Holly Archer is the author of I Never Gave My Consent: A Schoolgirl's Life Inside the Telford Sex Ring and the founder of the Holly Project, a survivor-led support service helping people who have experienced child sexual exploitation and their families. We caught up with Holly as part of our series on the politics of survivor engagement to ask about the genesis and reception of her book, its appropriation by certain groups to support a far-right agenda, and her interactions with the media and other anti-trafficking professionals as a survivor in the public eye. An explanation of how we produced this interview can be found at the end.

Ella Cockbain (BTS): Your book I Never Gave My Consent recounts your experience with child sexual exploitation in the UK. By way of introduction, could you please tell us about why you wrote this book?

Holly Archer: I had to go to counselling when my daughter started nursery. I was so scared of what might happen to her. I'd watch all the other parents walk away and think, ‘how can you just leave your children with these people? You don't know who they are.’

Slowly I realised I might be the one with the problem. So I sought help.

As I went through counselling, I realised I didn’t understand me. I still blamed myself, and because I saw my exploitation as the result of my own choices, I assumed nobody else out there could relate. So instead of talking, I started to write everything down. All the thoughts and feelings I couldn't tell anybody because they would judge me or never understand.

Then the news came out about child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, and I realised that there were other people out there like me. I started putting my writing into an anonymous blog, and shortly after that Sarah Wilson’s book Violated came out about Rotherham. It made me think I could do something a bit more substantial.

Through Sarah I got in touch with the journalist Geraldine McKelvie, who offered to ghost write. We talked for hours, and she combined our conversations with my blog to bring my story together. It was released in summer 2016.

Ella: How was your book received?

Holly: I hadn’t thought through how the book would affect me. I had created so much distance between myself and this persona I was using to tell my story that I didn't think it really would.

Instead, I ended up in the hospital with a suspected stroke. But it was just the stress. On the news Rotherham had been the problem, Rochdale had been the problem, Oxford had been the problem. With my book Telford became the problem. I put it on the map. We are a really tiny little place, and everybody was talking about it – about me, although they didn’t know it. My mum’s friends, my friends, the people at the school, the other mums at the playground. I felt like I was in a totally different world. It was bizarre.

I hadn’t anticipated how quickly everybody would think they knew me. I’d just told the whole world my deepest darkest secrets, and online people were giving feedback on my life story. Some were lovely: ‘you’re so brave’, or ‘keep fighting!’ Not all though. One woman wrote on my Facebook wall that I should be ashamed of myself – that I was disgusting and how dare I tell everybody that I was on the game as a child. Things like that hurt. There’s still a lot of victim-blaming in society when it comes to modern day slavery, including child sexual exploitation.

Ella: How did you learn that you’d caught the attention of the far right?

Holly: A couple weeks after the book’s release, Britain First decided they were coming to Telford. I didn’t know they were there. I walked out of a car park and Jayda Fransen (ed. a former leader of the group) was just standing there with some of her cronies outside a shopping centre. She handed me a leaflet with a picture of my book on it, and quotes that had been twisted and misconstrued to make me say the most racist things.

I was so angry. I didn't write my book to persecute any community, not even the paedophiles who trafficked me. I wanted other victims and their families to know that you could still have a normal life after going through these things: a family, a career, a home, a feeling of security. All those basics that you never thought you were going to get.

And they'd made it about immigration. About all these migrants ‘coming over here to rape our girls’. I felt a rage inside me that I didn’t know what to do with.

Ella: Why do you think the far right is attracted to stories of trafficking?

Holly: Because they have enormous potential for inspiring hate toward Muslims and anyone else who doesn’t fit a certain idea of what a good person is. They’re a dream come true for some far-right groups. And they’ve got a lot of slogans around it: it only happens to white girls, girls from broken homes, girls who are oh so vulnerable. There’s no rational debate that can be had with somebody who believes that white girls are the only victims and Pakistani men are the only perpetrators.

A few years ago I read some posts by the English Defence League, and they just made my blood boil. They were writing about how they had gone to predominantly Pakistani areas and kicked people's front doors off. How they’d beaten up pregnant women. And they were celebrating it on message forums, saying ‘they won’t rape our girls anymore’. It made me cry.

