‘What do I tell him? How do I tell him?’

Sammy Woodhouse faced a conversation with her son that no mother should ever need to have.

At the age of 15, she was subjected to the most horrific abuse imaginable on a daily basis, including rape, assaults and threats to kill her family if she told anyone about it.

It was that string of sexual abuse at the hands of the ringleader of one of Britain’s most notorious grooming gangs that led her to become pregnant.

She was one of 18 girls in Rotherham who called Arshid Hussain her boyfriend, without realising the level of suffering she was being subjected to by a gang leader.

Hussain was locked up for 35 years in 2016 for offences against nine different girls after Sammy opened up about what had happened.

A further 18 gang members, including two of Hussain’s brothers, were also put behind bars for their shocking crimes.

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Now 37, Sammy has recalled the moment she had to try and explain to her son exactly how he was born and who his father was.

She said it wasn’t until her son was around 12 years old that she started to come to terms with the fact she was abused and exploited and decided to come forward.

‘It just got to the point where I had to tell my son,’ she said while speaking on Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4.

‘I wasn’t really sure how to go about things but in the end I decided to just be honest with him and try and tell him as much, and as age appropriately, as I could.’

Sammy is now an activist against child abuse and has spoken about how the children of rape survivors – including her own son – are not given enough support.

She said: ‘As a mother and child going through this, there was no support for me as a mum on how to tell him or how to help him get through this.

‘Now for my son, he had to deal with [the fact] his mum had just disclosed to him that she had been abused and exploited. 

‘The person he knew, his dad, was the person that committed it.’

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