‘I tried to pretend it wasn’t real’: Victim of grooming gang alleges police officer was among abusers
The chief constable of South Yorkshire Police has offered to meet a young woman who was groomed and abused by a gang of paedophiles in Sheffield 10 years ago – after she alleged to Sky News that a police officer was one of her abusers.
Leona Whitworth, 28, has waived her anonymity to tell her story.
It comes in the week a damning report revealed thousands of corrupt officers may be serving in England and Wales.
Leona, whose mother was disabled with mental health problems, was easy prey for a woman called Amanda Spencer, who was convicted eight years ago of grooming young girls in Sheffield and selling them for sex.
“I genuinely thought I loved her,” said Leona. “She understood everything I said, and she listened, and she said she loved and cared about me. I thought she cared about me.”
Spencer would take young girls to parties, where she introduced them to the men. Aged 13, Leona says she was drugged and woke up to find a man raping her. She says she was beaten by Spencer and a number of men until she became compliant.
She told Sky News: “I spent weeks with them getting beaten and raped and drugged. And then I was allowed to go home, I was allowed to go to school, I was allowed to see my friends, because they knew they could come and get me whenever they wanted.”
To begin with, she thought she was being punished for doing something wrong.
She said: “I suppose that’s how kids think, don’t they? If they grow up always being in the wrong, always being the bad child, then if something bad happens, that’s always going to be your fault. You’ve obviously done something to start that happening.”
For months, she was convinced by her abusers that she had to keep the whole thing a secret, and she says authorities including police, social workers and teachers showed a lack of curiosity whenever she disappeared.
She said: “The thing was not ‘what have you been doing?’ It was, ‘what do you think you’re doing?’ My answer was always, ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry.’
“Nobody would have believed me. They convinced me of that. Nobody’s going to believe me and if I do say something, what’s going to happen to my family. They knew where I lived. My mum was a disabled woman. What’s she going to do? She’s going to ring the police?”
Leona Whitworth spoke to Sky News about her experiences
Leona’s faith in the police was shattered further, she alleges, when she discovered one of her abusers was a police officer. She claims she realised this when he picked her up once after she went missing.
She says he pretended not to know her.
“He just spoke to me like the police officers do,” she recalls. ‘You know everybody’s been worried about you, don’t you? You can’t keep putting your family through this. You’ve got a lot of people out there looking for you, and you’re wasting our resources by doing this.'”
This allegation comes after the police inspectorate warned earlier this week that poor vetting was allowing sexual predators to join police forces.
The review, commissioned following the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Met Police officer, found it was currently “too easy for the wrong people” to join and to stay in the police.
Responding to Leona’s claims, South Yorkshire Police Chief Constable Lauren Poultney said: “What happened to Leona at the hands of her abusers is simply unforgivable, and I am extremely concerned to hear today that the trauma she faced may have involved an officer who was serving with the force.
“There is no place in policing for individuals who abuse their position for criminal behaviour, and we proactively root out those who do so.
“I want to say to Leona directly that I would welcome the opportunity to meet with you to obtain as much detail as you can provide in relation to this officer.
“We are here to listen and, if you feel ready to make a report, I will personally ensure this matter is thoroughly investigated by the specially trained officers in my counter corruption unit.
“If you feel more comfortable speaking to a third party, you can go to Crimestoppers or even the National Crime Agency’s Operation Stovewood, which is dedicated to the investigation of child sexual exploitation offences in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013.
“To Leona, and to any other victims or survivors who haven’t yet felt ready to tell someone what happened to them – please be assured it is never too late to make that report.”
Leona didn’t report the incident with the police officer at the time. Eventually she escaped to Norfolk – and one day the police came knocking after she’d been identified by others as a child victim.
She had been trying to forget and told Sky News that when the police arrived it “felt like the earth ate me.”
She says: “I had tried to pretend it weren’t real. If it’s a bad dream, it doesn’t hurt, does it? If it’s a bad dream, it never happened. It’s not real.”
In May 2014, after a trial at Sheffield Crown Court, Spencer was sentenced to 12 years in jail along with one of the abusers.
Detective Chief Inspector Bob Chapman, who led the investigation, said Spencer had carried out “sustained and calculated abuse” and that she had “preyed on some of the most vulnerable people in our community, grooming them under the pretence of friendship, using the lure of drink and drugs in order to coerce them into doing what she wanted and when her demands weren’t met she would threaten violence, intimidating them into submission”.
But years later, for Leona, the demons don’t go away.
She can’t remember how many men abused her during the period she was under Spencer’s control.
She said: “I don’t know. And as weird as it might sound, I don’t want to know.
“I don’t want to know because the amount that I do know, whether it was my fault or not, I still feel dirty.”
Leona has shown incredible courage to speak out, but it is a mark of the damage she still carries that she ended the interview asking herself whether she was somehow to blame.
There is, of course, no blame on any 13-year-old-girl in that situation, but sometimes it takes years to come to terms with it, and the memories can never be erased.
