Shy Keenan: I didn’t think abuse was criminal act

Feb 18 2008 by Emma Pinch, Liverpool Daily Post

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EMMA Pinch talks to a victim of an infamous paedophile ring who is determined to make sex attackers face justice

WE ALL have a song or a smell that brings childhood flooding vividly back. For Shy Keenan, from Birkenhead, it’s when a classic from Billy Butler’s back catalogue of golden oldies comes on the car radio.

From the age of four to 14, Shy was casually raped and battered until lights flashed before her eyes, in a grim routine that became part of her daily life, and the song became a suitcase in which to store her painful memories, with the lid jammed tight shut.

“When those Motown drums bam, bam bam come on, from What Becomes of the Broken Hearted, I can’t get past that without falling into sobs,” she says.

“It takes me back to when I first heard it, when I was about eight or nine.

“It was the first time someone had found the words for what was in my heart.

“I thought, ‘this is what is happening to me – this is horrible. Why are you telling people what I was secretly thinking?’ I was furious.”

Two decades later, playing back that song would turn the key to the blocked memories of her childhood which were needed as evidence to convict stepfather Stanley Claridge and two of his twisted cronies of a string of sex offences.

The trial, at Liverpool Crown Court in 2002, was something of a sensation, not only because of his stomach–turning catalogue of crimes, but because it came after the victim had turned hunter and filmed him secretly boasting about his attacks for BBC’s Newsnight programme.

Her brave actions, spurred by the discovery that another generation of children were at risk from Claridge, form the opening of her new autobiography, Broken. The book chronicles what must be one of the worst starts to life anyone could have – but it also provides testimony to the astonishing resilience of the human spirit.

“There’s no messages out there for us saying actually you can have a good life,” says Shy, who now lives with her own family in the south of England.

“All the messages say you will probably end up a smack head or a prostitute, or will rob or kill people or kill yourself.

“I would love someone to have said, you can survive this, you absolutely can.”

Shy, nicknamed because of the bashful pose she assumed in photos, suffered most of her abuse between 1971 and 1982 when she lived in Stratford Way on the bleak Noctorum estate, in Birkenhead.

Her mother was at best apathetic and her real father, who appeared only intermittently, killed himself in a stolen car after Shy tried to tell him what was happening.

Reading her book, it’s staggering to reflect that the person wearily fending off Claridge’s daily sex attacks was just aged six or seven.

As a tiny girl, she privately refers to it simply as “the horrible”.