- Thursday, May 02, 2024
Sammy Woodhouse was instrumental in exposing the gang after she approached the media anonymously with her claims
By: Pramod Thomas
One of the victims of Rotherham child sex abuse said that she had no idea about how to describe her story to her son.
Sammy Woodhouse, 37, became pregnant at the age of 15 after being raped by abuser Arshid Hussain, who was 25 at the time.
“I didn’t know what to tell him. How do I tell him? He had no-one to talk to. We weren’t in contact with anyone that has been through this,” the victim Sammy Woodhouse told The Sun.
“He and I just felt very alone in things. And I remember him saying to me, “We’re the only family going through this”. I said, ‘Well, actually, we’re not but we’re the ones that are public, you’ve got no idea how many people will have a similar story to us’.”
She now has a new BBC documentary called Out of the Shadows: Born from Rape, in which she speaks to other mothers in her position as well as children who were born from rape.
She was one of 18 girls who called Hussain her boyfriend. In 2016, he was jailed for 35 years for 23 offences against nine girls after Woodhouse took her story to the papers.
Later, 18 other members of the gang, including two of his brothers, were also jailed.
According to Woodhouse, when her son was around 12 years old she began to come to terms with the fact she was abused.
She had previously spoken about how her abuser treated her like a ‘dead body on a slab in a morgue’ and isolated her from her family when she was just 14.
The victim revealed that she was subjected to horrendous abuse, including rape and assaults, and even coerced with threats to kill her family at the hands of Hussain.
“I was pretty much his sex doll; he was an absolute monster. I just felt like a dead body on a slab in a morgue. I grew up in Rotherham, about two and a half miles from the town centre. I was your average, everyday little girl I suppose,” she is reported to have said.
Woodhouse added: “What he did was actual very clever. He worked out the dynamics in my family, he knew my dad was more strict and my mum was more of a best friend. So what he did was started to turn me more against my dad rather than my mum.
“I was completely out of my depth. I didn’t recognise it was dangerous and wrong I thought I’m a teenager having a bit of fun, how bad can things get.”
She escaped her abuser when he was sent to prison in 2001 for a violent offence.
