Daisy’s mother was raped when she was 13 years old. Her attacker was 29 years old and was reported to the police, but the case was filed in 1975 and no more was known. Until the daughter born of that act decided to fight in court when she reached the age of majority, and she overcame all legal obstacles until she put her own father, Carvel Bennett, on the bench. The jury found him “guilty” in 2021 and he was sentenced to 11 years in prison.

The exemplary sentence in the British Isles gave rise to a campaign, sponsored by the Center for Justice for Women, to recognize children conceived from rape as “victims”. After two years, the effort has borne fruit in what is now known as the “Daisy Law”, which puts England and Wales at the forefront of the world in dealing with this hitherto hidden tragedy.

It is estimated that more than 3,000 rape babies were born in England and Wales last year. Many of them end up in hospices or grow adoptive families. Many do not really know how they were conceived until the years pass, and the world crumbles under their feet…

“I hope this changes things for all those who are born of rape and that they at least feel that they are not alone,” said Daisy herself at 47 years old, finally seeing her personal fight with the Victims Law culminated. “Until I managed to bring my father to court, I realized that we were invisible to criminal justice.”

“I am living proof of rape,” Daisy told The Guardian. “I’m kind of like the walking scene of the crime that was committed against my mother when she was a child. I wanted justice for her and I wanted justice for myself.”

Their fight has not been in vain, and children born from rape will now have the right to claim financial compensation, social assistance, psychological support and other rights as “secondary victims” of a crime. Daisy’s feat has also contributed to removing the stigma attached to “invisible” children, and although she has decided to protect her identity under that name, many have decided to show their faces in a powerful documentary broadcast this week by the BBC: Out of the Shadows: Born from Rape.

There is the story of Tasnim, rescued by her father from the fire in which her mother, Lucy, died. Soon after, she found out that her “savior”, Azhar Ali Mehmood, had set the fire in which her aunt and her grandmother also died. He was tried and sentenced to life imprisonment, but Tasnim was left to learn the darkest part of his own story… For 18 years, the police had kept his mother’s diary, which was found in the smoldering remains of the house : “Dear Tas, you are ten now, but by the time you read this you will be much older.” Lucy told her daughter how she had been the result of sexual abuse by her father, who raped her for the first time when she was 12 years old and that he was an extremely violent man under the mild facade of a taxi driver.

“I am the daughter of a murderer and a rapist,” Tasnim admits on camera. “For a long time I thought about horrible things and I came to ask myself: ‘What if I end up being like him?’ There are things that are too painful in my mother’s diary, but there are also poems, and I know I shouldn’t feel bad about myself because she wouldn’t want me to.”

Neil, 27, is also the “collateral” victim of a rape. He was adopted by “a happy family” in West Yorkshire, but was always curious to find his mother. He hired a private detective and discovered the cruel reality: his mother had been raped in a park when he was a teenager.

“Do I look like the man who did that to you?” was the question he asked when they finally met. “Everything is fine, you don’t look like him,” were the reassuring words of her mother. Neil confesses that when he found out what had happened, he felt like “one of those video game characters whose chest bursts and everything comes out.” But the reunion with his mother has gradually put things in his place “and there is love between us.”

Mandy’s story is overwhelming. Her father, a respected police officer and member of the Salvation Army, began abusing her when she was 11 years old. No one in her family knew about it, until she became pregnant five years later: “It was as if they injected you with poison; that’s what my father did with me.”

Her father wanted to attend the birth, and the midwives let him hold his son in his arms before giving him to her. When she returned with the baby, she took the first opportunity to run away with him from home, never to return. The boy was born with genetic disabilities, but her mother adores him: “I always say that I am the survivor and he is the victim.” Ella mandy provided her with a loving father, Pete, with whom she has had two other children.

Mandy’s example has given strength to other mothers like Sammy Woodhouse, who did not dare to talk about his own case until they met. Sammy has been a victim of sexual exploitation from the age of 14 in Rotherham, and denounces the failure of the police and social services to protect young adolescent girls from sexual predators.

Sammy was able to prove the paternity of his attacker Arshid Hussain, sentenced to 36 years in prison for various crimes, thanks to the DNA test. He did not tell his son the story until he was well 12 years old, and for a while he kept asking him if he was a “monkfish baby”.

“I’ve fought alone for years without anyone really knowing how I feel,” laments Sammy, who has become one of the campaign’s most visible faces. “We have finally achieved that the children of sexual violence are recognized as victims and that we can count on the “extra” support we need. Meeting other mothers and other children has been vital to discover that we can move forward and try to be happy.”

According to the criteria of The Trust Project