Breaking Out

by Janice Nix

  It was clear that Nina’s hostel placement wasn’t working. I asked her if she’d been to see the council about somewhere more permanent to live. No, she said, she hadn’t. What was the point? She spoke so softly it was difficult to hear her. She was scared that the council would send her away, and tell her that she’d made herself homeless when she was sent to prison. (She was probably right about that.) But the thought of rejection was terrible for her. She’d feel even more worthless than she did to begin with.

  As she started to talk, I grew more and more alarmed. Her difficulties in the hostel were worse than I had thought. Her hostel was mixed-gender. Nina behaved like an obedient little girl, not like an adult, following any direction she was given as though it was an order. The result was that male residents were openly sexually abusing her with no one to stop them.

  She had no sense of herself. She would do anything that anybody told her to do – including blowjobs and full sex. If she was with a man and another came knocking on her door, she’d invite him in as well. Arguments broke out in her room about whose turn it was next to have sex with her. I saw tears in the other women’s eyes as they tried to explain that men like that were only using her. But Nina didn’t seem to understand.

  A few weeks later, when I was introduced to her mother, Sarah, at a meeting, I began to understand Nina’s struggles a little bit better. Sarah was friendly but completely remote. The two of them acted like acquaintances, not mother and daughter. I winced as I watched Nina turn towards her mother for a look or a word of approval, but receive just a strange, empty smile in return. I wondered sadly how they’d drifted so far from each other. But I couldn’t put it right. All I could do was try to safeguard Nina.

  If she couldn’t leave the hostel, was there any way to make her safer? I’d heard about issues in the building before. But the situation was clearly far worse than I had thought. What on earth was going on? Should someone not have noticed what was happening to Nina? Where was the communication between the professionals in charge? How could such a vulnerable woman be put there in the first place?

  I approached a senior colleague. Shaking her head, she explained how overloaded the accommodation was. There was far more provision for men than for women, who were fitted in wherever there was space just to get them off the street. There were staff on site in the hostel twenty-four hours a day, but they weren’t offering individual support. Their role was to make sure the lifts were working, that the toilets weren’t blocked up, that the hostel was secure. Beyond those basics, the residents had no supervision. The kitchens were squalid. Pimps worked in the building. Sex workers were brought in and sent around from room to room. Staff patrolled in twos for their own protection.

  And all of this was known. There was simply no money to improve things. A hostel place was better than sleeping on the street – but not by much. While she was living in these terrible conditions, it was very hard to see how Nina’s life was ever going to get any better. But where else could she go?

  With Soraya, nothing seemed to help. From our very first meeting, she always reeked of drink. The smell rolled in like a wave when she entered the room, a foot or two in front of her, even at ten in the morning. It was coming from the pores of her skin. Her whole body was toxified with booze. In this state, it took just a tiny amount – no more than a few sips – to put her back into the slurred-voice, stumbling, inebriated state where she already spent most of her time.

  Soraya couldn’t listen at all. She was frequently aggressive, and no one else could have any space while she was there. When I asked her to wait and take her turn, she abused me. When other people asked her the same, she insulted them too. Arguments broke out. With Soraya present, the group was close to chaos and nothing could possibly get done.

  I could see just how serious her problems really were. But that wasn’t the time or the place for her to find the help she needed. She was making the others feel unsafe. I was going to have to ask her to leave.

  I followed our procedures, hoping against hope that she might understand how important it was to keep the rules we set and comply with her order. First I gave a verbal warning. She responded by shouting and swearing. Her second warning had to be in writing, by email to her offender manager. It had just as little impact as the first. If there was any more disruption, I must tell her to leave.

  I didn’t want to throw Soraya out to face the trouble I knew would await her. Her probation officer would breach her for failing to comply with the terms of probation. Then she would be sent back to court. She might end up in prison. I hated pushing such a deeply damaged person away. I always remember the people in my past who didn’t give up on me. They believed that no matter what had happened, I still had the potential to do better.

  But I had no other option. Until Soraya could manage her drinking, she would never engage. The interests of the group had to come before one lost and struggling woman who was just too disturbed to be a part of it.

  Lorraine was also extremely disruptive. She constantly talked over others in the group, interrupting the meeting and annoying other women who were waiting their turn to speak. She was breaking the rules of behaviour to which every member had signed up. Her interruptions had already caused two arguments. Again, the group’s protocol required me to ask her to leave. And my life would certainly be easier. Trying to make sure that everyone was heard was taking far too much of my time and attention.

  I noticed how desperate she was. Her words came bursting out, but they were always prompted by something that another woman said. That showed me she was listening and wanted to join in with the others. It was waiting her turn that seemed too hard. Sending her away wasn’t going to solve her problems. I decided I was going to be flexible, and try to understand.

  ‘Lorraine,’ I said, ‘can you do something for me? Next time, before you start talking, can you try to count to ten?’

  She looked completely panicked.

  ‘Only up to ten,’ I reassured her.

  But half a minute later, she burst in again.

