It was in 2016, that Mr B, a survivor of sexual abuse, heard that a female victim had reported his attacker for attempted rape. “I went mad when I heard that,” he says. “I could just about cope with knowing what he had done to me, but when I heard that I just thought: ‘You dirty bastard, you are not getting away with this any longer.’”
The attacker was Nazir Ahmed, or Lord Ahmed of Rotherham as he prefers to be known, and last Friday he was sentenced to five and a half years in prison for child sex offences, namely the attempted rape of a young girl and sexual assault of a boy, during the 1970s.
Ahmed was a businessman who owned a string of fish and chip shops before becoming a property developer and then entered politics as a Labour councillor in Rotherham in 1990. He served as a magistrate, and in 1998, became a life peer on the recommendation of Tony Blair.
He has has been described to me as “the most powerful Pakistani in the UK” and I was told by one of his victims that within the Pakistani community he was held in the highest esteem and given “the royal treatment, wherever he went.”
Not any longer. In handing down the sentence last week, the judge told Ahmed that his crimes had “had a profound and lifelong effect on his victims”. This weekend Mr B, one of the two survivors who brought the case against Ahmed, told me his story. It is the first time he has spoken at length about what he suffered. “I felt relief when I heard the sentence,” he says, having just left the courtroom. “In court my whole body was shaking.”
The abuse began when Mr B was five and continued for five years, ending when the family moved out of the area, in 1972. But reporting Ahmed to the police was a difficult decision for Mr B. Both victims live in the same neighbourhood as their abuser, and attend the same mosque. As a result, Mr B worried not only for himself, but for his children if he should go to the police.
“There might be weeks when I would not think about it and then it would all come flooding back,” he told me. “The Jimmy Savile case was really difficult for me because it was on the news all the time and I would relate it to myself.” Seeing Ahmed in the community was also difficult for Mr B, he says, leaving him feeling like he “couldn’t cope”.
The abuse affected Mr B’s relationship with his father, who he blamed for “letting him [Ahmed] into the house”. As an adult, he accepts that his father knew nothing about the abuse, but he still regrets the years of mistrust between them which it caused.
The trial was terrifying, he says. The defence cross-examined him as to the exact nature of the abuse, which he found highly distressing. The prosecution asked him to describe details of the sexual acts, and asked him how come his mother didn’t see that his underwear was full of semen. He broke down in the witness box, and the judge halted proceedings. But, he told me: “I came back and forced myself to carry on telling the jury the truth. I thought: ‘Fifty years you’ve had of this and one more day won’t kill you.’” Nonetheless, he told me that giving evidence in court was one of the worst days of his life. It left him scarred.
Mr B admits that he has contemplated taking his own life, such was the trauma and deep shame he suffered as a victim of sexual abuse. “That’s how profound the damage has been,” he says. “And this is what that man has done. It’s time for him to feel the shame, not his victims.”
I asked Mr B about how he coped with the trauma in the aftermath of his courageous decision to face this shame head on, and report Ahmed to the police.
“My immediate family have been brilliant. To this day not one of them have questioned me – they believed me. Same with my close friends. They let me know through a third person that they were with me, but they would not probe unless I wanted to speak out.”
Mr B still has one battle to fight before he can try to rebuild his life. “There is no real justice while he is still carrying his peerage around,” he says. “His political career should be in tatters but while he can call himself Lord he still has status. And he will believe he still is part of the establishment.” Only an act of parliament can remove his title, but none exists. Mr B is determined to help change this.
It is hard to know the mood music in Rotherham following this latest scandal, involving one of its most high-profile citizens, but the messages of support are finding their way to the survivors. Indeed, Rotherham has had its fair share of scrutiny when it comes to the sexual abuse of children, as we have seen with the so-called “grooming gang” exposé, which led to an independent inquiry in 2014. It was described as the biggest child protection scandal in UK history.
Zlakha Ahmed, founder and director of Apna Haq, a survivor-led organisation based in Rotherham, says: “We know how incredibly difficult the gruelling process to get justice can be, to give evidence against someone who has a lot of power and influence within the community. This conviction will encourage others to come forward.”
“Ahmed may well be friends with Imran Khan [prime minister of Pakistan] and countless lords,” says Mr B, “but he is now a man who has been brought down by two ordinary people. And I can feel proud of that.”
