I have just been having a clear out and came across a newspaper cutting from 3 years ago.  Charlie Lee-Potter’s Special Report on child pornography. It recalled my experiences and feelings of the time my partner and I were driving through Germany on our way home to Spain from Poland. What I witnessed in the space of 10 mins, responses to it and  my actions have left me with feelings of disgust, anger, total amazement and disappointment at the level of deprivation the human race has reached and, as mentioned in her report, if we as bystanders do nothing then this evil will flourish.

 

You know the feeling when you sense something is not right? The sensation down your spine, the tingling in your arms and the sick feeling of dread in the pit of your stomach? And you KNOW….this is something you HAVE to do something about?

 

I am not a prude, neither is my head  buried in the sand. I am a mother of two, grandmother to four, I have been an Army wife, worked for the Probation Service for 19 years, I read a lot, I know what goes on in the world and I am well aware of the shit that can be perpetrated on women and children. But when you are faced with it, a few yards from where you are standing, it makes you sick. Recalling to mind what I witnessed, makes me angry and ashamed that I didn’t immediately do more to help. However – I used my camera and spent four hours with the German Police. I couldn’t have lived with myself if I had come home having done nothing. To have ignored what I saw would have been the same as giving my permission for this horror and evilness to go ahead.

 

It was purely by chance that we were where we were at 8.10am on the morning of Thursday 26^th May, 2005. We had driven to Poland a few days earlier to collect a caravan and were on our way home using the caravan as our nightly base.. In mainland Europe, truck drivers have very good facilities provided for them i.e. large parking areas, restaurants, coffee bars, shops showers, and we were using these to park each night. On the evening of Wednesday 25^th May we had reached such an area in Karl’s Ruhr, Germany, had coffee and went to bed. Next morning the car battery was flat. The answer? Call ADAC (the German AA/RAC). They would be arriving at about 8am. I spent my time photographing the trucks and reading. ADAC arrived at around 8.10am, the same time my partner returned to our car saying “Something funny going on over there. Go and see what you think. It’s two men and a girl” He went to deal with ADAC, I picked up my camera ( to this day I don’t know why) and wandered in the general direction of ‘over there’

 

I was expecting to see a couple of men and a young woman of say 18 or 19 years. What I actually saw were two men and a child of around 10 or 11 years. A girl.

 

 I knew immediately that the situation didn’t sit right. The scene itself spelt it out…the body language, the closeness and, as Charlie Lee-Potter says in her Report ‘the blank, empty face of the child’. An expression the NSPCC describes as ‘frozen watchfulness’. To me, the child looked emotionally numb; in fact she looked doped up to the eyeballs. One man was sitting on a low wall with the girl hugged and held to his side with his left arm; the second man was standing on her other side, facing them. They walked her to a waiting car, she was still being held to the man’s side, but the other man had closed in to them, cutting off any escape route. She was put into the back of a black Volkswagen Golf and the door closed. The two men stood with their backs to me, I used my camera to record the scene and the number plate, and then the men turned and saw me, camera in hand. I was scared. I stood my ground and became ‘a middle-aged female tourist taking photos of trucks’. With hindsight, should I have made conversation with them – about these lovely big vehicles and how my son drives one? I could at least have then picked up a language or accent. But I was scared. They got into the car and drove off at high speed. I walked back to our car knowing what I had seen – a child being toted around the truck stops being used for child prostitution……it could not have been anything else. I had not witnessed some cosy family scene. I had witnessed a young girl being used, her rights to a childhood ignored, being dragged around wherever and subjected to abuses which I, as a grown woman, would run away from. She couldn’t run anywhere. The look of numbness on that child’s face and the sense that any form of escape was denied to her will remain in my mind for ever.

 

She could have been taken anywhere – there are very few borders in Europe now – and with a vast, efficient motorway system winding its way through one country to another. ..she could even be dead.

 

On returning to our car, I made notes of what I had seen and felt, descriptions of the men and the child and I had a photo. We drove down the motorway and stopped at the next Service area – this one having a Motel and a Church, where I was sure someone could speak better English than I can speak German. I was in luck; the receptionist at the Motel spoke excellent English. I told her what I had witnessed and she said she would call the Police. I then spent the next four hours with the German Police, who I must stress were excellent. When I told them I had a photo it became like a scene from a TV drama – 7 uniformed officers checking the image, tracking details etc through their data base. I then made a 3 page statement and was told that the Criminal Police may want to speak to me when I got home.

 

Leaving the Police Station four hours later, I asked my partner (who had stayed in the car) if I hadn’t been with him, would he have reported the ‘something strange’ he had seen? The answer – No. This response both shocked and surprised me. But I have had exactly the same response when mentioning the incident to other couples. The men all said No or didn’t express an opinion one way or another The women have all been encouraging for the action I took and that, like me,they couldn’t have left the matter and come home.

 

Charlie Lee-Potter stated that 99% of child sex abuse is carried out by men – the same gender whose response is ‘don’t rock the boat’. She also wrote in her report ‘…many countries, including the U.S refuse to legislate against pay-per-view child porn sites on the internet because they are obsessed with protecting freedom at any cost’. What about the freedom of the children? What freedom did the child I saw being toted around have? Charlie Lee-Potter is right in saying we all have a duty to these children and to fail to protect them, is a crime itself.