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When women come to us for counselling we take them to one of seven bright and cosy rooms where they can talk in peace and comfort.
As they walk through the door they might notice a nameplate.
That is because we decided some time ago to commemorate women who turned to us for help through the most difficult times in their lives before dying tragically young.
As time goes by, fewer people here know about those women and their experiences, so we thought it would be fitting to tell their stories, where possible with the help of those who knew them best.
This is Emma’s story, told by her partner, Karen – the pseudonym we have given to a client who began keeping a diary last year and is sharing it with us every month or so.
You can follow Karen’s diary here in the news and views section of our website.
Karen tells us she moved into a hostel in Leicester in December 2017, meeting Emma two days later. After just a couple of days they became a couple – an inseparable couple at that.
She says: “You either loved her or hated Emma, there was no in-between. She was Marmite and had no filter from her brain to her mouth.”
“Emma had been involved in sex work for many years. “She knew what she was doing. It was a job to her and a means to earn money. I hated Emma sex-working,” Karen remembers.
Remarkably, Karen always stood on the beat when Emma was working, looking out for her and keeping her safe from all the risks associated with the job.
Despite the challenges of their lifestyle, the couple wanted to raise a child together. Karen describes coming into the project and showing Paula, our drop-in worker, a scan.
“Paula assumed it was Emma who was pregnant and was shocked when I told her it wasn’t Emma who was carrying our baby, it was me,” she says.
The pregnancy went well and their daughter was born on July 26, 2018. From the beginning, they knew they were going to have to fight to keep her child, but were determined to prove they would be good parents.
Karen gave up drinking while she was pregnant and, to the surprise of everyone, so did Emma, who had struggled with alcohol-use for most of her life. The baby was taken into foster care while the two women were assessed by social services.
Throughout this process the couple never missed an assessment appointment or a contact visit and took every opportunity to see their baby, Karen says.
Emma’s favourite song was Babycakes and she would sing it to the infant. Karen remembers Emma bouncing their child on her knee, singing to her.
Despite their efforts, they felt that social workers judged them for their lifestyle, and it felt like the whole system was against them.
She believes they were accused of things that were not true, such as falling asleep in contact meetings and Emma accused of smelling of alcohol at the hospital just after the baby was born.
Karen describes the social workers looking disappointed when her hair strand test came back negative. “It felt like they wanted us to fail, we were never going to be enough,” she recalls.
Then there was, she says, an untrue allegation that someone was living with them. That was the day the placement order was made, and they knew they had finally lost their struggle.
Karen tried to keep fighting for their daughter but knew there was no hope. Emma never recovered from the trauma and turned to drinking and using crack again.
Karen tried to support Emma and keep her safe, but one morning in January 2020 she woke to find her struggling to breathe.
“Just before she stopped breathing she made this horrible groan noise which is what I’ve heard is called the death rattle,” she recalls.
“Five minutes later I watched her stop breathing and grabbed her and shook her and shouted ‘baby’. She opened her eyes looked at me then went.”
Karen had started performing CPR, desperate to save Emma. However, her efforts, and those of the paramedics who had arrived by now, were unsuccessful and she lost the woman she loved.
Because of the history of drug use, Karen was arrested and cuffed at the scene. She had to say goodbye to the woman she called her wife as she stepped over Emma’s body in handcuffs.
She was held in custody for seven hours at the police station before being released.
Upon her release, she came straight to the project. “I didn’t know where else to go. Emma loved coming here” she remembers.
“If you were hungry, if you needed help, if you couldn’t get into a hostel then you came to the project. You could always come here.”
Her memories of Emma often involve the project, she fondly recalls Christmas here, her and Emma eating two helpings of dinner and getting a bag full of gifts each and Emma looking in Karen’s bag trying to get the best gifts.
That year they both won a teddy in the Christmas games and they gave them to each other.
She still has them.
The two women were together for four years, a period which Karen describes it as the craziest four years of her life.
Emma died a year after they lost their daughter, twelve days before she was due to go into rehab.
On the 15th November last year it would have been Emma’s 40th birthday. Karen came in and donated a bag of Emma’s clothes to the project because she said she knew that’s what she would have wanted, and maybe where she had got most of them from anyway.
Our director Della Kagure Brown says: “The project continues to support Karen who had counselling for many months in the Emma counselling room because that’s where she felt closest to Emma.
“Theirs was not a traditional romance and probably not a romance everyone will understand. That’s not important. What matters is that they loved each other and Karen describes Emma as the love of her life.
“I always pause to think of Emma when I use her room and Karen hopes that by telling her story more people will remember her too and she will remain a part of the project she loved.”
New Futures was set up to support women involved in sex work more than 20 years ago.
However, we have evolved into a comprehensive welfare and counselling service for women and young people dealing with sexual abuse or exploitation, domestic violence, trafficking, poverty and debt, substance use or mental ill-health.
Call us on 0116 251 0803 or send us a message at: info@new-futures.org.uk
You can find us at 71 London Road, Leicester, LE2 0PE.
We publish a monthly newsletter to tell the stories of the women we support and to round up all the things we’ve been doing.
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