My daughter was bright, beautiful and full of confidence. She played the piano, she played the flute and she sang. She also had her own pony which she used to go to shows on and, yes, now and again, she would win, which any mother would be proud of.

And, then, all of a sudden, it all went. Like that. Everything just stopped.

The cost of child sexual exploitation to my family, to my friends and to me has been devastating. And, six years later, it’s still going on. My daughter was originally groomed for sex at the age of 12. She’s now 18. As far as I’m concerned, I lost my daughter, in a sense, when she was 12.

We’ve had to remove her from the country for her own safety. I’ve left her in a strange country with her father. As a result of this, my mum has lost contact with her only grandchild and my sisters have lost contact with their only niece. We removed her from the country –a very drastic thing to do – because we had reached a stage when drastic measures were needed. She was going missing for four or five days at a time and returning home drugged up.

My health has suffered. I’ve got MS and I’ve had some very, very bad attacks. I’ve also had cancer twice in the last three years and I’m still going through treatment and having surgery.

There’s been so much worry, so many sleepless nights and suicidal thoughts. I used to walk the dog at 2 o’clock in the morning thinking, ‘Well, if I kill myself, she’ll have to behave.’ But then I’d think, ‘It’s not her that’s wrong. It’s the perpetrators that are wrong. They’ve made her this way.’

Shame as well came with it because I didn’t feel as though I could tell anybody. I hid away for a month when I took my daughter abroad. That was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do but I thought, ‘It will keep her alive.’

There’s also the feeling that I’m not a good mother. It tortures me to this day – six years later – when she’s 18 years old, nearly 19, that somewhere along the line I’ve done something wrong.