Jayden Sheeran’s mother was just 14 years old when she was raped by a member of a grooming gang.
Jodie Sheeran was plied with Malibu before being taken to a hotel room by a group of older men for an ‘Eid party’.
She woke hours later and remembered only regaining consciousness to find she had been raped at a hotel in Blurton, Staffordshire.
When her parents rushed to the police station to see her, she was ‘delirious’ and ‘under the influence’, and was covered in a ‘sort of a curry powder’ all over her body.
After Jodie called the police on that night in 2004, a man in his mid-20s – believed to be Jayden’s father – was arrested and charged, but in a devastating blow to the family, the CPS dropped the case before it reached trial.
Nearly two decades later in 2022, Jodie tragically died having never found justice.
Now Jayden, 19, who was conceived as a result of that traumatic night, still battles daily with the struggles he has had to face as the child of a victim of rape.
Any opportunity of having a ‘normal’ relationship with his mum was ‘robbed’ from him before he was even born, and he has had to grow up knowing that his ‘father’ is a rapist who roams free.
He told MailOnline: ‘Just growing up I always felt a bit different to everyone else.
‘I never called her mum. I always called her by her name. I never ever called her mum or anything like that. Just because I didn’t know anything else.’
Jayden, 19, is the child of a victim of rape. His mother, Jodie, was raped by a grooming gangs predator in 2004
Jayden and his gran, Jodie’s mum Ange, are still fighting for justice
Jodie died in 2022 aged 33. The family say she never recovered from what had happened to her
Jayden is now fighting for more support to be awarded to children of rape – who are now officially recognised as victims in their own right under the Victims Bill – and is also in the process of suing authorities over their failures to protect both Jodie and him.
Following her death to alcohol ketoacidosis, Jodie’s mum Ange requested the CPS to reopen the case into her daughter’s rape, but claims she was told to ‘let it go’.
In a sit down interview with MailOnline, Jayden and Ange opened up about the family’s decades-long ordeal.
About a week or so after the rape, Jodie had to go to a clinic for sexually transmitted diseases, which is where it was found she was pregnant.
Jodie decided to keep the baby, but was moved to a safe house after she was met with threats from groups of Asian men to drop the charges, leading to her giving birth miles from home under an alias and using secret passwords.
When Jayden was born, Jodie is said to have held him up, looked at him, and said ‘take him away now, get him off me’.
From just a few months old, Jodie’s parents Ange and Dave took shared parental responsibility of Jayden and took the lead role in bringing him up.
Describing how his complex relationship with his mum has affected him, he said: ‘It’s mental. I can’t describe how it makes you feel.
‘She was lovely with me, she would do anything for me, but our relationship was more like brother and sister.
‘All mates would say ‘oh my mums making tea, this and that’ and all my mates when I was at school used to ask ‘why don’t you call your mum, mum,’ and I didn’t know, I just thought it was normal. I hadn’t even questioned it.
‘And now, knowing how my mum felt when she gave birth to me, that’s sent me even more west.
Jayden is also campaigning for more support to be provided in legislation for children conceived as a result of rape
Jodie was working as a carer when in 2022 she was found dead, with the official cause being alcohol ketoacidosis
Jodie, pictured with Jayden and her daughter Isha
Mother Ange, pictured with Jodie when she was just a few years old
‘The way I’ve been feeling over the last couple years it’s hard to describe.’
The family say the effects of grooming, paired with the CPS’ ‘failure’ to prosecute her rapist, meant Jodie struggled throughout her life to overcome the ordeal.
She would fall in and out of alcoholism and would find herself in abusive relationships.
But she would never mention her rapist, bar one occasion.
Ange said: ‘She mentioned him to me once.
‘As Jayden was getting older, she turned round and said ‘do you think he looks like…’ and she said his name.
‘She said ‘do you think he looks like him?
‘That was the only time she mentioned him like that. It was heartbreaking.’
