Silent cries for help went unanswered
How can almost 30 years of incest go undetected? Relatives of the two Sheffield sisters who bore their father nine children and endured another ten pregnancies give their side of the story to Women's Editor Jo Davison
WHEN a little girl draws clumsy, crayoned pictures of the monsters that come into her bedroom at night, somebody surely should question why.
Yet relatives of the sisters at the centre of one of Sheffield's most shocking sexual abuse cases say those childish, silent cries for help went unnoticed by all but the girl's grandmother.
Having met with blanks from her daughter and son-in-law, the worried grandmother asked her grand-daughter's schoolteachers for advice.
"She was told she was reading too much into the pictures and nothing more was done," claim the woman's son and daughters. They are the maternal uncle and aunts of the girls who last week saw their father finally admit his ruination of their lives.
He was the monster in the pictures and in both girls' living nightmares.
For over 20 years, the very man who should have been their protector was their abuser.
In a story which echoes that of Josef Fritzl, the Austrian who kept his daughter and the children she bore him locked in his cellar, they gave birth again and again to his genetically damaged children.
But it took until he was 56 and they were adults for the abuse to stop.
The father was finally brought to justice last week, when he pleaded guilty at Sheffield Crown Court to 25 rapes and four indecent assaults. He admitted he had repeatedly raped his daughters from 1979 until last February.
As a result of the rapes the girls gave birth to nine children, two of which were stillborn, and had to endure 10 miscarriages and terminations due to abnormalities in the foetuses.
He has been remanded in custody to be sentenced next month.
The angry but frightened sisters and brother of the girls' mother now say that if someone in authority had listened to their mother all those years ago, the truth might have come out and the girls' lives could have been so different.
Their rage is directed at police, social services and health workers who, they say, either failed to spot telltale signs of the girls's abuse, or dismissed their mother's attempts to alert them to her granddaughters' ordeals.
Their fear is of people finding out who they are – and of blaming them for doing nothing to protect the girls.
Says the uncle: "The first things people are going to ask are: Why didn't the family help them? How can they not have known?"
But they were just children when their 16-year-old elder sister married the man they had already come to fear.
When one of her daughters fell pregnant at 14, they were only in their late teens.
"We were too young to really take in what was happening," says one. "Our father had died two years before and it was our mother who tried to raise the alarm. But no-one listened to her.
"We are innocent in all of this but we are worried about how this will rebound on us. We all have children; we desperately want to protect them."
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Friday 25 May 2012
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