A sex trafficker has been attacked in jail after her fellow inmates "found out what she's in for".
Carolann Gallon, a 23-year-old from Newcastle, was sent down for six years after being found guilty of supplying girls for a sex ring in the North East, with some victims as young as 13 years of age.
Advert
She was the only woman to be involved in the Operation Shelter investigation that cracked open several grooming gangs and has subsequently been locked up in HMP Styal in Cheshire, 150 miles south of her home. Gallon was initially held in Low Newton prison in County Durham but was moved recently.
"People have found out what she's in for and she's getting grief," her father Jimmy Gallon told Chronicle Live.
Gallon was arrested alongside 17 others for her part in the ring. Credit: PA/Northumbia Police
Advert
"She got moved from one place to another because she was getting picked on, then she rang me saying she had been assaulted by someone in there. She cries every time I speak to her.
"It's awful for me because I feel so helpless. She's my daughter and I just feel like there's nothing I can do for her."
Operation Shelter caught 18 people, of whom Carolann Gallon was the only woman.
Advert
The grooming gang would lure girls to parties and ply them with drink and drugs before sexually assaulting them. Gallon would help the gang source women.
Newcastle Crown Court was told that, on one occasion, Gallon left a young woman with mental difficulties alone with Abdulhamid Minoyee, one of the men convicted. When she fell into a stupor because of drink and drugs, Minoyee raped her.
She would pick girls up from a children's' homes in Newcastle and take them to houses where so-called "sessions" were taking place in which drugs and alcohol were prevalent. She is reported to have told one victim that her "family would be chopped to pieces if I spoke out".
Credit: PA
Advert
Jimmy Gallon is adamant that his daughter is a victim of the gang.
"I have always said she needs help not punishment," said Gallon. "They could have put her on a tag. I would have taken full responsibility for her. She could have come to live with me. Prison is not going to help."
Her father says that Carolann was a good child until she fell in with a bad crowd in Newcastle's West End.
"She was alright as a young lass, but it was since she got in with this lot that she changed. Those men were just using her. I think they saw her as an easy target I don't think she knew what she was doing.
Carolann Gallon. Credit: Northumbia Police
Advert
"She had been in trouble before. But it was just things like drunk and disorderly. When I heard I just thought, 'Carolann what are you doing? You are getting yourself a name and it will get you into bother. And it did. I knew it would. I said to her; 'Have you not got something you want to do with your life?'.
"When she was young she wanted to be a vet or a nurse. I just wish she had of done something with her life. She could have. She was quite bright. She's got a good head-piece. I tried my best to stop it. I had been to a couple of places that she had been and I got the police a couple of times because they were giving her drink."
Source: Chronicle Live
Featured Image Credit: Northumbia Police