In April 2018, Sam was in her mid-20s and had recently arrived in London from New Zealand. Having run out of money, she went to an interview for work as an escort, which is where she met Nuruzzaman Shahin. He took her passport, told her he needed to inspect her body as part of the interview, locked her in a room in which she was dimly aware of camera equipment and raped her. She found out soon afterwards that he had also raped another woman, Gabrielle, and a third, Hannah. More survivors would continue to surface.
From this point on, she was trafficked by Shahin; that is a matter of fact, settled in a later case by the Home Office, yet he has never been charged with trafficking Sam, or anyone else.
“One time, he made me go and collect another girl from this pub,” she says, when we meet in her flat in west London. “I knew what was going to happen; I couldn’t say anything. I took this girl upstairs. She was young, Brazilian, I think, and I remember sitting in the next room hearing him rape her. When she came out, I could barely look at her, she could barely look at me. He decided he didn’t see any use for her, opened the door and let her out. He’d smeared her lipstick across her face. He turned to me and said: ‘Ugly bitch.’ I felt awful, because this girl thought I had set her up. But no, he had set me up.”
Five months after her rape, Sam reported it to the police. “I was younger. I had this idea: I’ll go to the police, they’ll do something straight away and he’ll just go to prison.” Sam deals in laconic understatement and disarming straightforwardness. “I think I was just quite naive.”
It didn’t feel possible to be disappointed in the Metropolitan police. Not after Wayne Couzens, known by colleagues as “the rapist”, a jocular term in general use for years before he raped and murdered Sarah Everard; not after David Carrick, whose work nickname was “bastard Dave”, was convicted of sexual offences spanning his career; not after the failures in the specialist sex crimes unit, Sapphire, which resulted in its closure; not after the dehumanising behaviour of police investigating the murders of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman. It didn’t feel possible because expectations were already so low.
Yet the way Sam was treated, the lengths to which she had to go to bring her rapist to justice, are staggering. The conviction rate for reported rape in England and Wales is below 1%, a statistic that has passed into the zone of remarkable but familiar. To understand what that means, which is for sexual violence effectively to have been decriminalised, you need to walk with a survivor. This is the story of Catching My Rapist, a documentary that aired this week on ITV.
Making it wasn’t a linear process. There is a sequence in which she goes back to the street where Shahin lived and sees his bedroom window from a car: “After that, I panicked. It was a mixture. I felt I shouldn’t be this close to that place, and I worried that I could be hampering the police’s investigation.” They paused the film for a year.
But what she could not have known is that the police had also paused. Shortly after making her report, she had been moved into a safe house, as Shahin knew her address. “Those first two years were a weird time. I was waiting for the police to do something, because that’s what you would expect them to do. I ended up just yelling at them a lot of the time. ‘He’s still out there and is raping other women and you’re OK with that?’ Excuse my language, but that’s really fucked up.” The staff at the safe house were concerned – they needed updates to manage Sam’s status within the refuge. They heard nothing.
This limbo continued until August 2019, when Sam received an NFA, a notice to say the police would be taking no further action. It remains impossible to ascertain how much evidence the police had gathered or deemed lacking in order to reach this conclusion; a lot of what they had, they had lost. In documents unearthed later, the Met said explicitly that it intended to stop worrying about the 2018 victims, in order to focus on the women who came forward later. Sam was one of three women that she knows of making the same charge in similar terms in the same time frame, and two others prior to that, against the same man. She even gave the police a recording of a driver who worked for Shahin challenging him with the rape allegations, in which Shahin effectively admitted it.
One clue that may help explain the police’s inertia came in Sam’s second police interview. “The first police officer was really lovely. The second said to me: ‘I don’t know how you girls do what you do.’ And I thought: I don’t know how you do your job, because you’ve just told me you don’t believe me. She was pointing to the sex work, saying: well, it’s dangerous. She disregarded what we were telling her – that, no, there’s a difference between sex work and being raped.”
This is a running theme in the language used almost universally by police and in the courts. A QC, now KC, at one hearing relating to Sam said: “I don’t mean to cast any moral judgment, but she chose a line of work known to be dangerous.” Shahin’s victims were routinely described as “complex” or “vulnerable” – the subtext being that these women made victims of themselves, so how can anyone commit a sex crime against them?
If that sounds like a reach, it is there in the action: until Sam challenged the NFA, with the help of a lawyer at the Centre for Women’s Justice, Shahin had never stood trial for any act of sexual violence, despite his immigration hearing detailing multiple allegations. “We’re not all these broken women, necessarily,” Sam says. “A lot of us are very educated, we’ve done degrees. Don’t stick us all in a box stamped with ‘sex worker’.”
A month after she heard the investigation was over, Sam’s visa expired. She took the Home Office to court successfully over its failure to identify her as a victim of human trafficking. Winning that recognition meant she couldn’t be removed from the UK, but it also stripped her of her right to work or access education. Speaking of trying to subsist on the statutory £39 a week to which she was entitled, she says: “You’re going to struggle to pay the import tax on your birthday present from your dad.”
However, realising there was no police investigation to hinder, she picked up filming again. Her profile was still on a sex work website; Shahin was selling another woman as Sam, using her passport details and photograph. She managed, with a friend, to book that woman – who turned out to be Romanian – and talk to her. She also contacted Gabrielle and tried to contact other women to build enough evidence to get the case reopened. She would later have to answer questions about whether this amounted to “collusion”.
More outrageous still, when the police found out about the film after the case reopened, they took the film-maker, Richard Parry, to court when he refused to hand over his footage. “They could find the energy to do that, but not even enough energy to remove an illegal profile on [the sex work website], when he was using my passport as a means to traffic other women.” Parry won that case, but in the process the trial of Shahin was delayed by another year. Three witnesses lost heart and dropped out, meaning three charges had to be dropped.
In December, Shahin was found guilty of 22 charges – including all five crimes against Sam and four of the five against Gabrielle – and later sentenced to 31 years in prison. Sam, who spent nearly five years bringing him to justice, feels that she lost a lot of her youth to that fight. She also thinks there is more to uncover, since trafficking charges were never brought against Shahin.
The rape has left her with deep residual anxieties. “The first interview I went to after I was allowed to work, they asked me for my passport. I just froze. It was completely anxiety-inducing. What are you going to do with it? Where are you going to take it? This may be a completely different situation, but I’ve experienced this before and it went really wrong. I just broke down, All the time thinking: ‘I’m definitely not getting this job. They’ll be thinking: ‘There’s going to be a lot of emotional labour to this girl.’”
She got the job. She has settled status in the UK until the end of next year, and now works for a charity dealing with modern slavery, which is mostly very rewarding and sometimes overwhelming. It is impossible not to admire her tenacity, resilience and wit, but this is not a feelgood story. This, as she says, is fucked up.
Some names have been changed