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Trafficking survivor ‘told to blame Muslims’ in Lords speech [1]
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Date: 2023-06
Caitlin Spencer is the author of the 2017 book Please, Let Me Go: The Horrific True Story of a Girl's Life In The Hands of Sex Traffickers, which recounts her experience with child sexual exploitation in the UK. For our series on the politics of survivor engagement, we sat down with Caitlin to ask about her book, the speech she gave on trafficking in the House of Lords, and her interactions with the far right both online and in person. An explanation of how we produced this interview can be found at the end.
Joel Quirk (BTS): By way of introduction, could you say a few words about how your book came about?
Caitlin Spencer: People close to me kept telling me I should write a book. Eventually I thought: “You know what? I’m going to do it.”
I found a ghost writer, because I could talk about it, but I couldn’t put it to paper. She’s in Scotland, so I went up there for a few days, we talked, and she recorded the whole thing. She tends to work on these sorts of stories and was very sensitive and considerate around it. That’s rare – there aren’t many people who are.
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I proofread it after she was done. Not everything that happened to me is in there, but everything in the book is absolutely true and correct. I think she did a fantastic job. She got my voice out there, and based it on me and no one else. It’s my experience. It’s my story.
Joel: Your Twitter feed is full of exchanges about perpetrators and race. This seems to be a topic you’re either drawn to, or that you can’t escape. Is it because the theme of Asians and Muslims features so prominently in your book?
Caitlin: I’m still really glad I wrote my book, but I’m uncomfortable with what other people have done with it. People have taken parts of it and posted them on Twitter to say: “Oh, it was only Asians that this girl was abused by.” I tell them to stop but they don’t. When I tell them they’re wrong – and that I know what happened because it happened to me – they don’t just get angry. They want to argue with me about it.
The minute you talk about a non-Asian abuser, people get enraged. Especially the far right on Twitter. They say things like “you must be lying,” or “you’re a race traitor”. I had one guy say: “Yeah, but the Asians done it because they hate you. The white ones are just poorly, they’re not well.” I can be a bit of a loose cannon on Twitter, so I shot back with a list of what had happened from white guys to prove they're just as bad. It gets my back up when people use my story in that way. I hate it.
As I keep trying to explain to people, the group that trafficked me was Asian, but that’s because I was living in a majority Asian community at the time. It makes sense that they’d come from that same community. But that doesn’t make all Asians traffickers.
Joel: So the far right will effectively troll you if you challenge them, even though you’re a survivor of what they claim to be against?
Caitlin: Yeah. It can get intense. Once somebody wrote that "Her kids need throwing into the English Channel for bad genes," because my kids are the result of the rapes I endured. I get comments like that all the time.
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https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/caitlin-spencer-trafficking-survivor-says-she-was-told-to-blame-muslims-in-lords-speech/
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