One day, soon after Sammy Woodhouse had turned 14, she and her friends were hanging around outside a shop near their home a couple of miles from Rotherham city centre, when a man pulled up in his car and started talking to them. And so it began. He took her out, bought her presents, paid her compliments and, as an impressionable teenager, she became besotted. “I knew what a paedophile was,” she says. “It was a fat old man, looking out of his window on to a school yard, or it was somebody who pulled up in a van, offered you some sweets, kidnapped you and you never saw your mum and dad again. He wasn’t that description. He was 24, muscley, really well dressed, nice car. He was funny, charming.” She was, she thought, his girlfriend. It took her until relatively recently to see she had been his victim.

Last year, the man, along with his brothers, was convicted of multiple offences, including rape, abduction and indecent assault. He was given a 35-year sentence. Several members of his family were also convicted of conspiracy. Among their victims was a woman who told the court she had been tied up and had petrol poured over her, and another who had been abused since she was 11, passed around men who had sex with her. Their victims were some of the 1,400 children who, according to Alexis Jay’s explosive and damning report, had suffered sexual exploitation in the south Yorkshire town between 1997 and 2013 – routinely ignored by the police, social services and council. “The collective failures of the political and officer leadership,” the report said, “were blatant.”

Last week, Woodhouse, who has previously spoken under the name Jessica, waived her anonymity in an interview with BBC Yorkshire’s Inside Out programme. As Jessica, she still felt cowed and hidden; as Sammy, she is a survivor. The decision to come out, she says, has given her “a sense of freedom”.

We sit in the kitchen of her house on a quiet estate on the outskirts of the town. She has just got home from the school run, and the younger of her two sons is in the next room playing video games. She makes tea, chatting in a strong Rotherham accent, then sits down and fixes me with a strong gaze that she barely breaks over the next hour.

Why does she think she was targeted?” I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He didn’t pick me. It was whoever was there.” She didn’t fit the idea we sometimes have of the children who are vulnerable to abuse – she was confident, doing well at school and had a happy home life with her two older sisters, she says. “I had loads of friends. Birthdays were always special. There was a big field out the back and we would have a bouncy castle. We had a caravan at Cleethorpes and we’d go abroad. I’ve got loads of good memories.” Her parents, who quickly found out about him, were horrified and told the police – who weren’t interested.

Before long, he had started alienating Woodhouse from her family – for example, by saying her father only disapproved because he was racist – and she was skipping school to be with him. A month in, he started having sex with Woodhouse at his family house, in hotels, at friends’ flats. He would even climb in through her bedroom window at home. She says she thought she was consenting at the time, even though a 14-year-old can’t consent, but she adds “there were things that happened and I didn’t like it”. He raped her anally. “I didn’t even know that was physically possible. If he ever did something and I didn’t like it, he would say: ‘Everyone else does it.’ So then I thought: ‘I’m a bad girlfriend, everyone does it.’ I had STIs and didn’t know what they were.”

Around the same time, the violence started. She says she experienced it on an almost daily basis. “I kept going back. Afterwards he would apologise and say: ‘It’s only because I love you, you make me do it.’ He would take me back to earlier memories when everything was really nice. You do think it will stop, it will get better.” Once, during an argument, he drove towards the edge of a ridge that overlooks Rotherham. “He was speeding towards it really fast. How he didn’t go off it, I don’t know. He said he was going to kill us both. He slammed the brakes on, and I was terrified. I got out and was sick, and then he dragged me to the edge and said he was going to throw me off. Then he put me in the back of the car and had sex with me.” She felt, she says, “like a body on a slab”.

Her family, meanwhile, were getting desperate. When she was missing, which was often, her father would go out with her picture, taking it around hotels and B&Bs, trying to find her. At one point, she left home for two months to be with her abuser, moving from place to place. “Because I knew my parents were looking for me, I couldn’t really go outside. A few times I’d have to bob down [in the car] when he took me out for a drive.” It sounds like being a prisoner. “It was,” she says. “I was pretty much locked up for two months. He’d come, bring me food, he’d have sex with me. I was just like a little sex doll.”

She became pregnant when she was still 14, and wanted to keep the baby, but her parents told her they would use a paternity test as evidence to prosecute, so he told her she had to have an abortion. “And I did,” she says, simply. She says she felt detached, as if her body was shutting down. “I was a 14-year-old girl, going through puberty, plus I was pregnant, plus I was being abused.”

Her family applied to social services to have her taken into care, thinking she would be safer if she was looked after by the authorities. They were mistaken. If anything it was easier for him. There were only two conditions, she says. “One, I met him at the top of the street and two, I had to be back by 10pm. And they wanted me to go back to school because I had missed nine months of education.”

She had contact with the police, she says, “on a daily basis. I was always getting pulled up in his car. They’d talk to me: ‘Hiya Sammy, all right? What you been up to?’” The only times they would remove her from him and take her home was if her parents had reported her missing.

