A kidnapped British teenager was saved after 13 years of abuse thanks to two words scribbled on a piece of paper: "Help me".
Anna Rushton escaped years of being beaten, abused and used as a sex slave by her captor by writing the short note and passing it to a visiting health worker.
Despite the horrific treatment she endured, in which her captor SOLD the babies she had by him, it took Anna years to work up the courage to escape.
But she eventually wrote the pleading note when a health worker was visiting to check on Anna, whose name has been changed for her own safety.
On the note, she included a date when she knew her captor and his family would be distracted by prayers for the Islamic festival of Eid. When her health visitor came to the house she dropped it on the floor.
Anna remembers: “I think she must have had an inkling, because she put her foot on it, then picked it up.” When the woman handed her a form to sign she had written on it: “I will ring the house phone three times when I’m outside.”
The plan had everything stacked against it, but by miracle, it worked. As expected, the family were occupied with prayers, and after the phone rang Anna asked to go to the toilet – they let her. Anna had planned to try the back door – but with an incredible stroke of luck, a key had been left in the front and she managed to get out to her rescuer.
By the time they alerted police, Anna's captor, Malik, had already been in touch, claiming his “wife” had run away and “suffered severe mental illness”.
But eventually, Anna managed to get the police to believe her story.
However, she was too terrified to press charges.
Anna is 44 and has been free for 16 years. To this day she has never felt strong enough to face her captor in court and give evidence to bring him to justice. The police have tried to change her mind, even telling her a later victim is willing to speak out if she does. But as part of her therapy, instead Anna has chosen to commit her memories to paper and has written a book, Secret
Slave, to help her cope with her trauma.
She hopes, in time, she will be able to take her captor to court
Anna's ordeal started in 1987, just two days after her 15th birthday. Anna told how she was a vulnerable teen staying with a friend of her mum’s before she was lured by Malik – an Asian taxi
driver who worked at the Midlands rank where she helped out.
“My nana died when I was ten and my parents didn’t want me,” Anna explains.
“If anyone showed me affection I grabbed hold of that,” she adds. “Malik would ask me how I was. It was nice to have someone interested.
“When he asked me to go back to his house for tea he knew no one would miss me."
She says Malik lived with his brothers, their wives, children and his mother.
Anna recalls: "They gave me milky tea and chapattis and even when Malik said I should stay the night I thought nothing of it, I assumed he would take me home in the morning.”
Instead, she says, Malik came into her room and branded her a
“filthy white s***” who he would “make his own”.
He turned on her with the most violent physical abuse and sickening rape imaginable, then locked the bedroom door.
This torture and pain would be repeated almost every night
for 13 years.
One of his brothers also took to visiting her. And, seeing an opportunity to make money, Malik eventually prostitued her to men who would visit the house. Malik’s family turned a blind eye.
The wives were sometimes friendly, on occasion sneaking her painkillers. They would draw heavy kohl make-up around her eyes to hide her bruises.
“But they were scared to say anything,” she says. “They were being abused too.”
The only time Malik let up in his abuse was when Anna was pregnant. She carried four children during her captivity. The reason for Malik’s apparent care soon became clear. He wanted to sell her babies – as she quickly learned after giving birth to her
first, a boy.
Anna was overjoyed when she realised she was pregnant. She admits: “When you feel a baby move in your stomach you feel you have someone with you, you are not alone.”
But when her firstborn arrived in hospital, Malik quickly got her discharged and whisked him away. He did this for all four of their children together.
“I barely held any of my babies, I did not get the chance to be a mother to them,” Anna says.
Each time, she would be marched out to hold her children for health visitors. But once contact stopped, the baby would be sold.
“I do not know where they are,” she admits.
It seems astonishing that no professional raised the alarm when they met this mute, six-stone girl. Once, the police visited the house when Anna’s screams were heard – but Malik convinced them all was fine. For herself, Anna says she simply became too terrified to escape.
“Twice I tried to get out of the back door but I got such a beating,” she admits.
Instead, she made regular attempts to kill herself – with painkillers, by throwing herself down the stairs, and even by trying to strangle herself with her scarf. “But I couldn’t bear
the choking,” she says.
Anna admits she would eventually have ended it all, had not finally been for the help of the health visitor who saved her
from captivity.
"I think my nana was watching over me," said Anna of the woman who brought her up.
Anna fears it was because Malik was Asian that authorities she encountered during her captivity asked no questions.
She says: “Malik dressed me in his culture’s clothes, dyed my hair black, made me wear a scarf and keep my head down. When he spoke for me they thought it was a cultural thing. And I think people are scared to be accused of discrimination.”
“There are a lot of vulnerable girls like I was. This could be happening on any street.”
Sounding more broken than angry, she adds: “I feel let down.”
After her escape, Anna stayed under police protection, briefly, then stayed with her mother who seemed unconcerned about where she had been. Neither of her parents made any attempt to search for her after she went missing nor had social services.
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