Woman blames long-term mental health problems and pressure of trying to get help for son with ADHD for making rape complaint

A woman who called police to accuse her 14-year-old son of raping her in her sleep has told a court she dreamed the attack.

The woman, who cannot be named, blamed long-term mental health problems and the pressure of trying to get help for her son, who has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

She told a jury at Preston crown court on Wednesday, the opening day of her son’s trial on charges of rape, that when she called 999 to report the alleged attack in the early hours of 23 February last year she was “a woman on the edge”.

She said she had no memory of the attack, or the 999 call, or recording the subsequent police video interview played to the jury on Wednesday morning.

In the video interview played to the court, the woman described her horror as she awoke. “I woke up and found my 14-year-old son on top of me, inside me,” she told a detective the day after the alleged incident. “I don’t know how long he had been there.”

She added: “I had so many things going through my head – where am I? Who’s this? What am I doing? And then I have realised the enormity of the situation, that it was my son. And I just screamed.”

She described how the boy “scuttled out of the room without saying anything”, which struck her as unusual. He never did anything quietly, she said, adding: “He’s usually very vocal, very argumentative.”

But, in the witness box, the woman insisted her son had not raped her. “I just think I was having a dream and [the boy] has cuddled into me,” she said.



“I’m 99.9% sure that it was a dream,” she said later, comparing it to another “sexualised dream” she had about a neighbour back in 2005 which was so vivid “I couldn’t look him in the face for weeks”. The neighbour was not in her bed at the time. “Normally I wouldn’t look at him twice,” she told the court.

The court heard she had a history of mental illness and suffered a bout of psychosis aged 16 or 17.



Under questioning on Wednesday she said she now felt she was suffering “some sort of breakdown” at the time of the alleged rape. “I had had a horrible 18 months. I had been trying to access help for my son,” she told the jury.



She said that six to eight weeks after making the rape complaint she tried to withdraw it but no one listened. Of the experience of giving evidence in court she said: “I just feel I’m not being listened to. I feel like I’m being railroaded.”



Francis McEntee, prosecuting, said to her: “You are in a horrendous situation because the truth is you were raped by your son.”



She replied: “I wasn’t raped by my son and nobody has believed me since … My poor son has been through hell and back. He’s not had any education for 14 months.”



McEntee put it to her that she was lying now to protect her son from going to prison. She responded angrily. “I’m telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. This didn’t happen and my son has been failed by this system that’s quite clearly fractured.”



The boy had been taking medication containing amphetamines to control his ADHD since he was seven, the court heard. “He couldn’t even colour in a picture before he started the medication,” his mother said.

She told police he had been monitored by child adolescent mental health services (CAMS) since he was three after being barred from various nurseries.

In her video interview she said her son had his own bedroom but liked sharing her bed until he was 12, when she “booted him out – he was always in my bed, doing my head in”.

She said his medication caused him to sleepwalk and sleepeat, and that she would regularly come into the kitchen in the morning to find he had used every cereal bowl while asleep.

The boy, now 15, who also cannot be named, allegedly assaulted her soon after his 14th birthday.

Sitting in the dock next to a chaperone, the boy fidgeted as the prosecution outlined his mother’s claim that she had woken up in the middle of the night wearing only a thong to find him on top of her, penetrating her. Mother and son had been out drinking separately near their home in Blackpool, the jury was told.

McEntee said that while the boy denied rape, he admitted getting into his mother’s bed and putting his arm around her while she was almost naked. His own bed was uncomfortable and there were crumbs on the sheets, he told police.

Eighteen months before the alleged rape, the mother said her son’s behaviour had been “gradually getting worse and worse”. He was really aggressive to her, she told police, and would throw things at her – slippers and cushions – only to apologise afterwards.



There had been meetings with his school and CAMS but little was done, she said. “I don’t feel like I have had the support I needed. Quite clearly I am feeling angry that we are in this situation now, thinking: ‘If somebody had listened to me 18 months ago, would this have happened today?’”

The boy left the courtroom while the video was played. He is being tried in an adult court, but reporting restrictions prevent his identity being published and the public are not allowed in court.

The case resumes on Thursday.