  ‘Can you please try to count to ten before you speak?’ I repeated. But even that short pause was too much.

  I gave her a final warning. If she couldn’t manage to do this, she was going to be excluded from the group.

  ‘You can’t!’ she said frantically, terribly upset by this idea.

  ‘Lorraine, I’ve tried to explain. It’s unfair when someone else is –’

  But she couldn’t wait to speak. She interrupted me again.

  ‘Lorraine! You must learn to respect other people.’

  ‘But – but – what if I forget?’

  ‘Forget what?’

  ‘What I was going to say!’

  ‘Is that what you’re afraid of?’

  She looked terribly worried.

  ‘Yeah,’ she muttered.

  She was definitely the worst, but she wasn’t the only interrupter in the group. There were many different reasons. Short-term memory problems make people scared of forgetting what they’re saying. They get more and more desperate to speak before it happens. Stress can cause this memory loss, and so can abusing alcohol and drugs. What the sufferer really needs is understanding and help, so that they can start to feel calmer, and therefore less likely to forget what they wanted to say.

  And Lorraine did start to improve. Sometimes it was very hard indeed for her to wait her turn. But the effort she was making was obvious. I had to give her credit and allow her to stay. She also made an effort to cut down on her drinking. That helped too. When she told the group that she hadn’t had a drink for ten days, we had a little celebration.

  ‘Janice, are we going to have vodka?’ she asked me.

  ‘No, darling. Just tea and coffee.’

  I smiled at her, and she smiled back at me. It was nice just to have a conversation. A few weeks before, she could never have managed it. Among so many unsolved and unsolvable problems, it felt like a victory.

  Miaow!

  I looked ar
ound the circle. Several of the other women did the same.

  Miaow!

  ‘Whoever’s left their phone on,’ I said, ‘please turn it off. You know we have a rule about phones.’

  I gave it a moment. No one fumbled in a bag or a pocket. The miaowing had stopped. I decided I would carry on speaking.

  Then a moment later: Miaow!

  Now we all heard it quite distinctly.

  I looked around the circle. ‘So – who’s brought a cat to the meeting?’ I asked. Members of the group began to giggle.

  A carrier bag by Nina’s feet lurched to one side. I realised that the bag had an occupant. I peeped inside and saw a thin little tabby curled up on a folded pillow case.

  Nina looked at me nervously.

  ‘Where did she come from?’ I asked.

  ‘Dunno. I found her.’

  ‘Have you been feeding her?’

  ‘Yes. She’s lovely.’

  ‘But Nina,’ I said, ‘you can’t bring a cat to the meeting.’

  ‘I can’t leave her on her own, Janice! She’s only a baby.’

  It was the very first time she had ever spoken up for herself. Her care for the little cat was clear. I hadn’t seen her caring for anything or anyone up until then – most of all herself. I could only hope that at some point in the future, she might get the help she needed. Time and time again, I reached the limits of the support I could give. There were so many shortcomings in the system – and so many issues still unaddressed. But as I watched her lift the skinny little cat out of the bag and gently cradle it, it seemed to be a sign, however small, that something better might be possible for Nina.

  Sheba was a slow starter in the women’s group. She was softly spoken and gentle. She sat silently listening to the others for a very long time before she could tell her story.

  Months later, she explained why she had been so cautious. She assumed, she said, that someone who was offering to help her was going to want something for themselves. That had always been her experience.

  ‘I was wondering,’ she told me in her quiet, steady voice, ‘what you were wanting to gain from doing this.’

  Sheba had been trafficked from Nigeria for sex. She thought that she was coming to England to study. She was young and naive, believing when a friend explained that she could take a course in London and pay for it by working. She saw it as a great opportunity – at first. There were only two things that she didn’t understand about her English education: why she had to give all her personal documents to the course organiser, and why she must keep her travel plans secret from everyone she knew.

  Slowly she was drawn into the traffickers’ net. With a group of seven other girls, she was flown from Lagos to Italy. There the group divided; half flew on to Paris, and half to London. In London, she was taken to a large private home. It was the first clue she had that there was something wrong – she’d been expecting official student accommodation. A woman in charge of the house took the girls to different places to do cleaning, and told them that their proper jobs weren’t ready for them to begin.

  One day, at one of her cleaning sessions, she was introduced to a man and told that she must sit on his knee. Sheba said she wouldn’t. The man and woman exchanged glances and the woman remarked that, ‘This one is going to be a problem.’ Sheba said indignantly that she had come to London to work and to study, not to sit on men’s knees – and the woman laughed and laughed.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re into at all here, do you?’ she said.

  That was how the nightmare began. Men were invited to the house to have sex with Sheba and the others. When she said no and tried to fight back, she was chained to a bed. She bit one of the men, and the woman gave her a vicious beating. She was told that she could only leave her room if she was nice to the men and let them do whatever they wanted. She had no other choice.