Their protests aren’t about protecting us. They aren’t about changing the lives of survivors, or preventing crimes from taking place, or even persecuting the perpetrators. They’re about having a drink and a fight while shouting some racist language they can't normally get away with. It’s really sad.

Ella: What does this profiling get wrong?

Holly: The media portrays victims and perpetrators of child sexual exploitation in certain ways, as do some politicians. It’s nearly always a Pakistani or Muslim man, it’s nearly always a white girl. I find that really offensive. I was trafficked alongside girls of all different faiths, colours, attitudes, and classes.

It wasn’t the case that they only go for white girls from children’s homes. I don’t fit that stereotype. I’m from a comfortable family, not really any issues. I am a white woman, and yes: a lot of the perpetrators who groomed me were Pakistani men. But the paedophiles who paid money to rape a child: the only common factor was that they were all men.

Ella: After the book came out, you continued to work with Geraldine to investigate what else happened in Telford. Can you tell us why?

Holly: After the book came out victims started contacting me, telling me that I had told them their own story. That was a shock – I hadn’t anticipated that.

Geraldine is an investigative journalist, and we decided to figure out what had actually happened in Telford. I had told her about other girls who had been exploited and killed, or who had died after being forcibly addicted to drugs. We met some of the victims who had contacted me, and through them we met more victims and the families of girls who had died. We gathered information and started to build a case. It took two years, until March 2018, to pull it all together and for Geraldine to get it onto the front page of the Sunday Mirror.

Everything just went crazy. It was traumatic in a way – I became a circus act where everybody just wants a piece of me for five minutes. I ended up on Good Morning Britain with Piers Morgan asking me questions, my back to the camera. And then another show straight after that. It was intense, surreal.

That led, eventually and with a lot of work on our part, to an independent inquiry. The final report was published last July.

Ella: It also led to the creation of your own support project, didn’t it?

Holly: The Holly Project started taking shape while we were interviewing victims for the newspaper investigation. All these people were saying, ‘I’ve never had access to trauma-based therapy’, or ‘I’ve never met anybody like me’, or ‘I was thrown out of school’. I saw that so much was broken and wanted to do something about it. So I started wallpapering my house with notes. That became the Holly Project.

I started by doing small presentations about child sexual exploitation from a survivor’s point of view. I’d already done some public hearings and spoken in Parliament, so I was ready to speak. I did one with another survivor at the YMCA. It was really well received, and afterward the manager said she’d love to host our project if we were interested. I figured it was a good offer, so we said yes.

We set up our office in the exact square where our exploitation began. It’s where the conversations had started, it’s where we were sent to meet people. It’s a really lovely place actually, and we decided it had to be there. We needed to be accessible to the victims who need us.

Our sole purpose is to support survivors to find out what their justice looks like. Justice is unique to every single person, and we spend a lot of time trying to convince professionals and parents that criminal justice isn't the only kind out there. And, statistically speaking, it’s unlikely that you will get criminal justice. So we work with people to see what they actually want in life, and from that other kinds of justice take shape.

Some want to fight the world. Some want to change the family court system. Others want to strengthen laws around child sexual exploitation, start their own taxi firm, or just go ride horses because that’s what they loved before all this started. We support them to get from A to B. That’s the soul of the Holly Project. That’s what I do with my days.

Ella: Many would describe you as a survivor of human trafficking, and a survivor leader at that. Would you agree with them?

The police had to explain to me that I was a victim of human trafficking. I had been moved from room to room, across the whole West Midlands. And I was moved for the purpose of raping a child. I was booked in advance. We didn’t just turn up somewhere and hope for the best, so to speak. A paedophile would contact the man controlling me to book me, and then we went to him. I was definitely a victim of human trafficking.

I hate the term survivor though. It suggests there should have been a point where I shouldn't have made it. And I don't think any of us shouldn't have made it. Child sexual exploitation is not something unavoidable, like cancer. All of these situations were avoidable. Yes, I went through something. Yes, I’m here to tell the tale. And I do tell the tale, every day. But I don't feel like I survived.

