Sammy Woodhouse said her son asked if he was a ‘rape baby’ (Picture: Rex Shutterstock/ITV)

A woman has bravely spoken about how her son asked if he was a ‘rape baby’ after his mother was targeted by a Rotherham sex gang.

Sammy Woodhouse, who waived her right to anonymity last month, spoke about the abuse she suffered at the hands of ringleader, Arshid Hussain in the 90s from the age of 14.

He ordered her to have an abortion when she first fell pregnant but at the age of 15 she conceived again and this time went on to have the baby.

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She told Loose Women: ‘I remember when it all came out and I had to tell him things. He asked “Mum, am I a rape baby?”. I took his hand and said: “No, you’re not. You’re my baby.”




‘And he is. He’s a bloody pain as he’s a teenager now, but I love him.’

She was repeatedly raped by Hussain, also known as Mad Ash, who was 24 and married at the time. She thought that they were in love with one another and he treated her to meals before eventually turning violent.

Before meeting him she said that she was a normal teenager, close to her sisters and obsessed with dancing.

Sammy with her son (Picture: BBC)

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‘He started hitting me on a daily basis. I knew I needed to get away from him, but he was like a drug and I kept going back,’ she said.

‘He’d hit me and he’d say ‘It’s only because I love you. Would you rather I didn’t love you?”‘

Since speaking out publicly, Sammy has criticised those who failed to protect her and has called for action to be taken against them.

Now 31, she told BBC’s Inside Out: ‘We’ve seen perpetrators held accountable and that’s good for us because we can move forward now; we’re getting that justice.

‘We can’t move forward as a town until those professionals are charged and held accountable.’

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Arshid Hussain, Basharat Hussain and Bannaras Hussain (left to right) (Picture: PA)

Three men and two women were convicted at Sheffield Crown Court of sexually abusing girls.

During the two-month trial, the court heard that teenage girls in the South Yorkshire town were raped and beaten by men who passed them around. Some were also forced to work as prostitutes.

Brothers Arshid, 40, and Basharat Hussain, 39, were found guilty of multiple rapes and indecent assaults of teens. A third brother, 36-year-old Bannaras Hussain, had admitted 10 charges of sexual abuse at the start of the trial, including rape, indecent assault, and assault occasioning actual bodily harm.

Arshid, Basharat and Bannaras formed a violent, drug-dealing, gun-toting family who ‘owned’ Rotherham.

Karen MacGregor, 58, and Shelley Davies, 40, were also found guilty of conspiracy to procure prostitutes and false imprisonment.

As the verdicts were read out, some of the 15 victims who were abused by the gang watched from the public gallery overlooking the packed courtroom. Some of them held hands with each other.

Karen MacGregor (left) and Shelley Davies (Picture: PA)

At the start of the trial, prosecutor Michelle Colborne QC told jury members they weould hear from girls who were ‘targeted, sexualised and in some instances subjected to acts of a degrading and violent nature’.



Throughout the process victims described how they were trafficked, locked up, physically assaulted, and threatened with death.

Arshid Hussain was jailed for 35 years.

His brothers Basharat Hussain, 39, and Bannaras Hussein, 36, got 25 years and 19 years respectively.

Their uncle, Qurban Ali, 53, was jailed for ten years. Female accomplice Karen MacGregor, 58, was jailed for 13 years while Shelley Davis, 40, was given an 18 month suspended sentence.

Sheffield Crown Court (Picture: Alamy)

At the time, Sammy said: ‘It has been 16 years we have waited for this.

‘It has not sunk in yet. This can give me some closure, for me my life starts now. It has been such a mess, I can finally move on.

‘The investigation started two-and-a-half years ago and it has been one of the hardest things I have had to do, but it is so worth it. It’s an emotional rollercoaster.

‘I think a lot of people will come forward now, and think, “if they can get justice after nearly two decades, so can I”.’

How did the abuse in Rotherham come to light?

The convictions of the Hussain brothers and their accomplices is the first successful prosecution of a grooming gang in Rotherham since the scandal first broke 18 months ago.

The publication of the Jay Report in August 2014 established Rotherham as a byword not only for the exploitation of teenage girls, but also for the failure of the police and social workers to stop it happening.

Prof Alexis Jay described the ‘utterly appalling’ examples she had uncovered of ‘children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally-violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone’.

Around 1,400 were said to have been abused (Picture: Getty Images)

She found at least 1,400 children had been raped, trafficked and groomed in the town over a 16-year period.


The report also exposed the extent to which police and council officials failed to act – with Prof Jay explicitly questioning whether this neglect was connected to the perpetrators largely being men of Pakistani heritage.

Although this report brought the sheer scale of the abuse to light, the process was kicked off by a case years earlier.

The scandal engulfed Rotherham (Picture: Getty Images)

In 2010, five men – Umar Razaq, Razwan Razaq, Zafran Ramzan, Adil Hussain, and Mohsin Khan – were convicted of a string of sex offences against girls aged between 12 and 16.

This case was followed by a string of similar prosecutions around the UK, including Rochdale, Oxford and Derby.

An investigation by Times reporter Andrew Norfolk revealed a pattern of teenage girls being groomed by gangs of adult men of Pakistani heritage.

This started a chain of events that led to Rotherham Council asking Prof Jay to look into what was happening.