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The Lost Childhoods: 'I fled gun hell for a new life, instead my mum's boyfriend raped me'

Brave: Tamika was abused between the ages of 14 and 16. Now 18, she recently decided to tell the police: Jeremy Selwyn
Brave: Tamika was abused between the ages of 14 and 16. Now 18, she recently decided to tell the police: Jeremy Selwyn

Tamika was 11 and living with her great aunt in the notorious Tivoli Gardens neighbourhood in Kingston, Jamaica when her parents sent for her and she came to join them in London. Tamika did not know her parents — they had emigrated without her when she was two — but she was looking forward to “a safer life” in England.

“I was brought up by my great aunt in a tenement yard where extreme violence and poverty was part of life,” she said. “I would hear shooting at night and next morning when I went to school there were dead bodies still on the street. Gun battles between the police and local gangs were normal and many people I knew got killed.

“My neighbour had seven sons, some of them not much older than me, and all of them got killed within the space of a few months. Every Sunday we’d go to funerals.”

Tamika arrived in London grateful to leave this carnage behind and to meet her new siblings — a brother aged seven and a sister aged three — for the first time. “It was not easy but I was given my own bedroom and I understood they were all going to help me make a fresh start,” she said. The family lived in east London and Tamika attended school and started to make friends and forge a new life.

But two years later, her parents split up and her life took a dramatic turn. Now 18 and living in a supported housing hostel for homeless young people aged 16 to 25 in Edmonton, Tamika wept as she spoke for the first time about the sexual abuse that destroyed her childhood.

“My mum was about 30 years old and she got this new boyfriend who was in his twenties and he came to live with us. I was 14 and curvaceous and he’d look at me in funny ways. One night I was sleeping and I woke up to find him lying on top of me. I thought, ‘What the hell? What is happening?’ He was raping me.”

There are 200,000 young people in England whose childhoods have been blighted by abuse or trauma, according to a report by the Children’s Commissioner for England, Anne Longfield. The NSPCC has narrowed this down, with 37,778 sexual offences against children under 16 recorded by the police in England in 2015/16, including 11,230 child rapes.

But what about children whose abuse was not officially documented or known about? Those, like Tamika, who slip under the radar and whose rape is neither reported at the time nor picked up by the responsible adults in her life — not by her parents, teachers, key workers or children’s services?

Tamika sobbed. “I wanted to tell somebody, but he warned me, ‘Don’t tell or else!’ He would creep around the house and started to come to my room on a regular basis. He would pick his moments.

“At school I told my teachers, ‘I’m having problems at home,’ but I didn’t say what it was and they didn’t think to probe or to ask. I started thinking maybe this is normal but also I knew it was not right, and there was this fear that if I told friends what was happening, people would look at me differently.”

One night it got too much and Tamika decided to end it all. “I found a bottle of tablets and swallowed all of them hoping to kill myself. Instead I wound up in A&E. When I came round my mother was there. Sickeningly, so was he.”

Did her mother know? “I feel like she did because of how long it went on and certain things that got said, but she preferred to turn a blind eye. I resented her for not protecting me and being so focused on herself. We became estranged.”

The sexual abuse continued until Tamika was 16. “The day after I finished my GCSEs I ran away. I walked out of my mother’s house with nothing except the clothes on my back and I never went back.”

She was homeless for over a year, sleeping on friends’ sofas while she attended college and somehow completed a level 3 course in health and social care. She scoured the internet and found a charity for homeless young people called Alone in London that found her a room in a supported housing hostel where she has lived for the past 18 months.

She currently survives on Jobseeker’s Allowance of £115 a fortnight. She is not in touch with her mother and has never had any professional counselling to help her process what happened.

Recently Tamika decided to go to the police and social services to tell them about her ordeal, and she also drew support from her father, who encouraged her to press charges.

“The police are now investigating,” she said. “I went to the police because I realised he might target my little sister and I want to do everything I can to protect her. If he’s touched her, he’ll be going straight to prison.” Has the abuse affected her ability to form relationships?

“No, but it’s definitely made me more cautious and it takes me a while before I trust guys. I will only go out with somebody my age.

“I do boxing to get my anger out. This is the first time I’ve spoken about it to somebody outside my family or the police. It feels good to talk and get it out.”

For Tamika, speaking out to the readers of the Evening Standard is a huge step. “I am telling my story because I want to help children in similar circumstances to know they are not alone and that they should seek help as soon as possible. And because I want to say I am not ashamed of my past.

“I want to be clear that I was a child, that I was raped, that I was the victim. There has been so much pretence that nothing happened in order to make other people in my family feel comfortable, but internally I have suffered. I have been fighting, fighting, fighting for so long.”

She wiped away her tears and smiled radiantly. “I am looking forward to clearing away the past so I can face the future. It’s got a lot in store for me. I am a talented chef and I am on a programme run by the council to help me start my own company, a cooking business for events. Sometimes I feel destined for greatness. I am trying to restart my life.

“Stories like mine, in life, they can have a great ending.”

Names have been changed.