I don’t really know how I’d prefer to be categorised. I’m just myself. Even though I use a different name in public, there’s nothing I’d like to be called other than me.

Ella: You embody a powerful combination of lived and professional experience. Have you found that that is welcome?

Holly: Initially, lots of professionals didn't want me in the arena at all. I hadn't studied social work, I didn't understand the hierarchy, I wasn’t always politically correct. I’ve been challenged many times. Sometimes I entered meetings and was shut down immediately.

I think many were afraid that we were just there to criticise them – to say they weren’t good at their job. But most people are quite good at their jobs. They may just not have access to the right resources, or maybe they don’t understand that indicators can differ widely between people. Or they’re caught up in rules they didn’t make, like if a person doesn’t have at least 10 indicators then they don’t meet a certain threshold.

I’ve learned how to point to problems without making it personal. I feel able to walk into a room and say, ‘I see a pathway, I see a procedure, and that’s brilliant. How do we make sure people get on it?’

One thing I’m pushing for in Telford is co-production. Take call centres and hotlines. Let’s get the staff together, give them real scenarios, and see how different questions and answers lead us to different outcomes. That way they can see that we’re not just there to say they’re doing a rubbish job. We’re only trying to make sure everybody gets to the right place.

We’re definitely far more welcomed now than we were before. It’s been five years. I think they’ve realised we’re not going away.

Ella: What about with the media? What are the dynamics like with journalists?

Holly: I've come across some really amazing journalists who give you loads of information and who let you sign off on everything before it goes live. They understand the need of survivors, for lack of a better word, to stay in control.

I always ask for the questions in advance. I want to know who is coming and what the setup will be. I’ve learned to ask for those things as they’re not freely given. I’ve also learned to say ‘next question’ when I don’t want to answer. That was different five years ago. I felt very vulnerable, and felt I was obligated to answer those questions.

The most awkward question I get is, ‘can you please introduce me to a recent victim?’ The answer is absolutely not. People who recently experienced that sort of trauma haven’t yet left the exploitation in their minds, even if they’ve physically exited it. They’re at their most vulnerable, yet at the same time they think they’re invincible. They’re saying anything, doing anything – they’ve been through all this stuff, so what could happen now? Catching them at that moment is morally wrong.

Journalists have this need to try to capture a new voice all the time, and I do think they like having trauma on their show or in their article. They never stop to think that when they put us on TV, and we're crying or saying something terrible, that it is going into the living room of someone who has also experienced those same things. And I don’t want to hurt anyone by speaking about these things. That’s irresponsible. I’ve done that, I’ve learned from it, I don’t do it anymore.

We need to be responsible with our own trauma. And journalists should be far more considerate about the things they put out.

Ella: Have journalists ever misrepresented you in a story?

Holly: With a few exceptions I haven’t had journalists twist my words very much, but it happens a lot on social media. Somebody will take a portion of something I’ve said and then present it out of context.

I remember one really long thread on profiling, where I wrote that the majority of the perpetrators who initially groomed me were Pakistani and Muslim men, but then I went on to say that the only real pattern was that they were all men. People took screenshots of just the first half and shared them around, making me sound racist.

So I’m very aware of how my words can be misconstrued. It’s difficult. One the one hand, I don’t want to filter myself. I want people to understand the reality of child sexual exploitation, and as somebody who has been through it, I should be able to say, ‘This is this. That is that.’

On the other hand, we need to be aware that, as survivors speaking out, we are never just speaking out about our own exploitation. There are so many other survivors who are relying on us to speak their story, so that they're not forgotten about even when they don't want anybody to ever know.

That’s what I realised when I was contacted by all those people after writing the book. That's been the thing I've carried with me, and I'll continue to carry it with me for the rest of my life. It's not just about me. My voice is mine. But I have to be mindful and aware of every single word I say, so I don't let anybody down.

Holly Archer is a pseudonym. This interview was conducted by Ella Cockbain.