Exploring grief and shame with children born from rape - BBC World Service Documentaries | 100 Women

I was conceived by rape. There's no getting around it. She was raped. He was born because of a crime. Do I look like the man who raped my birth mother? He said, Mum am I rape baby? And I said, no, you're my baby. No one wants to talk about what we’re going through. He was my angel. We shouldn’t have to hide it anymore. I'm putting the… one of the hardest stories about my life out there. And it's, yeah, it's petrifying. That was literally just minutes after I’d given birth to him. I just look so

young. I was only fourteen when I met a man called Arshid Hussain. He was ten years older than me and from that moment he began grooming me. At the time I didn’t see it for what it was. I thought that’s how love was supposed to be. I was 15 when I got pregnant. God, I still remember him being in my arms and I just had that moment, that instant bond that only a mother feels. He’s so chunky. I was so excited to be a mum. But as I got older, I started to understand what had happened to me. The abus

e of young girls in Rotherham… Arshid Hussain was the ringleader behind the grooming… Rape after rape, assault after assault…. He has now been jailed for 35 years…. Sammy Woodhouse gave birth tp a son after she was raped… I remember when those thoughts first started running through my head I was panicking about my son. I thought, ‘what am I gonna tell my son?’ I couldn't see a light at the end of the tunnel. My son was only 12 when I had to tell him that his dad had raped and abused me, and that

’s how he was born. He didn't want to be the person who he was. He didn't want to be in his own skin. I blamed myself. I felt so stupid. My bruises healed. My mind didn't. We both felt so alone. And there was nowhere for us to turn. There must be others out there feeling the same way. I'm related to a murderer, and also a rapist. And I used to think horrible things like, what if I grow up to be like him? You feel grief, you feel anger, you feel shame. I know there’s nothing that I could have don

e but it feels like it's my fault that I'm alive. You’re putting yourself in your birth mother’s shoes. You’re also thinking am I going to remind her of the person who did this to her. And I think it's incredible that she even decided to keep me. I don’t think I could look at that child without thinking about all the abuse. I just want acceptance and to know that I’m normal despite where I’ve come from. The worst feeling is feeling like you’re alone You're questioning everything about yourself.

Do I look like a rapist? Looking in the mirror, almost like, I could see the man who raped my mother looking back at me. You grow up with all these ideas of who you are. That you're kind and you're nice and you're loving. And then you find out, you were conceived in a really violent, almost hateful way. It pulls the heart out of your world. Neil grew up adopted and traced his birth mother when he was 27. It was then that he discovered he was born after she was raped by a stranger in a park. When

you hear those words, it's like somebody's almost like a video game punched into your chest and ripped your insides out. I just broke down. Completely and utterly lost it. So, I did meet with my birth mother a nd one of the first things I said to her was, if I looked like the man who did this to you walk away. I don't want to bring that back. Yeah and upset her. What did she say? NEIL: She said, it's fine. You don't like him and that really changed things for me. It really, really did. Have you

ever wanted to meet him just to confront him and say, ‘why did you do this?’ The man who did that to my birth mother is… he is just nothing to me. You know, I can't be clear enough about this. That, how angry I was at him. But no, I wouldn't want anything to do with him. To all intents and purposes, I don't think of myself as having a birth father. I have my birth mother and that's it, and that's enough. SAMMY: For me, what's kind of hard to sit here and listen to is that you had all this to de

al with, and it's affected you so much. And you were an adult dealing with this, like in your 20s. My son was 12 years old, with no one to talk to. So, I'm kind of just sat here thinking, I feel in a way like I've failed him. NEIL: I don't think you have at all I think by being open and honest, you've done the best by him. So long as there is love there and you can show that love and explain that how he was conceived is the most unimportant thing in the world. It's, you are my son. You know, I l

