Caitlin Spencer is the author of the 2017 book Please, Let Me Go: The Horrific True Story of a Girl's Life In The Hands of Sex Traffickers, which recounts her experience with child sexual exploitation in the UK. For our series on the politics of survivor engagement, we sat down with Caitlin to ask about her book, the speech she gave on trafficking in the House of Lords, and her interactions with the far right both online and in person. An explanation of how we produced this interview can be found at the end.

Joel Quirk (BTS): By way of introduction, could you say a few words about how your book came about?

Caitlin Spencer: People close to me kept telling me I should write a book. Eventually I thought: “You know what? I’m going to do it.”

I found a ghost writer, because I could talk about it, but I couldn’t put it to paper. She’s in Scotland, so I went up there for a few days, we talked, and she recorded the whole thing. She tends to work on these sorts of stories and was very sensitive and considerate around it. That’s rare – there aren’t many people who are.

I proofread it after she was done. Not everything that happened to me is in there, but everything in the book is absolutely true and correct. I think she did a fantastic job. She got my voice out there, and based it on me and no one else. It’s my experience. It’s my story.

Joel: Your Twitter feed is full of exchanges about perpetrators and race. This seems to be a topic you’re either drawn to, or that you can’t escape. Is it because the theme of Asians and Muslims features so prominently in your book?

Caitlin: I’m still really glad I wrote my book, but I’m uncomfortable with what other people have done with it. People have taken parts of it and posted them on Twitter to say: “Oh, it was only Asians that this girl was abused by.” I tell them to stop but they don’t. When I tell them they’re wrong – and that I know what happened because it happened to me – they don’t just get angry. They want to argue with me about it.

The minute you talk about a non-Asian abuser, people get enraged. Especially the far right on Twitter. They say things like “you must be lying,” or “you’re a race traitor”. I had one guy say: “Yeah, but the Asians done it because they hate you. The white ones are just poorly, they’re not well.” I can be a bit of a loose cannon on Twitter, so I shot back with a list of what had happened from white guys to prove they're just as bad. It gets my back up when people use my story in that way. I hate it.

As I keep trying to explain to people, the group that trafficked me was Asian, but that’s because I was living in a majority Asian community at the time. It makes sense that they’d come from that same community. But that doesn’t make all Asians traffickers.

Joel: So the far right will effectively troll you if you challenge them, even though you’re a survivor of what they claim to be against?

Caitlin: Yeah. It can get intense. Once somebody wrote that "Her kids need throwing into the English Channel for bad genes," because my kids are the result of the rapes I endured. I get comments like that all the time.

Joel: Your book ends with a speech you gave at the House of Lords, in which you call on Parliament to “stop being politically correct and to deal with the truth. Admit that this is being done mainly by Pakistani Muslims.” Given what you have just said, it sounds like you’ve been on a quite the emotional journey since then.

Caitlin: There are a few things you have to understand about that speech.

When I was asked to speak in Parliament, I was still in a space where I thought culture had a lot to do with what happened to me. There is a reason for that. The guys themselves used to say to me, “This is what we do, it's in our culture. We're allowed to do this to you.”

My trafficking was also still very fresh. I wasn't in the head space to put it in a way that made sense by myself. So to prepare my speech I went looking for help. I reached out to some people who I thought were trying to create positive change in areas where people were being groomed and trafficked. I thought they were nice, but I’ve since realised they were part of the far right.

It’s one of those things where you look back and think, “Oh god.” They helped me word my speech, and although I felt like I was in full control at the time, there was a lot of manipulation going on. A lot is missing. There’s nothing about my non-Muslim abusers in there – it’s all about the Muslim side of things. They’re in my book but not in my speech. And they said things like, “you need to focus on this because this is a bigger problem in your area. If you talk about non-Muslims, it’ll take attention away from what’s really happening.” They clearly wanted me to say certain things in the parliamentary context.

I thought they were helping me, but they did it to benefit themselves. It took me a long time to realise that.

Joel: And now?

Caitlin: Things have changed since then. I'm much further out from the trafficking and have nothing to do with these people anymore. I've had real support from all sorts of different people. I've seen the good sides of people, I've seen the bad sides of people. And I know now that it’s not in their culture at all. They were just making excuses for what they're doing.

How can we say grooming is only a Muslim issue? It's not. There are grooming gangs that have been purely white – some who have been reported on in the media, some who are still getting away with it. It’s not a straight race thing. It’s not a culture thing. It’s a predator thing. We've got predators of all different backgrounds, cultures, and races.

After writing my book, I received just as much support from Muslim people as I did from anyone else. But I didn't previously have a chance to meet good Muslim people. The only Muslim people I knew were bad ones. And my speech was very much based on that.

That's the only way I can explain it really.

Joel: Why do you choose to continue to engage in these exchanges? It can’t be easy, always trying to correct the record and suffering abuse because of it.

Caitlin: Because if people like me don’t speak up, those that don’t know much about this stuff will continue to believe that it’s a strictly Muslim issue. And that will cause problems for both victims who aren’t being abused by Muslims, and for the Muslim community.

People are told to “look for the signs”. But if they don’t think white abusers exist, they’re not going to think much when they see a white man taking a girl somewhere. Because they’re expecting it to be a Muslim guy. They’re also not going to think as much when they see a Muslim girl. There’s a myth that no one touches Muslim girls, but they do. There were Muslim girls trafficked within the same ring I was. It happens to them as well. So if we think of it as just a Muslim issue, many victims are going to be missed, and many perpetrators are not going to go to prison.

Meanwhile, it creates racial tension that puts innocent Muslims in harm’s way. Look at the guy who attacked the migrant centre in Dover last year. He went in with petrol bombs, and from what I’ve heard he was shouting “this is for what you’ve done to our girls,” or something like that. It’s all coming from the same far right.

Editor’s note: Andrew Leak, the suspected perpetrator at Dover, was found dead shortly after the attack. According to the Guardian, in his final tweet he said he planned to “obliterate Muslim children”. Further reporting by KentOnline shows other posts in which Leak explicitly drew connections between Muslims, grooming and child rape.

Joel: Do you worry about how your online engagement might affect your family?

Caitlin: I’m very, very careful. I’ve protected my identity in full. People don’t know my name, they don’t know which area I live in. It’s going to be very hard for them to do anything offline to me.

And my children don’t know my history at all. Not a speck of it. Any material around my book, it's not in this house. There's absolutely no shred of evidence of my history because I don't want them to know. I don't want them to know where they're from because I think they're too sensitive for that.

But at the same time, a lot of what I do is based on my history. It can feel like a double life sometimes.

Joel: What do you think makes child sexual exploitation and child trafficking so attractive to that group of people?

Caitlin: A lot of the people who listen to far-right figures like Tommy Robinson are really vulnerable. And, as a parent, if I heard what he said without having the experiences I do, I might easily think, ‘I need to keep my kids away from these people.’ Parents wondering what’s going to happen to their daughters, parents trying to keep their daughters safe – that’s what it preys on and where the far right finds a large part of its audience.

There’s a drawing circulating right now online. It’s quite graphic, of a blonde girl being abused by several Muslim men. One’s holding a Qur’an. On the other side there’s the father trying to get to his daughter, but the police are holding him back.

It’s really powerful. And if I didn’t know what I know, it would put fear in me.