A woman who is under police investigation after assisting the suicide of her husband at Dignitas in Switzerland has told Sky News she has no regrets.
Louise Shackleton has spoken publicly for the first time since her husband’s death in December, as parliament prepares to vote again on legislation to introduce assisted dying in England and Wales.
Mrs Shackleton surrendered herself to police after returning from Switzerland having seen her husband Anthony die. He had been suffering with motor neurone disease for six years.
“I have committed a crime, which I have admitted to, of assisting him by simply pushing him on to a plane and being with him, which I don’t regret for one moment. He was my husband and I loved him,” she said.
“We talked at length over two years about this. What he said to me on many occasions is ‘look at my options, look at what my options are. I can either go there and I can die peacefully, with grace, without pain, without suffering or I could be laid in a bed not being able to move, not even being able to look at anything unless you move my head’.
“He didn’t have options. What he wanted was nothing more than a good death.”
The law in the UK prohibits people from assisting in the suicide of others, but prosecutions have been rare.
Louise Shackleton has spoken publicly for the first time since her husband Anthony’s death
In a statement, a North Yorkshire Police spokesman told Sky News: “The investigation is ongoing. There is nothing further to add at this stage.”
The next vote on the assisted dying bill for England and Wales has been delayed by three weeks to give MPs time to consider amendments.
The legislation would permit a person who is terminally ill with less than six months to live to legally end their life after approval by two doctors and an expert panel.
‘He was at total peace with his decision’
Mrs Shackleton says she saw her husband “physically and mentally” relax once on the flight to Switzerland.
She said: “We had the most wonderful four days.
“He was laughing. He was at total peace with his decision.
“It was in those four days that I realised that he wanted the peaceful death more than he wanted to suffer and stay with me, which was hard, but that’s how resolute he was in having this peace.
“I was his wife, we’d been together 25 years, we’d known each other since we were 18. I couldn’t do anything else but help him.”
‘We need to safeguard people’
She said the hardest part of the journey came after her husband’s death.
“There was this panic and this fear that I was leaving him,” she said. “That was a horrific experience.
“If the law had changed in this country, I would have been with family, family would have been with us, family would’ve been with him. But as it was, that couldn’t happen.”
Opponents to the assisted dying bill have raised concerns about the safety of vulnerable people and the risk of coercion and a change in attitudes toward the elderly, seriously ill and disabled.
They say improvements to palliative care should be a priority.
“I think that we need to safeguard people,” said Mrs Shackleton. “I think that sometimes we need to suffer other people’s choices, and when I mean suffer I mean we have to acknowledge that whilst we’re not comfortable with those, that we need to respect other people, other people wishes.”
Read more:
Assisted dying: What is in the legislation?
Debate over assisted dying delayed
Anthony, who died aged 59, was a furniture restorer who had earned worldwide recognition for making rocking horses.
“I think the measure of the man is that nobody has ever said a bad word about him in the whole of his life because he was just so caring and giving,” his widow said.
‘This is about a dying person’s choice’
She said she had chosen to speak publicly because of a promise she had made him.
“I felt that my husband’s journey shouldn’t be in vain. We discussed this on our last day and my husband made me promise to tell his story.
“He told me to fight and the simple thing that I’m fighting for is people to have the choice.
“This is about a dying person’s choice to either follow their journey through with disease or to die peacefully when they want to, on their terms, and have a good death. It’s that simple.”
UK
Feminists ‘feel braver about speaking out’ after gender ruling – but critics say it ‘stokes culture war’
A former Labour MP who quit the party over Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership has welcomed the landmark Supreme Court ruling on the definition of a woman as a “victory for feminists”.
Rosie Duffield, now the independent MP for Canterbury, said the judgment helped resolve the “lack of clarity” that has existed in the politics around the issue “for years”.
She was speaking to Ali Fortescue on the Politics Hub on the same day the UK’s highest court delivered its verdict on one of the most contentious debates in politics.
Politics latest: MPs respond to Supreme Court ruling on gender
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How do you define a woman in law?
The judges were asked to rule on how “sex” is defined in the 2010 Equality Act – whether that means biological sex or “certificated” sex, as legally defined by the 2004 Gender Recognition Act.
Their unanimous decision was that the definition of a “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 refers to “a biological woman and biological sex”.
Asked what she made about comments by fellow independent MP John McDonnell – who said the court “failed to hear the voice of a single trans person” and that the decision “lacked humanity and fairness” as a result, she said: “This ruling doesn’t affect trans people in the slightest.
“It’s about women’s rights – women’s rights to single sex spaces, women’s rights, not to be discriminated against.
“It literally doesn’t change a single thing for trans rights and that lack of understanding from a senior politician about the law is a bit worrying, actually.”
However, Maggie Chapman, a Scottish Green MSP, disagreed with Ms Duffield and said she was “concerned” about the impact the ruling would have on trans people “and for the services and facilities they have been using and have had access to for decades now”.