While Ange knew the name of her rapist, she never came face-to-face with him.
Jayden, however, has had encounters with him, and says he now constantly ‘looks over his back’ as he speaks out about his mother’s rape publicly.
He said: ‘While my mum was alive, he rang me on the phone.
‘I was trying to get in contact with him, this was before she passed away, and he was saying to me that if I went to live with him that he’d look after me but that I’d have to follow his rules, this and that.
‘And he was saying that he needed to see me and my mum.
‘But I didn’t even tell my mum I was speaking to him at this point so I said no.
‘After that I didn’t get back in contact with him or anything like that.
‘But when my mum passed away a couple of years later, I’d gotten hold of him again and he was like ‘I don’t know who you are’.
‘He was nasty, you could tell he was a nasty man.
Jodie with Jayden in Christmas 2004. Their relationship is said to have been more like that of a ‘brother and sister’ than parental
Ange and Jayden looked solemn as they spoke about their decades-long battle to get Jodie justice
‘He was trying to meet up with me, and I didn’t know what he was going to do if he met up with me so that’s why I tried to keep myself to myself and kept my head down.
‘And then a few weeks ago when I finished work I saw him in a takeaway but he didn’t even recognise me.
‘He didn’t recognise me at all.
‘I knew it was him straight away and I thought ‘if I say the wrong thing now I don’t know what could happen’. It was very intimidating.
‘I did say ‘do you know who I am’ as I was leaving, and he came back with a nasty comment.
‘He said something like ‘do you know who I am little boy?’
‘I just walked away.’
While Jayden and the family feel let down at the fact Jodie’s rapist is still able to roam the streets, he says this is a wider scale issue and there are ‘more out there’ like him.
He said: ‘He is just one of them.
‘I can’t stand him, I’ll never understand why he’s done what he’s done.
‘But he’s just one of them, he’s one of a bad bunch, and there’s more out there like him.’
Jayden now has a son of his own.
He said: ‘My partner at the time was pregnant when my mum was still alive so my mum knew I was going to have a baby.
‘And then it was the February after the November she died that he was born, so obviously I was still broken at this time.
‘It ruined mine and my son’s relationship.
‘It was really bad.
The pair hope the government will take grooming gangs seriously and investigate what they feel must have happened in ‘every city and town in the UK’
Jodie had reported the rape to police when it happened at the age of 14. A man was charged but the CPS told the family they were dropping the case the day before it was set to go to trial
‘Now having my own son, I know I never got to have that relationship with my mum, I was robbed of it.
‘That’s why I now take a step up with my son because I never had a dad, so I’ll be there for my son as much as I can.’
The family have recently detailed Jodie’s story in a new documentary produced by Rotherham grooming gang survivor Sammy Woodhouse.
They are campaigning for the grooming gang inquiry to be taken seriously as they say they believe the issue is rife across the UK.
Jayden said: ‘I presume this has happened in every single town, every city in Great Britain.
‘100 per cent it will be.
‘I’m determined to do whatever it takes to get it sorted. I’ll do whatever it takes.’
Speaking of her grandson’s plight, Ange looked at Jayden as she said: ‘It’s heartbreaking because it’s ruined him for life.
‘Ruined him for life.’
‘I used to have a lot of dreams and things like that but they’re all out the window for me now’, Jayden added.
‘Hopefully I can find a way through but as it stands I don’t see a way out.’
‘I didn’t even know it was grooming’
Ange remembers vividly how her daughter’s personality changed before she was abused by the gang.
However, she admits that more than 20 years ago she had never heard of the term ‘grooming’.
‘I didn’t even know it was grooming back then, I didn’t even know it was grooming,’ Ange said as she spoke in the conservatory of their home.
‘It was only when I watched the drama Three Girls and Jodie was sitting next to me that I said ‘oh my god, that’s a replica of you.’
‘And that’s when I knew then that she’d been groomed.’
