Teenage Victim Of Rapist Robert Foye Breaks Her Silence

Mar 23 2008 Exclusive by Gayle Ritchie

SHE cannot even say the word out loud - but Robert Foye's victim can articulate how rape destroyed her life.

Bright and intelligent, she now struggles at school and finds it hard to trust people.

She loathes Foye for what he did and is resentful about becoming a victim of Scotland's "soft touch" jail system.

Foye's teenage victim and her family decided to speak out about how prison bosses let the brute, who was caged for the attempted murder of a police officer, walk out of an open prison to attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

He didn't go back to the jail. Instead he made for his home town of Cumbernauld.

And it was there, on a pathway, that he pounced on the 16-year-old and carried out his attack.

The victim has told the Sunday Mail that the attack has destroyed her ability to trust people.

She decided to speak about her ordeal in the wake of a prison service review which was published last week.

The report revealed that Foye, 28, had been considered suitable for open jail despite also being assessed as a high risk of reoffending.

The review found there was "always a possibility" that Foye would flee from open prison.

But it argued that the staff could not have predicted he would commit rape.

The girl said: "The attack has weakened me, made me feel guilty and suspicious of people.

"I get scared when I see men who don't even look like Foye.

"It might be a little characteristic they have that reminds me of him but I could be walking down the street and I imagine I see him.

"I try to push the attack to the back of my mind and not to get upset but it's hard.

"I go pale or break out in a sweat. That's when I rely on my friends and parents to calm me down and reassure me.

"It took me ages to build up to even leaving the house."

Foye launched his rape attack on the girl in August last year.

He had been on the run from the Castle Huntly open prison, near Dundee, for almost a week before pouncing on the helpless teenager in Cumbernauld's Balloch area.

He repeatedly punched the girl in the face and forced her to the ground.

She begged him to let her go but he showed absolutely no mercy. He put his hand over her mouth to stifle her cries and raped her.

Foye was arrested the next day and, although he denied being in the area, forensic samples from the victim matched his DNA profile.

He had absconded from prison before, in 2005, and had been jailed in 2002 for 10 years for the attempted murder of a policeman, also in Cumbernauld, by reversing a car into him at speed and leaving him badly injured.

Foye's schoolgirl victim said: "The attack is quite blurry but I remember Foye told me to wait until he'd gone before I moved.

"I saw him run off and I just broke down.

"The scary thing is that I'd seen him at 10.30am when I'd been on my way into the town centre to buy contact lenses.

"He'd been hanging around there for a while and the attack happened an hour later.

"If it hadn't been me, it would've been someone else.

"He was out with intent and the prison should've picked up on that. I got the feeling that he had already done this to someone else but no one knows about it." The girl was helped to safety by a man who found her on the path.

She said: "I can't say that word rape out loud.

"There's a long road ahead and I take things hour by hour.

"Some days are OK but many are bad. I often feel numb and I have setbacks where I can't function at all.

"It feels like I'm to blame and when I read the report, I feel guilt.

"But at the end of the day, I had the right to walk across that bridge. It was my public right.

"Foye shouldn't have been allowed to slip through the system's fingers.

"He absconded in 2005 so he should've been put back into a closed prison.

"I think open prisons should be for petty crimes like stealing, not serious ones.

"They have to revamp the whole prison system and people who have done serious crimes should be punished, not rehabilitated.

"Prisoners should be assessed at every level.

"If this hadn't happened to me and Foye had been let out in a few years, it would have taken even longer for this whole thing to come out.

"The public should have more information on people who abscond.

There should be a notification scheme.

"We as the public have the right to know why the system is in such a mess.

"Foye was a high-risk reoffender so what was he doing in an open prison?

"They said it wasn't predicted he'd do that kind of crime but the fact is he wrote a letter to an inmate boasting how he would do this to someone else.

"The prison service didn't even take that into consideration and wrote it off as a joke."

The girl went back to school 10 days after she was raped.

But she found it impossible to cope and has since returned only on a parttime basis.

She said: "I felt bad not going back, like I was letting myself down.

"I had to drop two Highers and felt really angry that I'd lost out on opportunities.

"But I'm not ready to process what's happened yet.

"I was getting over my selfconsciousness as a teenager before the attack but this has knocked me.

"It's like disassociation - it feels like it's happened to someone else.

"My body recognises what has happened but my mind isn't ready to take it in."

The girl has chosen to go ahead and sit her exams but she finds it hard to focus on school work.

She said: "My prelims were a nightmare but I'm hoping things will improve in time."

The girl, who is receiving regular counselling from the expert team at Rape Crisis in a bid to overcome her trauma, is urging other rape victims to speak out.

She said: "If my speaking out helps change the system and maybe stops this happening to someone else, then some good will have come of this.

"But a clear definition needs to be given of open and closed prisons and the system needs to be addressed."

Foye is to be sentenced for the rape in May.

The victim and her family were not paid for these interviews but asked for a donation to be made to Rape Crisis.