  Once she was co-operating, she would sometimes be taken out shopping. In the street, she would stare hard at passers-by, hoping she could raise the alarm. But everyone looked through her. One day she saw a policeman and wondered what would happen if she made a dash towards him and tried to explain her situation. But she was too scared to do it. By now she understood that the people who had brought her to London were unlikely to have filled out the proper documentation. She was probably in the country illegally – so if she drew attention to herself, she would end up in even more trouble. The more she thought about this, the more desperate she felt. There seemed to be no way out.

  ‘So then – what happened?’ Izzie asked. Sheba had told her story to the group at last, and everybody listened in horror. ‘How did you get away?’

  ‘I was lucky,’ Sheba said. ‘I was taken to a house to do some cleaning – it really was cleaning that time. There were other people working there, and somebody slipped me an envelope. It had some cash – I’d never even seen British money before – and an address in Manchester. And there was a note saying if I could get there, somebody would help me.’

  ‘Manchester?’ Izzie asked. ‘How did you get all the way up there?’

  ‘I kept the money on me all the time, and kept looking for a moment when nobody was paying attention. And when I saw a chance – I slipped outside and ran.’

  Sheba had no idea at all where she was, how far Manchester was, or who might come after her. A man in the local newsagent helped her – he told her how to get a ticket on the train in London, and then how to travel to Manchester. As she described her escape, the only sign she was upset was a shudder that would pass through her body every few minutes. I wondered how far down inside her she’d pushed her awful trauma. I was deeply worried about her.

  She found the house in Manchester. For a little while, she was looked after there. She was provided with meals and could relax, instead of being confined to one room. She saw the news and tried to get a sense of what was happening in England. She was given a Nokia phone and a number to call if she needed any help. But she was still completely trapped, illegal, with almost no money and no way to get home. She was warned to stay close to the place where she was living, and not to trust anybody else who might approach her. The traffickers would certainly be trying to find her. She was absolutely terrified, every single day.

  ‘My God – so what happened?’

  ‘They did find me,’ Sheba explained. ‘By now I’d had a baby. He was just a few weeks old. They threatened me with everything – they’d call the police, they’d take away my son … I was out of my mind with worry all the time. I said I’d work for them, do anything but not sex work, and pay back the money it had cost them to bring me to England. I was desperate to be free of them. I thought that if I gave them all the money I could, they might let me go.’

  ‘Did it work?’

  ‘I never found out. One day I was arrested. I got a suspended sentence. That’s why I’m here.’

  The group sat there in silence.

  ‘But,’ said Izzie, frowning, ‘you’re not a criminal. You didn’t even mean to be illegally in England. The traffickers – they broke the law. It wasn’t you.’

  Sheba looked at her sadly.

  ‘They told me in court that I could have tried to contact the police much sooner than I did. They thought I didn’t because I wanted to stay in England illegally. But all along, I wanted to go home.’

  ‘They blamed you?’ Izzie said angrily, ‘because you were too scared to run away?’

  Sheba sighed.

  ‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘Yes, they did. They said I should have done more to get away. But I couldn’t. I just don’t think they knew what it was like.’

  And sometimes, when I’d tried to teach everyone to set their own boundaries, I found that I was struggling with my own. I’d leave the work phone on after hours so that my service users could ring me, and answer when they did. I knew that I should switch off from work. If I was exhausted, I couldn’t do my job properly anyway. But to be there for my clients was my passion.

  Sometimes the phone would ring after
hours and I wouldn’t be able to answer. I left a voice message, telling the callers I would get back to them tomorrow. Then when I checked, I’d find long rambling messages. Sometimes the messages were from people who’d been drinking, or taking drugs, their thoughts so scrambled that the messages made very little sense. I found one left at 1 a.m. by a girl who was just about to take heroin. It was harrowing to listen. But I tried to play the messages back so that I could respond. For some service users, even to say how they were feeling was a breakthrough.

  One morning, when I turned on my phone, I found a message from Carla, an Italian woman on probation for drink driving.

  ‘I know you’re not going to answer,’ said Carla’s voice, ‘but it really helps just talking. Is there any way that you can change the phone? Could there be longer for me to leave a message, before I get the beep?’

  For Carla, an automated message was the only comfort that she had.

  16

  Clearing up a hurricane with a dustpan and brush

  AS I SETTLED IN to my new job with London Probation, my skills for engaging with service users, and especially with women, were spotted by senior management. They felt that I could represent exactly what the service was trying to achieve. I became one of eleven engagement workers within the organisation, part of a ‘lived experience’ project. I also became a member of the Pan-London Strategy Group. The goals of the group were to develop services for female offenders and ex-offenders across the city.

  The constant talk of funding streams confused me initially. This political language was difficult to understand at times. I don’t have that managerial background, but the knowledge I have gained on my journey has provided me with insight.

  As the years have gone by, based on everything I have seen, I have developed a vision for change in the way that the criminal justice system deals with offenders – in particular, the way it deals with women. I understand the struggle of change – I’ve been there. I believe that a great deal can be done to reduce offending and support those who have offended in the past.