[Life Style] I just wanted peace’

[GL HERO SHIMA]

hen Carol Higgins was 15, she walked into Penistone police station in South Yorkshire with her mother to report that her father, Elliott Appleyard, had been raping her several times a week for the previous two years. She might not have used the word “rape”, because she wasn’t sure that was what it was. “I was upset, confused, petrified. I didn’t realise it was criminal because I thought he loved me,” she says. “I felt like I was to blame because I hadn’t kicked and screamed. He’d told me that it was normal. He said he had lots of friends who lived as man and wife with their daughters.”

There was no shortage of corroborative evidence. Her younger brother had seen them “snogging” (his word) and found intimate images of his sister in a tin box by his father’s bed. Higgins had once confided in a schoolfriend and talked to the girl’s parents about it. A neighbour had seen love bites on Higgins’s neck when she was about 13. Higgins’ mother – who didn’t live with the family at that time – had confronted Appleyard about their daughter’s allegations and he had replied: “You [CENSORED] prove it.” There was also a large tattoo on Higgins’ back that read, “Caz and Sam” with a rose in between (Sam was Appleyard’s nickname). The tattoo had been his idea and he had taken Higgins to the tattoo parlour, though she had never wanted it. (“I felt cheap,” she says. “He often used to call me a ‘slag’ and I felt like one with that tattoo on my back.”)

Higgins gave a 17-page statement, signed it and was given a painful internal examination. At the end of it, she was informed that Appleyard would not be charged. Apparently, the case wasn’t strong enough. There was no forensic evidence. The police told her that because her brother, who was 14, was a minor, his account was inadmissible. They said that, should the case reach court, her name and sexual history would be dragged through the mud. Could she handle it? Higgins said she couldn’t.

This happened in 1984. Decades later, in 2005, Higgins tried again, phoning West Yorkshire police to report historical sexual abuse, and then again in 2012. In 2013 and 2014, she instructed two sets of solicitors to write to the police on her behalf, and in 2014 she also walked into Normanton police station in West Yorkshire, waited five hours, then gave another police interview. In 2015, she reported it yet again, but in June 2017 she was informed that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had decided against prosecution. Police gave many reasons along the way, but much seemed to rest on her 1984 statement. It had been lost, so there was nothing to compare her account against. (Another time, she was told that it “hadn’t been lost”, it “just hadn’t been found”. Later, she was told it had been destroyed.)

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/aug/20/carol-higgins-father-abuse-how-we-survive