Detailing how the grooming began when Jodie was around 13, she said: ‘You could see a change in her, in her personality, her behaviour.
‘She was going missing, not coming in at the right time, things like this.
‘In 2003, my other daughter, Chantelle, she contracted meningococcal septicemia, and it was terrible. So she was rushed to A&E in an ambulance, and by the time she got to the hospital she was covered, she was black and blue.
‘Anyway, my husband went, and I had to stay because I had a baby at the time. And the hospital rang and said can all the family get up here you need to say your goodbyes.
‘So obviously she had to be resuscitated, sedated, everything like that. This was when we were living at the hospital.
‘Jodie had been her behaviour had changed, going missing, prior to this. But we must have been living at the hospital for about two months and in that time, this is when she was vulnerable.
‘I put my hands up, I couldn’t give her the attention she deserved. I did my best with all of them but it was so so hard not knowing if your daughter is going to live or die. She was eleven years old.
‘So this is when she’d go missing. She wouldn’t come the hospital with us. She’d physically try to jump out of the car, the bedroom window.
‘It was terrible. Honestly the amount of times I would report her missing because I was told to report her missing every single time which I did.
‘And then she’d arrive back early hours of the morning and they’d either leave her on my front door or my back doorstep and she was just out of it, completely from drink or whatever it was.
‘The police each time they brought her back they said ‘look if she keeps doing what she’s doing, she’s putting herself in danger, if she keeps doing what she’s doing, she’s going to end up dead or raped.’
‘They knew what was happening at the time because they were finding her in cars with older men. They were all older than her, she was 14.
‘Not once were they in trouble. It was always Jodie, making out like she was that naughty girl, that tearaway, that runaway.’
Recalling the night the rape happened, she said she had once again reported Jodie missing to the police.
Jodie had started going missing at the age of 13 when a group of older men began grooming her
Pictured: Jodie with her grandad, who has since also passed away
A snap taken by Jodie when she was about to go off to work. Ange says she was so devastated by the death she has slept on the sofa ever since
It was around 2 or 3am that they then had a knock on the door from the police, informing them that they had Jodie and that she was asking for them.
Ange said of when she got to Longton Police Station and saw Jodie: ‘I’d never seen anything like it.
‘She was under the influence. She was delirious, delirious.
‘The reports after they tested her blood, they said the amount of alcohol in her system, she wouldn’t have known what planet she was on because of her body weight.
‘Then she kept saying ‘they’ve stabbed me, they’ve injected me with something’, she kept pointing to her leg.
‘She was covered in like all this curry thing. It was all over her. I was like ‘what have they done to you’.
CCTV cameras at Tollgate Hotel, Blurton, is said to have shown a group of older men taking Jodie up the stairs to a hotel room that night.
But, Ange added: ‘That wasn’t the only hotel she’d been to.
‘Because many a time we’d drive if we were out going cricket grounds or something and she’d say ‘oh I’ve stayed there mum, been there, been there’.
‘She kept saying when she’d go missing ‘well I’ve got a boyfriend.’
The gangs would groom her with gifts including mobile phones and alcohol, and would get her to meet up in spaces like car washes.
‘It was the gifts. She’d have like mobile phones and I’d be like where’ve you got that from?
‘She was 13. These men were about 24, 25.’
A Crown Prosecution Service spokesperson said: ‘Our thoughts remain with Jodie Sheeran’s family after her tragic death.
‘In 2005, the case against the suspect in Jodie’s case was discontinued because the legal test for a prosecution was no longer met, a decision that was independently reviewed in 2019 by a different prosecutor who reached the same conclusion.
‘Child sexual abuse and exploitation are appalling crimes and since 2005 we have made significant investment in how we prosecute these complex cases.
‘This includes the recruitment of dedicated victim liaison officers across the country to better support victims of rape and sexual offences, and the creation of a dedicated Organised Child Sexual Abuse Unit to tackle these awful crimes.’