“They always saw me as his equal,” she says. “I was never treated as a victim. I was [seen as] part of his gang, his mistress.” A few days after she turned 15, the police raided his house while they were in bed. “He was pulling up his trousers and looked petrified. I think he thought, ‘I’ve had it’,” she says. But it was Woodhouse they arrested – they found a baton-style weapon that he had given her, which she had hidden in her handbag.

‘I think because they were Pakistani Muslims, the police were scared to be called racist’ … Woodhouse’s abuser (seated) during his trial. Photograph: PA

It was as if they couldn’t see what was in front of them – or didn’t see anything wrong with it. It was strange, she says, because the police were always looking for a reason to get this well-known criminal. They would often pull him over and check his car, looking for drugs or weapons, but failed to see the underage girl in the passenger seat.

“People say they didn’t know what grooming was back then. But if a police officer didn’t know it’s wrong for a 14- and a 24-year-old to be involved, then they were in the wrong occupation. I think there were a few different reasons. I think because they were Pakistani Muslims, the police were scared to be called racist.” Could it also be simple misogyny? That Woodhouse, and the other girls like her, were just seen by the police as complicit in their abuse? “Yes,” she says. “We were ‘slags’ and ‘little criminals’. To this day, some people look at us like that.”

Woodhouse finally got away from the man when he was sent to prison in 2001 for a violent offence. She was 15 and pregnant again. She moved back home and started to rebuild her relationship with her parents. Was it hard to go back home? “It was. They had to be very careful in the way they dealt with me. Everyone was constantly walking on eggshells. They weren’t happy when I got pregnant, and I think they thought: ‘We either deal with it and help her, or we disown her.’ And they were really involved in raising my son.”

When her son was a few months old, she cut off contact with the boy’s father. Not that this was the end of it – on his release, he assaulted her while she was out with the baby and told her he would “watch her burn”. She rang the police. “The police officer said: ‘What do you expect? He’s got every right to see his son.’” Someone also set fire to the flat she later lived in, and she says he had people watching her all the time. Her family were terrorised – her parents had to move, and so did her grandmother. The threats continued for years.

It was only in 2012 that she started realising she had been a victim of child sexual exploitation. Her sister persuaded her that she needed to get some help. She suffered from depression, and at one point was suicidal. She developed an eating disorder. “I felt disgusted, dirty. I felt my entire life had been a lie, because it had. I thought: ‘What am I going to tell my son?’ I even thought: ‘I’m not even going to be able to get a boyfriend, I’m damaged goods.’ And I hate that phrase. I remember being in a ball on the floor, just sobbing.”

By now she wanted to come forward. A social worker helped her, and they went to the police. “It was a complete disaster. They had a very lackadaisical attitude. They said there was no evidence to support me.” That’s why she went to the Times journalist Andrew Norfolk, who had been investigating child sex abuse in Rotherham. “I contacted him in desperation,” she says. He did an interview with Woodhouse, under her pseudonym, in 2013. And then, she says, “everything exploded”.

The Jay report was commissioned and published; the Independent Police Complaints Commission launched a large investigation into failures to act and corruption; Woodhouse’s abuser and his associates were put on trial. “Girls speaking out has changed how the country looks at child sexual exploitation,” says Woodhouse. “The whole country would be asleep. Our stories went worldwide and we’ve had people contacting us saying: ‘Because of you I’ve come forward.’”

Campaigning, she says, “has been like therapy for me”. The response she has had “has changed how I view myself.” She now runs a group that campaigns for survivors, raises funds and educates professionals in Rotherham, and gives talks. In September she went to college to study for her GCSEs, but found she was too busy to continue. Her current campaign is for “Sammy’s Law”, which would get the criminal records of children who were under the control of abusers wiped.

How does she feel about the way she was treated by professionals? “You can’t sugarcoat it. It’s bad,” she says. “But I don’t want to constantly live in my past. I’ve come forward, I’ve reported them.” She is suing the council, but she says: “I’m one of the success stories, if you can call it that. There are people [abused by other men] who haven’t got justice yet.” There have been other trials - in November, eight members of a grooming gang were jailed, and another six in February.

How does she feel about the man who did this to her? “I feel different things about him. If I was to hate him, that’s going to do two things – it’s going to damage my son, and also it’s going to damage me, because carrying hate and anger around is not healthy. I can’t go back and change things. I want to move forward. Have I forgiven him? Probably, yes. Not because I think it’s right, what he did, I’ll never think that’s right, but I need to move forward.” She won’t ever have contact with him, though, “and neither will my son. And my son knows that.”



The lasting effects of the abuse, and the way she was treated by the people whose jobs were to protect her, are complicated. “I’ve got detachment issues,” she says. “I can’t form proper friendships.” She says she knows she can appear confident and can hold it together professionally, “and then I will come home, close my door…” She doesn’t finish the sentence. “But this is the strongest I’ve ever been. It will always be with me, what he did. I have been given a life sentence. I’m just determined to try to not let him control my life like he has done – I’m determined to be in control of my own destiny.”