ove you beyond anything. You're part of me. And that's the important thing. And, we might have to work at it a bit more every day than most families because we're both hurting. But we're together and that's the important thing and you're my son. I’ve tried so hard to be the best mum I can to my son. But no matter how much I love him, he still has this shadow hanging over him. And I know he has questions about his dad, but I don’t know whether the reality would really help him. I’d love to know w

here he was buried so I could go dance on his grave. This monstrous man that felt that he could do that and that it was okay to do that, and that it was okay to rape people. I think there’s a special place in hell for people like that. It’s a reality that Eva confronted. She grew up adopted, imagining a perfect family that she would one day find. But when she met her birth mother, the truth was much darker She had been abused from a young age by her father and she had got pregnant at the age of

14. I was the result of that liaison. It made me feel unwanted, a freak. But I still wanted to know more. So, I rang him and I asked him if he'd done the things that he'd been accused of. And he said, yes he had. And I said to him ‘do you feel remorse for what you did?’ And he said, ‘no, I don’t.’ And I said ‘would you do it again?’ He said, ‘yes I would.’ I wanted him to pay for what he’d done and the only way that I could see for that to happen was to go to the police. They said they needed ev

idence. And I said, ‘well, you've got the evidence standing right in front of you. I'm living, breathing proof of the evidence that this man raped someone.’ They didn't seem to care. They didn't seem interested. I'm glad I found out where I came from. I needed to know. Sammy: What was that driving force to find those missing pieces? I think it doesn't matter how horrible the past is. It's like an itch that you can’t scratch, and you've just got to know. You've got to know. It helps to know I did

the right thing telling my son the truth. But meeting Neil and Eva has made me realise we’re not the only ones going through this all alone. And I know I’ve buried a lot of my own feelings, because they’re just too painful to deal with. There must be other mums out there feeling the same way. It's like if you inject poison into somebody, that's exactly what happened to me. My father injected our own genes into me. He told me that all daddies did this to their little girls. And then I fell pregn

ant. It wasn’t just about the rape and the physical abuse. It was the emotional abuse. I really wanted to tell what was happening and I couldn’t tell a soul. I couldn’t tell anybody what had happened, just that day, what I’d been through. I didn’t have time to have any thoughts. It was ‘you're having this child simple as. This child's gonna call me daddy as well.’ I just felt sick. Just, no. What am I gonna do? I felt like I was just so different to everybody else and I felt so alone. And, you k

now, I was embarrassed and ashamed of myself as a person. If he’d made me have that baby, I don’t think I’d have survived. I wouldn’t be here today. I had to survive, I had to survive to leave. I packed some nappies for the child. Some baby milk. Put them in the bottom of the pram… and walked out the door. Got on a train and never went back. Mandy escaped the abuse, but she couldn’t escape the consequences. Her son was born with a genetic disability. Neither of us have ever talked to another mot

her with a child born from abuse, so this is a first for both of us. Do you think it's different for us as mums having a child conceived through abuse to having children conceived in a happy relationship? Yeah. How do you think it's different? Before I had my other children, I thought I knew what loving a baby was. And then when I had my proper children… it sounds awful to say that… I knew what it was. He wasn't conceived out of love. He was conceived by a monster. But by God, I love him. But ye

ah… I always say I'm the survivor my son's the victim, because he is. Even though I carry it on in my head, everything that's wrong with him is because of what happened to me. Because a crime happened to me, it happened to him as well. And this is going to affect him for the rest of his life? Yeah. I do his meals, I do his bathing. And he always says to people ‘she's my mum and she's my carer.’ Ah, bless. He’s my son, always will be. But sometimes you go there… and then sometimes no, don’t go th

ere. People, when they’d find out, they’d say ‘you’re disgusting, you had an affair with your dad, that’s horrible, how could you do that?’ I didn’t, I was 11. Maybe younger but the first recollection I have, I was 11. Was there ever anyone that said this is not your fault? No, no. Has anybody even now after all these years, not just as a child but as an adult and even after him going to prison, has anybody ever said ‘this isn't your fault?’ No. I’m going to cry now. Well, I'm gonna be the first