Ange said she felt her daughter’s death was being used as a ‘political game’
‘My daughter’s death is being used as a political game’
Both Ange and Jayden told of how they’ve tried every avenue they could to find justice for Jodie but felt that ‘not one person in authority cared’.
Instead, they felt Jodie’s death was being used by politicians for their own motives.
Ange told MailOnline: ‘It’s like they try and make it into a political game.
‘Some politicians they even said to me, ‘well you know you need to change your votes’.
‘They were all blaming Keir Starmer.
‘Well the Conservatives have been in power and they’re all the same.
‘I wouldn’t vote for any of them.
‘They’re trying to turn my daughter’s death into a political game.
‘Every party that’s been in power, none of them have done anything.’
The pair also criticised people’s attempts to make it ‘about race’.
Jayden said: ‘It doesn’t matter about the race in my opinion.
‘Look at me, I’m an Asian male myself, I know plenty of Asian males who I get along with very well.
‘It’s not about race at all. I really want to get the point of it’s not about the race, it’s going on everywhere.
‘There’s dirty males out there who just want to abuse women because they know they’ve got that power over women.
‘People will look at our story and try and throw shade on immigrants. This is nothing to do with that.
‘It’s all races, it’s everywhere. It’s not one particular race.
‘I think people need to understand it’s going on everywhere, it’s all different races, and it’s disgusting.’
Ange added: ‘We’ve got a lot of Muslim friends because we were brought up in the cricket world, and we’ve got so many Muslim friends and they’ve been messaging us, sending us messages saying ‘we apologise, we can’t believe our Muslim community have done such a thing.’
‘They shouldn’t have to do that, should they?
‘I think it’s just a little minority in each town, it’s just a little minority. A minority of our people are horrible too.
‘People are jumping on the bandwagon going ‘deport, deport’.
A beautiful memorial set up in memory of Jodie by her loving family
A post on TikTok by Jodie when she was alive talking about what she had gone through
Both Ange and Jayden said they have completely ‘lost all faith’ in the authorities and feel not one person was interested in finding them justice
‘No.’
On their lack of faith in the authorities, they told of how they feel ignored, with no politicians, police or the CPS willing to take their daughter’s case or the overall grooming gang seriously.
Jayden said: ‘It just feels like your wasting your time.
‘You go around in circles.
‘We even travelled all the way to London just to get our point across. It felt like they listened to what we had to say for ten minutes then told us to bugger off.’
Ange echoed his views, saying: ‘Our local MP hasn’t even had the decency to respond.
‘We just get turned away because no-one wants to talk to you at all, they don’t want to get their name involved in something like this.
‘Every time I’ve gone to anyone, nobody has wanted to help. There’s only Sammy Woodhouse that helped me. That’s because she’s a lived-in experience.
‘I lost faith in the police, the CPS, social services. I’ve lost all my faith in everyone.
‘There is not one person in authority that cares. Not one.
‘It just makes you think what would they do if it was one of their children.
‘One of the police officers couldn’t even get her [Jodie] name right when I went to the independent review.
‘I was in tears.
‘My MP just got up and walked out without even saying ‘I’m just leaving the room’.
‘And their parting words basically were ‘you’ve got to let this go, you’re fighting a losing battle’ sort of thing.’
The documentary on Tousi TV has now been made free for the public to watch on YouTube.
Jayden said: ‘That’s why we’re grateful for the documentary coming out because it’s not coming out from the government or anything.
‘They’ve not done this.
‘My nan has had to go out of her own way while she is going through all this to do it herself.
‘Which in my eyes are unbelievable.
‘You get all different politicians and nothing gets done.
‘Every year it gets worse.
‘I don’t really have much to do with governance or politics. I just know the governments are all the same.
‘They’re just trying to get that promotion.
‘We lost faith in the authorities a long time ago.’
