1 GANGED RA*PED

Now, I go out and try to make myself happy. I also don't let threats get to me anymore.

Most men don't see me as only flesh and a hole where to ram it in, and I know that. I'm not disgusted by my body or by myself anymore. Counseling has helped so much, and I'm a volunteer at a local rape victims' support group. So you see, things can have if not a happy ending, a refreshing and peaceful start after Hell is over.

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RAPED AT THIRTEEN

I was 13 years old when my innocence was taken.

I had a whole life ahead of me. My rapist was my 8th grade teacher. He had asked me to stay after school for a project... Little did I know what his intentions were. I walked to the back of the room after school, to get something from the back closet. It was a walk in closet. Not very large. He followed me in and shut the door.

He grabbed me around the waist and grabbed my arms. He spun me around and threw me to the ground. I must have hit my head, because I blacked out for a minute, he was undoing my pants and had his belt in his hand. I screamed and he whipped me.

It seemed like it wasn't going to happen after, as I tried to convince myself, that it wouldn't. But it did. He began to touch all over my body with his hands, running them all over my hips, small tits and my panties, as I felt sudden cold sweep through my body.

He tried to use my hand on his self, forcing me to touch him too, but I declined and he hit me. He was forcing me to do many other crazy things, but I didn't want to. He seemed to have a dangerous smile plastered on his face.

He continued to undress me, to the point that I was naked. Laying on the cold floor. He was knelt over me. He began to undress and rape me. The whole time I cried and everytime I screamed he hit me. Harder. I wished in that moment I would have just died.

My whole body felt painful and weak, and I wished I could disappear far away from him. I began to plead and beg for the pain all over my body, but he turned instead and hit me with the whip.

He even tried choking me just to shut me up, but I held his arm and tried to take them off me. He pushed me back struggling to keep me still while he continued to thrust in.

He paused to catch a breath, and then continued with the act. I could no longer feel my legs anyone as they had somehow become stiff. My whole body also felt like they were going to be paralyzed.

The more I pleaded or screamed was the more he hit me.

When he was finished. He threw my clothes at me and said run. But if I ever told anyone, he'd make sure it was worse the next time.

I managed to get up, but unable to walk properly. The thought of letting what had just happened, happen a second time, even more worse than it did, made me keep it all to myself.

I couldn't concentrate well, and I wasn't enthusiastic about going to school anymore. I kept more to myself and hardly kept any friends.

But as the years began to go, I realized that I was hurting when I should try healing. It wasn't my fault, and I had a whole lot ahead that needed me to live. So I decided to quit the blame and tried to find happiness in doing the things I loved the most. I know he took alot from me, which I knew I had to get justice for.

It's been four years. And I've finally told

And soon getting justice for the many years he took away from me.

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I WAS GANG-RA*PED: EMILIA DI GIROLAMO

In October 1985, I attended a concert against my parents' wishes. By the end of the night I had been ga*ng raped.

The men, who were about six years older than me, were in a band, playing village halls and occasional support slots to bigger bands.

They talked about a world I knew nothing of, a glamorous world of recording and record contracts. Their faces pouted out of photo- graphs in the local paper. They were local celebrities. They were a gang with catchphrases I didn't understand, mostly referring to sex acts , and little hand signals that my best friend and I emulated and giggled over in the playground at lunchtime.

That night, I watched them on the stage high above me and when they smiled at me, pointed me out and waved, I felt grown-up and glamorous, and important. I had been seeing one of them, Liam, for three weeks and had met Phil and Simon once or twice. Liam asked me to arrange to stay out the night of the concert.

He suggested I lie to my parents and say I was at a girlfriend's house, so we could "spend the whole night together". I would have done anything he asked because I had fallen in love with this man who spoke of grown-up things, who said, "l can't believe you're only 14, you look so much older" - though the photos I gaze at now tell me that I didn't. He also told me that he couldn't believe I was a virgin when I first met him. Couldn't believe his luck, more like.

