Child sex abuse trial: Defendant's "£300 a night for selling girl, 16"

The 33-year-old woman said that just weeks after first meeting defendant Arshid Hussain in Rotherham, he had begun driving her to Doncaster and selling her body.

There, she claims, she would have oral or full sex with men in cars for £20 and £30 each, fearing the consequences if she refused.

Sheffield Crown Court court heard that, she did this several times a month bringing Hussain, said to have been known locally as Mad Ash, around £200 or £300 each night.

The woman added that Hussain would sometimes punch her in the face when he was in a bad mood, describing his behaviour as “very changeable, a bit schizophrenic”.

She told officers in a 2015 interview, played at Sheffield Crown Court today: “Ash would tell me that if I didn’t do what he told me I would get a slap.

“It wasn’t something I wanted to do, but it was easier than the alternative of getting a kicking.

“It was probably going to hurt a lot less, so I just put up and shut up.”

The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, told officers she first met Hussain while working for his uncle, co-defendant Qurban Ali, who the prosecution say was known as Blind Ash, at a Rotherham town centre taxi firm.

She described being on “a lot of drugs”, including GHB and crack cocaine, at that time, which was when she was aged 16 or 17.

Hussain gave her free drugs for around two weeks, she said, before he started taking payment in forced sex work.

He would drive her to Christchurch Road in Doncaster and sit in a takeaway while she “serviced punters”, the woman said.

“There was no set date or time,” she told police. “Ash would just turn up and say: ‘We’re going out’ and we would end up going there again.”

The woman said that when she was about 17 she was regularly taken to a house in Masbrough, where she was drugged and raped.

The woman she told officers she could remember only one occasion when she was raped, as she was often too high on heroin.

“If I was sober they would get you wasted first so they would take you in the front room until you were asleep or unconscious or didn't know where you were,” she said in an interview played to the court today.

“What happened next I don't know, but I would always wake up in some random room with no clothes on.

“I only remember waking up one time with a man on top of me and he was having sex with me.”

She added: “I think I must have had sex with several people, but I couldn’t tell you who.

“But I always woke up naked and sometimes there was Durex about.”

Asked why she did not approach police sooner, the woman said that the men's abuse seemed “perfectly normal” as a teenager.

She added: “Obviously I don't think that now, but at that age I was taught that's what men do.

“It was normal, so why would I tell anyone? It was perfectly normal.”

Hussain, of East Cowick, Goole, — who is one of five men and two women on trial — denies 29 sex crimes.

The trial continues.