Brave victim of serial rapist Joseph McCann ‘disturbed by nightmares and pain’ as she battles PTSD

April 21 — Watford, Hertfordshire
4am: 21-year-old woman abducted outside Pryzm nightclub, driven to her home and raped in her own bed.

April 25 — Walthamstow, London
12.30am: A woman aged 25 is abducted while walking home from the Tube and subjected to 14-hour ordeal.

April 25 — Edgware, London
12.15pm: A 21-year-old woman is abducted but her sister, 18, escapes. The 21-year-old and 25-year-old earlier victim manage to escape in Watford.

May 5 — Haslingden, Lancashire
Early hours: A mother is tied up in her own home while her daughter, 17, and son, 11, are raped and sexually assaulted in the room next door.

May 5 — Ramsbottom, Greater Manchester
1.30pm: A 71-year-old woman loading her car with shopping at Morrisons is abducted and raped. She is still in the car when McCann strikes again.

May 5 — Heywood, Greater Manchester
3.30pm: A 13-year-old girl is kidnapped and sexually assaulted. She and the 71-year-old woman escape at Knutsford services shortly before 6pm.

May 5 — Congleton, Cheshire
6.30pm: Two 14-year-old girls are abducted in the Fiat Punto stolen from the 71-year-old woman.

In 2008, McCann had been ordered to serve a sentence of Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) when he burgled the home of an 85-year-old man and threatened to stab him.

This meant after a minimum term of two-and-a-half years he’d be freed from jail only when the Parole Board decided it was safe to do so.

He was out licence from prison when he was arrested in August last year for burglary and should have been recalled to jail – allowing the Parole Board to be informed by the Probation Service about the case.

But he was instead remanded into custody and then given a three-year determinate sentence, which did not take into account his earlier offending.

And like London Bridge terrorist Usman Khan, McCann was then automatically freed to carry out further crimes.

Following his arrest in May, the Ministry of Justice carried out a serious further offence review into McCann’s case.

The review is understood to have identified an error in the probation service failing to recall McCann when he committed the burglary.

Of four probation staff in the South East and Eastern division who were directly involved in McCann’s supervision, one was demoted, according to PA.

Jo Farrar, chief executive of HM Prisons and Probation Service, has “apologised unreservedly” for failings in the case.

‘I am requesting that this statement be read out in court because during the last few months I have looked for reassurance that I am not alone in the stories of other victims and survivors.

‘I hope that putting this on the record can do the same for someone else. My thoughts are constantly with the other victims of these attacks.

‘Immediately after the incident, I was scared to go home and didn’t go back to my house for weeks. I found it difficult to sleep and was very physically weak even walking up and down the stairs was hard, I barely left the house and didn’t go to work.

‘I had to move house, which was an expensive and emotionally distressing process — my house, my road and my neighbourhood was now full of reminders which triggered flashbacks and made me feel constantly unsafe. I lost a tight-knit community of neighbours.

‘I felt acutely aware that everyone on the road knew what had happened. I could no longer share a home with my housemate, who was also traumatised by what had happened. I couldn’t travel anywhere unaccompanied, or be in the house alone. It took me weeks to be able to walk a few doors down the road to a local shop on my own, with my thumb hovering over the button on the panic phone in my pocket.

‘When I went back to work, I had to be accompanied to and from my workplace by my partner or a friend, and take much more regular breaks as I now often feel overwhelmed by time spent with a lot of people.

‘I am still unable to walk around after dark. I have to be picked up at the tube station to walk home in the evening. Even in the daytime I often feel jumpy and afraid, at home or outside.

‘Going for a run, going out for the evening, going on holiday — doing any of these things alone is now impossible, and it will take a long time to regain that freedom.

‘This is a significant and limiting change in my lifestyle. I used to be a very independent person with very little fear of going out and doing things alone. I am now much more dependent on other people, which changes those relationships.

‘It also impacts my partner, his studies and his social life as he spends time helping me, even as he suffers with the traumatic psychological fallout of having heard me being abducted and having feared that I was dead.

‘I have found some solace in therapeutic activities and techniques which help to ease my mind from dissociative episodes, intrusive thoughts and flashbacks.

‘This means that my life as a young woman in her twenties looks very different to how it did — I spend more time at home, managing my trauma, where I used to spend my time throwing myself into the work I love, hanging out with friends, living spontaneously and engaging gregariously with the world. This has been a huge loss for me, especially at what was such an exciting time in my life and career.

