Abducted and trafficked at just 14 into paedophile ring

Leon Towers fled foster carers and tells Harriette Boucher how that led to him being repeatedly raped by group of men

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Leon Towers grew up without ever knowing what it meant to be loved. Born in 1975, he was six weeks old when he was found in his cot beside his father's body. His mother was arrested for the death, and by the time it was discovered that his father had taken his own life, Leon had already been placed in foster care.

That brief beginning was the last time he would see anything resembling a home. From there, the system meant to protect him delivered something else entirely.

In the foster home he grew up in, under rules he felt were designed to crush him, Leon spent the first 14 years of his life in torment: beaten, psychologically tortured, and told that his mother had murdered his father. When he was just eight-yearsold, he was forced to spend 14 hours standing naked in the freezing coal shed as a punishment for taking a piece of bread without asking.

He was forbidden from speaking and would go the whole weekend without saying a single word, desperate for the school week to roll around out of fear he would eventually lose his voice altogether.

Every mirror in the house was draped with towels so he couldn't see his own reflection; his foster parents would tell him it was because he was ugly. Each morning on his walk to school, Leon would be forced to fix his hair in wing mirror windows, with no other way to see what he looked like. Leon became a child nobody wanted to hear or see.

It was an era when sweeping public sector cuts introduced by the Thatcher government, combined with a surge in demand for social services, left local authorities unable to keep up. An already underfunded and poorly supervised care system meant vulnerable children easily fell through the cracks and were failed by those meant to protect them.

"I was held captive there, I couldn't escape... I was just living in this torture, this prison, this hell, and I couldn't escape it," he said.