My paedophile stepfather raped me from the age of 6 - and sold me to other men. But the betrayal committed by my MOTHER was almost worse

By KATHRYN KNIGHT, FEATURE WRITER The accusation rang out across the courtroom. Jaz Ampaw-Farr, then just 16, was giving evidence against the stepfather who had sexually abused her throughout her childhood and sold her to strangers when she was as young as six. In the middle of her brave testimony, a woman had stood up and hurled abuse. ‘She’s a liar and a wh*re,’ she shouted. The words were devastating enough – but what made them almost unbearable was who had uttered them. For years, Jaz had tried to persuade the adults in her world – and eventually the authorities – that she was telling the truth. Now, at the very moment she was finally being heard, she was being denounced by her own mother. ‘She’s always trying to flirt with men,’ her mother screamed. ‘She’s ruined my life.’ It is a moment that will stay with Jaz for ever. ‘If the woman who gave birth to you thinks that little of you,’ says Jaz, now 55, ‘then it feels like you don’t matter, that you are not worth anything.’ It has been a lifetime’s work for Jaz to prove that sentiment wrong. Jaz is now a confident, articulate businesswoman and TED speaker - whose talks have been listened to by more than a million people around the world As she reveals in her heartbreaking but inspiring memoir, Because Of You, This is Me, her childhood was mired in poverty, abuse and racism so profound that when she finally plucked up the courage to go to the police, she was told she was unlikely to be telling the truth because she was mixed race. Yet while in part a story of institutional failure, Jaz’s book is also one of courage, resilience and the extraordinary difference a single person can make to a child in need. ‘I can name the teachers who saved my life,’ she says now. ‘The people who spotted something in me and gave me hope and refused to give up. That’s the message I want people to take away. That sometimes just one person can make a difference.’ Jaz is living proof of that. Today, few people meeting the confident, articulate businesswoman and TED speaker – whose talks have been listened to by more than a million people around the world – would imagine the horrors she endured as a child. Her domestic life is as happy as her professional one, too. Married for 24 years to husband Ed, she has three grown-up children whose upbringing was a world away from her own. Born in Nottingham in 1970 to a white mother and an unknown father – her mother would later tell her she was ‘raped by a gorilla at the zoo’ whenever she asked – Jaz was initially raised by her ‘salt-of-the-earth’ maternal grandparents. They had stepped in to take on the consequences of an unexpected – and unwanted – pregnancy when her mother was around 19. ‘My mum went into hospital with appendicitis and came out with a baby. She had no idea she was pregnant or, if she did, she certainly didn’t tell anyone,’ she says. Two years later, her younger brother Paul – from a different father – joined the family and eventually also moved in with the grandparents. Jaz's mother and stepfather on their wedding day, both of whom subjected Jaz to neglect and abuse  When her mother did appear in her life, she left fear in her wake. ‘My first memory of her is being shaken,’ Jaz recalls. ‘I was ill with mumps aged about four and she was angry because I wouldn’t sit up. I didn’t know who she was exactly but even then I knew she didn’t make me feel safe.’ As a mixed-race child in an almost uniformly white community, Jaz also knew she was different. ‘I got shouted at in the street all the time,’ she says. ‘The National Front was quite big and even my nan would sometimes let go of my hand when certain people walked past.’ Then, when she was six, Jaz’s world collapsed overnight following the sudden death of her grandfather. Unable to cope on her own, her grandmother took the decision to hand Jaz and Paul back to their mother – who was in a new relationship with the man who would go on to be the father of her mother’s next four children. The household was not just characterised by neglect but violence from both parents, who subjected their children to brutal physical abuse. ‘My stepfather would put cigarettes out on our bodies and beat us with belts, but Mum could be violent too. I remember her once smashing my face into a cat bowl,’ Jaz recalls. Her stepfather also singled out Jaz for a specific horror. From the age of six, he would creep into the bedroom she shared with Paul and rape her, while Paul was still in the room, lying under his bedcovers terrified. Jaz was just six when her stepfather would creep into the bedroom she shared with her brother Paul and rape her ‘I cannot hear the words “good girl” without wanting to be sick, because those are the words he used to say to me,’ she says quietly. Not content with inflicting himself on his young stepdaughter, he also sickeningly used her as a ‘bargaining chip’, taking her to the pubs where he gambled and offering her as payment when he lost at darts. ‘I would be taken to a car park, to bins, to strangers’ cars,’ she says. ‘I was used for sexual acts. I hated it, but at the time that was what I knew. ‘He told me if I said anything he would break my bones, suffocate me and drown me.’ To survive, Jaz learned to make herself invisible, and quickly learned that the one place she felt safe was school. ‘There was warmth, hot food and adults who cared,’ she says. Among them was one who, when Jaz was just seven, told her that she would one day make a fantastic teacher. ‘I thought she was mad,’ Jaz laughs. ‘I’d never seen a brown teacher in my life. But she planted a stake in the ground of my unknown future and tied a rope around my waist and anchored it there. Even in my darkest moments, that rope held.’ It was another teacher, meanwhile, who alerted Social Services when Jaz arrived at school with a black eye, having escaped from the cellar where her stepfather had confined her after another beating. She was placed into foster care – although it proved only a temporary measure. Jaz secured a place at Lincoln Bishop University, then Hull, to study teacher training and then drama ‘Social Services were keen to keep us together as a family so that’s what they constantly tried to do. Things would be ok for a bit, and then it would just go back to normal – the beatings, the withdrawal, the lack of food, the sexual abuse. ‘I was in and out of foster care constantly from the age of eight.’ It was at 11 that, sickened, Jaz watched a sex education video at school and realised that what her stepfather had been doing was how women got pregnant. ‘I went to the toilet and threw up,’ she says. The discovery ultimately prompted her to report her stepfather to Social Services – not that anybody listened. Years later, Jaz was given access to notes from that meeting which suggested that as a mixed-race child she was less likely to be telling the truth as her stepfather was white. ‘A vivid imagination. Prone to lying,’ read one scribbled line. That pattern of disbelief continued. When she confided in a teacher, she was advised to simply ‘forget about it’, while another social worker suggested she ‘wouldn’t have to worry about it for long’. ‘I was beyond despair,’ Jaz reflects now. ‘It felt like there was no hope, because no one was coming to help me. I felt in the end he would kill me.’ Only when she was 15 – and by then back living with her grandmother – did one social worker finally listen and inform the police. ‘I remember speaking to the detective who told me it would be my word against his,’ she recalls. To her astonishment, however, her stepfather eventually confessed. ‘To this day I have no idea why,’ she says. Not that there was any remorse, or support from her mother, whom she’d had no contact with. Quite the opposite. When, aged 16, Jaz was called to give evidence at one of several harrowing hearings to determine whether her youngest siblings were safe at home, her parents’ solicitor suggested she had been a sexually advanced child who had encouraged attention from adult men. And in the courtroom, her mother hurled abuse at her from where she sat alongside the husband she had chosen to support. ‘She was holding his hand,’ says Jaz. ‘That was one of the lowest moments of my life.’ Justice, too, felt painfully incomplete. Her stepfather received a suspended sentence meaning he did not spend a single day behind bars. Yet something kept her going. By 17, Jaz was living in a community house for those with nowhere else to go and attending college to take her A-levels, living off a paltry £15-a-week grant. ‘I would walk two miles in the rain with no coat and often no money for lunch,’ she says. ‘It was incredibly tough, but I knew education gave people freedom. My biggest motivation was that I didn’t want to be like my parents.’ Nonetheless, when she learned she had failed her A-levels, despair set in. ‘It felt like the odds were stacked against me,’ she says now. This time, another teacher intervened and told her that if she truly wanted to go to university she would phone every single institution in the land to persuade one of them to give her a place. ‘It wasn’t just what they said, but that they believed in me that helped,’ she says. Through sheer force of character, and despite her grades, she secured a place at first Lincoln Bishop University, then Hull, to study teacher training and then drama. It was far from easy. Ashamed of her background, Jaz invented a confident, middle-class alter ego. ‘I worried what people would think if they met the real me,’ she says. ‘University felt like it wasn’t designed for people like me. At the same time, I didn’t like to be underestimated.’ After graduation she did indeed become a teacher, a job she did for ten years. ‘I wanted to give to others what some of my teachers had given to me,’ she says. ‘It was the best job in the world.’ On a whim, she applied to a magazine that offered readers a free dinner with their ‘man of the month’. What she had expected to be little more than a jocular and friendly evening became ‘the most romantic day of her life’. Indeed it ended with an impromptu drive to Brighton where, as she and Ed, then aged 29 and working in orthopaedic sales, walked along the seafront, he told her he wanted to walk with her there when they were in their 80s. On their second date, Jaz broached the subject of her traumatic past: ‘So often men couldn’t handle it and I wanted this to be different. And it was. We’ve been madly in love ever since.’ She left teaching to start a family and went on to have three children. Motherhood brought healing but also, on occasion, fresh pain. ‘I would look at my children at the age I was when the abuse started and think, how did my little body cope?’ she says. ‘There were some very difficult times.’ Slowly, through therapy, she began confronting her past. ‘I’ve processed a lot of stuff, and I still feel sometimes that my default setting is misery – but I’ve chosen to lean into gratitude,’ she says. Astonishingly, she has chosen to forgive her mother and stepfather for the way they treated her, although she is no longer in contact with them. ‘I didn’t do it for them, but for me,’ she says. ‘I told my stepfather what he had done was wrong, but I don’t think he’ll ever really understand what he did. ‘He said he was “done with all that” now as if what had happened was a hobby.’ Happily, after a period of estrangement, she has reconnected with her siblings, who reunited in the wake of the tragic death of Paul, who died from a heroin overdose in 2012 aged 39. Jaz had to travel back to Nottingham to identify his body. ‘Paul’s death was devastating, but it was also a wake-up call,’ she says. ‘We shared the same chaotic childhood, but the difference was that at school I had adults who refused to give up on me even when I’d given up on myself.’ His loss was the prompt she needed to focus on the work she does today. Along with Ed, she founded a leadership academy and now delivers motivational speeches all over the world in which she focuses on the power of ordinary people to make a difference. And, for all the horrors she endured, Jaz refuses to see herself as a victim – but as proof of what can happen when even just one adult chooses to care. ‘You never know the impact you might have on a child,’ she says. ‘One conversation, one act of kindness, one teacher who refuses to give up. It can change everything.’ Because Of You, This Is Me by Jaz Ampaw-Farr (£16.99, Independent Thinking Press) is out now