, it's not your fault and you’re not to blame. How many women are sat at home now in my position I was all those years ago, thinking ‘I'm gonna be stuck here forever?’ And you’re not. Open that door and get the hell out. I feel a little bit lost for words. I mean, she's just been through so much and I just think she’s by far one of the bravest people, if not the bravest people that I’ve ever met in my life. Everyone I’ve met has felt so alone, and there’s nothing here to help people like us. I w

ant to see how people elsewhere in the world have changed that. Rwanda is one of the only places in the world with specialist counselling for mothers and children born of rape. It was a massacre that saw a tenth of the population killed. This country suffered a genocide in 1994. Women, children. They were hunted down and slaughtered. Eight hundred thousand people were massacred here in just 100 days. The killers were a mixture of regular forces and Hutu militias, who took to the streets with clu

bs and machetes. Their victims were the minority Tutsis and some moderate Hutus… Rape was also a weapon of the genocide and hundreds of thousands of mainly Tutsi women were raped. Clare was thrown into a mass grave among the dead bodies. Somehow she lived. But her ordeal wasn’t over. She realised she was pregnant by one of her attackers. Clare even thought about killing her baby when it was born. But when she saw her daughter’s face for the first time - she knew she couldn’t. Hi, you must be Cla

re snd Elisabeth? How are you? And you must be Elisabeth? Can I give you a hug as well? How are you? Pleasure to meet you. Clare kept the truth hidden for years. It was only when she met other mothers like her that she opened up and told her daughter how she was born. I know, I was a baby. He was my Angel. And that’s him when he was a little bit older. As many as twenty thousand children were from rape during the genocide against the Tutsi. Here they come together to talk about how it’s affected

them. When I'm kind of sat there as a mum… I’m gonna get emotional now… So, kind of like when I'm seeing it, from a mum, and I know what my son’s feeling as well. That was really difficult. What happened here in 1994 is very different to what happened to me but we still have so much in common. It’s been incredible to see how children and mothers here dealt with their struggles by coming together. I just wish me and my son had not felt so alone. Things between me and my son have always been diff

icult. And I don’t know what the future holds. I just wish that me and my son had been able to process everything a lot better than what we did. But I’m his mum, and I love him, and I always will do and he knows that. Since I’ve been back from Rwanda I’ve just been thinking about everything I learnt there and the people that I met. And one thing that really stood out for me is how everybody in Rwanda came together through a charity and just how much it helped them. So today I’ve invited some of

the people from the documentary to come together in Sheffield. And for some of us, it’s going to be the first time that they’ve ever met somebody that’s been through their situation. So, today’s a really big day for them. Talking about this is always going to be painful. But it feels like this is a first step. My son’s birth father is my father. There’s not a lot of people I’ve told that. I think you’re the second person. People said to me ‘you’ll have to adopt him, you’ll have to adopt him, you

can’t look after him, he’s going to be a constant reminder, constant all the time.’ And I said ‘no he’s not. He’s my son.’ It matters to me to do this because I've always been silent. Now I'm a woman, a fully grown woman, who’s got a gob on her. And she's willing to use it. My son looks like his dad, but that doesn’t matter to me. He’s still my boy, so… Exactly, he’s yours. The first thing I said to my birth mother when we met…I said ‘if I remind you of him for a second, walk away.’ You know, I

’ll totally understand… My relationship with my birth mother is, we've started talking again. It's lovely. I hope there's love there. You’re an amazing woman! Now I’m getting emotional, but honestly, every single one of you. Honestly, I think you’re incredible anyway. You don't have to feel alone and confused and scared because that’s how I felt. It's not that bad. You can feel a lot happier about this subject but you don't have to always feel so sad. Now to be ashamed of. Nothing to be ashamed

of at all and nobody can stop me.