Trafficked Girl: Abused. Abandoned. Exploited. This Is My Story of Fighting Back.

I don’t think the social worker wanted to have to deal with any of it. To her, it was probably just a case of an attention-seeking teenage girl not wanting to live by the rules imposed by parents who sometimes became so frustrated with their daughter’s difficult behaviour they lashed out at her. Eventually though, she did get the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children involved and I had been put on a waiting list for counselling when she came to the house one day with someone from the charity.

My social worker, the woman from the NSPCC, Dad, Mum and I all sat in the living room, with Dad saying nothing while the two women asked questions, which were answered with half-truths by me and with blatant lies by Mum. Then the two women clicked their Biros, closed their notepads and shuffled their papers into neat piles, and suddenly the only thing that mattered was that they didn’t walk out of the house and leave me there.

‘I’ve got bruises from where Mum beat me,’ I said, rolling up one leg of my trousers quickly when everyone turned to look at me.

‘Is this true, Mrs Patterson?’ The woman from the NSPCC looked shocked when she saw the black, purple and yellow marks that almost completely covered my calf and shin. ‘Did you hit your daughter and cause that bruising?’

I was holding my breath, expecting Mum to explain, in the fake-reasonable voice she’d adopted while answering all their other questions, that I was somehow responsible for my own injuries. But the strain of pretending she was a rational human being had obviously proved too much and she started screaming, ‘Don’t you fucking look at me like that, you stupid bitch. She’s lying. I told you: she’s fucking mental.’ And, finally, they saw her as she really was.

‘I think it would be a good idea for Zoe to live somewhere else for a while,’ the social worker said when Mum eventually calmed down enough to be able to hear her. ‘Just for a few weeks, while we do an assessment. It’ll be on a voluntary basis. So you’ll still have a say in any decisions that need to be made on her behalf.’