Susan Smith and Marion Calder, directors of For Women Scotland celebrate after the ruling. Pic: Reuters
“One of the grave concerns that we have with this ruling is that it will embolden people to challenge trans people who have every right to access services,” she said.
“We know that over the last few years… their [trans people’s] lives have become increasingly difficult, they have been blocked from accessing services they need.”
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‘Today’s ruling only stokes the culture war further’
Delivering the ruling at the London court on Wednesday, Lord Hodge said: “But we counsel against reading this judgment as a triumph of one or more groups in our society at the expense of another. It is not.
Campaigners celebrate outside the Supreme Court. Pic: PA
“The Equality Act 2010 gives transgender people protection, not only against discrimination through the protected characteristic of gender reassignment, but also against direct discrimination, indirect discrimination and harassment in substance in their acquired gender.
“This is the application of the principle of discrimination by association. Those statutory protections are available to transgender people, whether or not they possess a gender recognition certificate.”
Read more:
Supreme Court decision has immediate real-world consequences
Prisons across England and Wales now 98.9% full
Asked whether she believed the judgment could “draw a line” under the culture war, Ms Chapman told Fortescue: “Today’s judgment only stokes that culture war further.”
And she said that while Lord Hodge was correct to say there were protections in law for trans people in the 2020 Equality Act, the judgment “doesn’t prevent things happening”.
“It may offer protections once bad things have happened, once harassment, once discrimination, once bigotry, once assaults have happened,” she said.
She also warned some groups “aren’t going to be satisfied with today’s ruling”.
“We know that there are individuals and there are groups who actually want to roll back even further – they want to get rid of the Gender Recognition Act from 2004,” she said.
“I think today’s ruling just emboldens those views.”
Arsenal have reached the semi-finals of the Champions League after a dramatic victory over holders Real Madrid in Spain.
The north London side, who became the first English team to win twice at the Bernabeu following their triumph there 19 years ago, will face Paris Saint-Germain in the last four after the French side beat Aston Villa on Tuesday.
It is the third time the Gunners have made it through to the semis of the top club football tournament in Europe, and the first since 2009.
Arsenal went into the second leg of their quarter-final clash on Wednesday with a 3-0 lead.
Backed by a raucous home crowd, Madrid tried to get off to a strong start and Kylian Mbappe scored after two minutes. However, the goal was disallowed for a clear offside.
Arsenal had the chance to go ahead in the 13th minute but winger Bukayo Saka missed a penalty.
The Spanish hosts were awarded a penalty of their own about 10 minutes later when Mbappe stumbled under pressure from Declan Rice in the box – but the decision was overturned by VAR.
Saka atoned for his tepid penalty as he chipped the ball past Madrid’s keeper Thibaut Courtois when put through on goal by auxiliary striker Mikel Merino in the 65th minute.
But Arsenal were pegged back just two minutes later as Vinicius Junior caught William Saliba dawdling on the ball and fired Real Madrid level.
Arsenal’s resolute defending kept the home side at bay until Gabriel Martinelli made a late break through the home side’s defence to put his side 2-1 ahead three minutes into injury time, as the Gunners made it 5-1 on aggregate.
(L-R) Arsenal’s Declan Rice and Mikel Merino celebrate after the defeat against Real Madrid. Pic: AP
‘We knew we were going to win’, says Rice
Arsenal midfielder Declan Rice has insisted his team are intent on winning the Champions League after their victory in Madrid.
Speaking to TNT Sport, Rice, who was named player of the match, said: “It’s such a special night, a historic one for the club. We have the objective of playing the best and winning the competition.
“We had so much belief and confidence from that first leg and came here to win the game. We knew we were going to suffer but we knew we were going to win. We had it in our minds, then we did it [in] real life. What a night.
“I knew when I signed, this club was on an upward trajectory. It’s been tough in the Premier League but in this competition we’ve done amazingly well.
“It’s PSG next, who are an amazing team.”
‘We have to be very proud of ourselves’, says Arteta
Arsenal boss Mikel Arteta told TNT Sport: “One of the best nights in my football career.
“We played against a team with the biggest history.
“To be able to win the tie in the manner we have done, I think we have to be very proud of ourselves.”
He added: “The history we have in this competition is so short. The third time in our history of what we have just done and we have to build on that. All this experience is going to help us, for sure.”
Real Madrid were seeking their third Champions League title in four seasons.
Mbappe twisted ankle
Their forward Mbappe twisted his right ankle during the game and was jeered by part of the crowd when his substitution was announced after a lacklustre performance.
The French star, who is still looking for his first Champions League title, was replaced by Brahim Diaz in the 75th minute following his injury. He was able to walk off the pitch by himself, but was limping slightly.
The other semi-final will be between Barcelona and Inter Milan.
The first legs are set to be played on 29 and 30 April, with the second legs on 6 and 7 May.
The final will be on 31 May.
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