So I arranged my alibi and went to the concert. I wasn't plied with champagne but with cheap vodka. I didn't drink much of it and certainly wasn't drunk. I was never a teenage drinker.

After the concert, the men were on a high, enjoying the attention of their groupies. I waited while they circulated for half an hour and then they came over to me. Liam asked if I had made the arrangement to stay out. I said yes and he shuffled me out of the door quickly, followed by the others.

Liam asked if I would like to stay at Simon's house where we would "all be together" or go back to the fourth member of the band's bedsit. (He was also a model and actor and was having a party.) I didn't understand the hidden meaning.

I thought he wanted us to spend the night alone together at Simon's, so this was what I chose. This is what, he later told me, he took as my consent. Asking me where I wanted to stay was taken as consent to group sex.

The year before, our county had been terrorised by a rapist known as the Fox. Malcolm Fairley broke into houses during the night and raped women at gunpoint in front of their husbands. My father, desperate to protect his family, would stay up all night after barricading the windows. He was determined no rapist would get near us.

I felt safe, with my father watching over me. That was what I thought rape was, a man climbing through your window in the night. I never thought it would happen at a local music festival, the first I had ever attended, after days of begging and pleading with my parents. I didn't think Liam would spend three weeks getting to know me, before passing me on to his friends.

I was taken to a small modern house. There was a black leather sofa, black ash veneer furniture and Athena pictures of semi-naked women. It was a 1980s bachelor pad, I suppose, though I had never been in one before. I still had a Pierrot duvet cover. The men said they were tired and that we should go to bed. I followed them up the stairs, led by Liam. When we reached the room I looked around, confused. I asked

I asked Liam where we would sleep.

He said, "We'll all squeeze in together."

As the other men got into bed I asked

Liam if we could sleep downstairs, but Phil was growing impatient and told us to hurry up because he wanted to sleep, and Liam jumped at his command, hurrying me along. I left my shirt and underwear on and got into bed next to the man I had trusted, feeling embarrassed, knowing that I wouldn't sleep a wink.

The light went out and Liam started touching me. I whispered, no, said it wasn't right with his friends there, and asked again to go downstairs. But he wasn't even listening. He had sex with me. I won't say this was rape, though it was statutory rape because of my age, but I was uncomfortable and uncooperative, hating every second of it

I thought that if I just let him do it, it would be over and I would be able to wait out the long hours until it was safe to go home without arousing my parents' suspicions. But then the light was on and Phil said, "Can we join in?" And Liam said, "Be my guest." None of them asked me.

I won't torture the reader or myself with the details of what they did to me.

Suffice to say, I was the victim of a ramming" - one of their catchphrases. I was raped by Simon and Phil in turn, each with the "assistance" of the other. To this day I can still feel the chill metal of Phil's nipple-rings pressing against my flesh as I was torn apart in every sense. I often wake from nightmares where I am having the breath squashed out of me, a huge weight pushing down on me and the smell of his aftershave in my nose.

In Nicholas Meikle's words, like the 17-year-old girl, I "stayed for breakfast", though I didn't eat a thing. I watched them stuff their mouths with fried egg sandwiches and waited for them to drive me home.

I couldn't call my parents or go home early, or they would know I had lied and, like many teenagers, I was scared. So I waited and they drove me home. I ran a hot bath and began a ritual that would last for years, scrubbing my flesh in an attempt to get clean. Friends frequently joke about how obsessive-compulsive I am when it comes to cleaning but the truth of this obsession lies in that night.

I have lived with the shame and consequences of their actions for the past 18 years. The emotional repercussions have been enormous. Soon after the attack I attempted suicide but I never told a soul my secret

The men, however, bragged about the " three's up" as they put it. It wasn't seen as rape, though. It was seen as me being a slag, a willing participant in group sex even though I was a child with no experience of men like them, and almost no experience of sex. I have suffered from clinical depression, panic attacks, nightmares and many symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder ever since.