Photograph: Fabio de Paola/The Guardian
When Carol Higgins was 15, she walked into Penistone police station in South Yorkshire with her mother to report that her father, Elliott Appleyard, had been raping her several times a week for the previous two years. She might not have used the word “rape”, because she wasn’t sure that was what it was. “I was upset, confused, petrified. I didn’t realise it was criminal because I thought he loved me,” she says. “I felt like I was to blame because I hadn’t kicked and screamed. He’d told me that it was normal. He said he had lots of friends who lived as man and wife with their daughters.”
There was no shortage of corroborative evidence. Her younger brother had seen them “snogging” (his word) and found intimate images of his sister in a tin box by his father’s bed. Higgins had once confided in a schoolfriend and talked to the girl’s parents about it. A neighbour had seen love bites on Higgins’s neck when she was about 13. Higgins’ mother – who didn’t live with the family at that time – had confronted Appleyard about their daughter’s allegations and he had replied: “You fucking prove it.” There was also a large tattoo on Higgins’ back that read, “Caz and Sam” with a rose in between (Sam was Appleyard’s nickname). The tattoo had been his idea and he had taken Higgins to the tattoo parlour, though she had never wanted it. (“I felt cheap,” she says. “He often used to call me a ‘slag’ and I felt like one with that tattoo on my back.”)