‘As things stand now, I am still unable to take on as much work or the same kinds of work that I used to. I’ve suffered a huge loss of income as a result of this, and this financial precarity makes me feel worried and insecure.

‘Where I used to find work joyful and purposeful, my limited energy and inability to focus or concentrate now means that my work is a source of stress. It is difficult to have the motivation to do even the most basic tasks at work, at home or for my own self-care.

‘I suffer from chronic pain throughout my body as a result of both whiplash and the assault, but am nervous about seeking physical treatment which might trigger my body’s memory of the assault.

‘A routine smear test would mean reliving the forensic process I underwent hours after being attacked, and I worry about my health as a result. My sleep remains disturbed by nightmares and physical pain, and I am chronically fatigued.

‘I continue to have flashbacks, to dissociate and to have intrusive and emotionally distressing thoughts as a result of the trauma incurred. This has also led me to avoid things which could remind me of the event and trigger that response, such as my old neighbourhood, or physical intimacy with my partner.

‘I now rigorously check for distressing content before I read a book, watch a film or TV programme or go to a play. I have lost interest in things I used to love, like playing music and going swimming.

‘These things that came easily to me, that were so much of who I am, have become hard work.

‘I have become more socially isolated from my friends and peers, because it’s hard to be close to someone if they don’t know what I’m going through, but it’s even harder to tell them, and several months of silence or superficial conversation takes its toll on a relationship.

‘I often feel like I’m hiding a terrible secret, and I can’t connect with people like I used to as a result. When I do spend time working or socialising, I am having to work hard to seem like my old self, which takes twice the energy.

‘On the other hand, the people who do know my partner, family and close friends, as well as my employer at the time now know far more than I would have been comfortable disclosing to them, as a result of the graphic details of the assault which were gratuitously published in the press throughout the trial.

‘When I think about what they have discovered in the news, and how they must feel about that, I feel exposed and vulnerable all over again, and sad that I can’t protect them from that horror. Witnessing the ripples of trauma that have affected mine and my partner’s family and friends has been very distressing.

‘My partner and I now both exhibit the symptoms of PTSD and it’s hard to hold on to our relationship as we knew it whilst balancing caring for each other in a traumatised state.

‘The process of seeking help for the effects of this trauma has been complicated, After being told there was a waiting list of eight months to a year for long-term counselling, I sought counselling myself after several months as a way to have some control over that process.

‘I am now in therapy, but paying for it myself makes me feel let down and like I am betraying the services that I know should be available for victims and survivors. I have been met with the utmost care, empathy and respect by nurses, doctors, advisers and police officers, to whom I owe more thanks than it is possible to express.

‘However, the evident scarcity, underresourcing and overstretching of specialist services for survivors has intensified my sense of isolation and abandonment by a society in which I used to feel safe. It feels like what has happened to me is not a social priority unless it’s being sensationalised in the news.

‘Whilst I am glad that justice is being sought, the trial was also an intensely traumatic event in which I had to relive what happened to me in great detail.

‘The misplaced guilt which often plagues victims of rape and sexual assault is well-known and documented, and my experience has been no different.

‘The questions I was asked when I testified in court were therefore not new to me. They are the same questions which keep me up at night and go round and round my mind in the day — could I, should I have acted differently, got away sooner? Was this failure to escape sooner than I did in some way my fault?

‘The defence’s questions echoed, and threatened to confirm, these intrusive and distressing thoughts. The fact that I am here to write this statement is testament to the answer: no. I had one chance. I did what I could in a situation that thankfully most people have no experience or understanding of – a situation for which nothing in my life had prepared me — and I survived.

‘The future now looks very different for me. Before this crime, I was optimistic about my life and I felt safe in the world.

‘My friendships and my career were flourishing, I was planning to take my driving test, and the plants I’d sown in my old garden were beginning to bear fruit. My partner and I were talking about starting a family together in the next three years.

‘My aspirations, both small and big, and my vision of a positive future, have been violently taken from me. To replace a life of thriving with one of surviving is deeply demoralising and difficult.

‘I can only hope that this process will take us one step closer to building a society in which rape and sexual assault are never excused, in which the voices of victims and survivors are heard and respected, and in which this can never happen to anybody else.’