A prostitute who was raped by a failed asylum seeker has spoken out to urge other sex workers to report attacks to police.
After Mohammed Al-Dehshari beat and then raped the woman, he tossed a £20 note on to the ground.
She said: “It was as if I was dirt. He acted like nothing had happened. I was nothing to him.”
In May, Palestinian Dehshari was jailed for five years for the rape and a previous assault on another prostitute in his flat in Glasgow’s Sighthill.
But it was a justice Dehshari’s victim found inconceivable following his brutal attack.
The victim said: “I want other women not to tolerate any sexual violence and come forward.
“Men like him shouldn’t get away with raping women. Prostitutes have the same rights as any other woman and the police proved that with me.”
She didn’t consider reporting the rape at first because she felt police wouldn’t take a prostitute seriously.
It was her drug worker who assured her that police would treat her with the same respect as any other victim.
The woman, we are calling her Lorna, said: “I thought they wouldn’t believe me or think it was my own fault because I was out working and I deserved it. A lot of the girls I know are raped and don’t go to the police.”
Lorna, 30, comes from a comfortable background in a rural area but she became a heroin addict when she was 18 and sold her body for drugs.
The attack happened last October, when she had just emerged from rehab with plans to go to college and get her life back on track.
She had been out that night to get some cash for food and basics because her benefits had been delayed.
Dehshari had been her first punter of the night and it was only 9.30pm when he picked her up.
He took her to an isolated spot in Glasgow’s Washington Street. She said: “I wasn’t nervous. I had always been quite lucky and I hadn’t been assaulted but my luck ran out in the end, it was bound to.”
Lorna always makes punters use a condom but Dehshari became aggressive when she insisted.
She said: “He started pulling my hair and punching my face. I kept thinking there was no way out of there. It was the middle of nowhere.
“He kept hitting me, I fell to the ground and he raped me. I tried to blank it out. By that point I thought the only way to get out was to stay calm and not argue. I was terrified but I acted as if everything was OK, so that he would let me go.”
Linda Gadia, of Glasgow Addiction Services, was the first person Lorna had called on the night of the attack. She deals with at least two rapes per week and numerous sexual assaults among the addicts she deals with, a number of whom are prostitutes.
She said: “The assaults are a regular occurrence but women reporting them to police is not. Lorna didn’t think they would believe her but I told her that attitudes had changed. When the police dealt with her, they put her completely at her ease and it made all the difference to her.”
Linda told her not to wash and to bag up her clothes and the next day took her to the Archway sexual assault referral centre where forensic evidence can be banked while victims decide whether to go to the police.
Lorna said: “I was reluctant to report it but I realised he was dangerous and he had to be stopped.”
DC Norma Montgomery, a sexual offences liaison officer, was with Lorna from the report of the attack to it reaching court.
Anything officers needed from Lorna would come through her, from injury photographs, the ID parade and the seizure of her clothing to further information about the attack.
Norma had been based as a uniformed officer in Glasgow’s red light district.
Many women have a negative view of the police as their contact is often linked to a crime or prostitution.
Norma said: “When they are then a victim, it is hard for them to open up and trust us. That can be difficult, so we have to assure them that, regardless of the circumstances, it is our job to get the person responsible.”
Senior investigating officer DCI Kate Jamieson said: “A lot of street workers will not come forward, we will hear through other channels. It is not any harder to prove the crime itself, you still have to prove all the essential elements of the rape, regardless of the circumstances. It is a hard crime to prove but we are getting better at it.”
Lorna’s case was proved through DNA, her injuries, her distress and CCTV confirmed that he took her to as remote a spot as possible.
Lorna said: “I feel I did get justice and he is now off the streets. It was hard but worth it. I was treated well and my case was handled sensitively.”
JOAN BURNIE’S VIEW
LORNA has been very brave. Lorna is also a prostitute.
But above all that she is a woman and deserves no less protection from rapists than any other female. The fact that she sells sex is utterly irrelevant.
Shops sell their products but no-one thinks it’s OK for someone to stroll in and lift what they fancy for free from the shelves, do they? Especially if they use extreme violence.
If Dehshari had merely wanted sex from Lorna, then he could have paid for it, like any other client.
But what he really wanted was power – the power to hurt, the power to treat her, as she says, like dirt, the power to do what he wanted with her body. And no one, no one at all has that right.
Lorna’s body is her own. What she chooses to do with it is her business. But like every other victim of sexual assault, what she did not choose was to be callously and vilely raped.
Whether anyone approves of Lorna’s profession is not and should not be the issue. She was violated against her will. End of.
Hopefully her actions WILL encourage other sex workers to report abuse. Rape, as DCI Kate Jamieson says, is rape.
And it is never acceptable, not in any circumstances, not with anyone.
I thought you couldn’t rape hookers, it was just theft of services, like getting a front end alignment, taking your car for a test drive, and never returning to pay.