to do that is because I wanted, again, to raise awareness but to educate people. So at the end of my book I speak a lot about spotting the signs, if you are a parent, who you can report to or what kind of evidence and information you can gather. And I think it's really important that we educate people, as many people as possible, about what grooming is, you know, how we can spot it, who we can report it to, and how we can support victims of abuse because there's still so many people that aren't being supported improperly.
I'm Sammy Wood Woodhouse and I'm a survivor of criminal and sexual exploitation. To support Irvin Scoop and all the work that we're doing, please head over to airbingscoop.nos and click on the supporters button.
Introduction and Early Life
The Encounter That Changed Everything
Life Under Exploitation
The Mechanics of Grooming
Attempts to Escape
The Turning Point
Struggles After Exploitation
Seeking Justice
Reflections and Advocacy
