The police did not see Fazeen as a credible witness and thought she was complicit with the abuse
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Fazeen was groomed and abused by a teacher in her secondary school.
She feels that the police might have treated the case differently if she had been white and the abuser had been Asian, instead of the other way round.
Fazeen was initially happy in school; she enjoyed learning. She is Asian, but most of the teachers were white.
When she was 14 years old, she began having lessons with a teacher, Mr Green, who was in his 40s and married. Very soon, he began giving Fazeen a lot of attention which she found flattering.
Another female pupil warned Fazeen about the behaviour of Mr Green, but Fazeen thought he was ‘super-cool and attractive’. She believed that he loved her and she felt this other girl was jealous.
Very soon, Fazeen says, Mr Green became very controlling in terms of what she did and how she looked, and he cut her off from her friends. The teacher sexually abused her numerous times on school premises, in parks, cars and in his marital home, and he insisted that she should always be available to him.
Mr Green also emotionally abused Fazeen by threatening to harm himself if she ended the relationship or reported it.
Fazeen was unhappy at home because her parents were very strict. At one point she left home and stayed in a hostel, where Mr Green visited her. When the hostel manager queried these visits, Fazeen said he was her ‘boyfriend’ and that they had begun a relationship at school when she was underage.
After this Mr Green was arrested by the police and questioned. But he concocted a story to explain his behaviour. Fazeen agreed to go along with it, and he was not charged.
She managed to leave him for a short time when she met someone else, but when this relationship ended, she returned to the perpetrator.
By this time Fazeen was struggling with mental health problems, and was self-harming. She says she was ‘completely dependent’ on Mr Green, and describes herself as ‘a sex slave’.
Eventually, when she was in her early 20s, she ended the relationship and went to the police again.
However, the investigation was not taken forward, and Fazeen says the police seemed to consider that she consented to the relationship and would make an unreliable witness.
Fazeen feels that she has been dismissed as being ‘complicit’ in her abuse. She would like to see a greater understanding of the imbalance of power that exists in a relationship between a teacher and a pupil.
She also believes that race was a factor and that if she had been a white girl abused by an Asian man, the case would have been viewed differently.
Fazeen still finds what happened to her as a school girl extremely distressing, and she feels that Mr Green has ‘got away with it’.