Harriet Richards was barely more than a child when the abuse began; when she was plied with drugs and alcohol, then made to perform sex acts with a woman, on a webcam, for the gratification of strangers.
Nobody else suspected Harriet, then just 13, was being sexually exploited in the most grotesque way.
No one had the faintest clue that she lost two years of her childhood to her abuser; that while under the influence of narcotics she forfeited her innocence, her trust, all sense of self-worth.
For the chilling fact is that Harriet’s abuser, Jassey Snooks, was assumed to be completely trustworthy. Indeed, no one would have doubted her reliability. She was 26 when she started to manipulate Harriet, and a mum to two little boys herself.
She also happened to be Harriet’s older sister. It was the most heinous breach of trust imaginable.
‘She wasn’t a neighbour or a family friend. She was my adult big sister, my Mum’s daughter. She’d cradled me in her arms when I was a baby. She was the person I looked up to and trusted more than anyone in the world. Actually I adored her,’ says Harriet today.
She has waived her legal right to anonymity to help encourage other abuse victims to ‘absolve themselves of guilt and shame’ and come forward.
‘Why would our Mum ever think, “Harriet’s going to Jassey’s for the weekend, where she’ll be given drugs, stripping naked and performing sex shows,”?
Nobody else suspected that Harriet Richards, then just 13, was being sexually exploited in the most grotesque way
‘It was the perfect smokescreen, and I kept a shield up to protect us both. Jassey told me: “This is just what sisters do, but don’t ever tell Mum because she won’t believe you and she’ll disown us.”
‘It got darker and darker and I stayed silent out of fear. I became very good at keeping secrets – but that’s exactly what abusers want.’
In fact, it was 14 years before Harriet – who had by then attempted suicide twice, so deep-rooted was her confusion and self-loathing – recognised her sister’s abuse for what it was.
‘It was incest and paedophilia,’ she says now.
Her use of these two starkly uncompromising words is clearly liberating. ‘Recognising that was like releasing a demon,’ she says. Last month, she was vindicated when Snooks, now 44, a former teaching assistant for pupils with special educational needs at Hardenhuish School, Chippenham, was convicted at Winchester Crown Court of inciting a child (her sister Harriet) to engage in sexual activity.
Snooks was given a 16-month prison sentence suspended for 18 months, and put on the sex offenders’ register for ten years. She must also attend 30 rehabilitation activity days and carry out 175 hours of unpaid work.
Harriet would have liked a custodial sentence: ‘How can she not be locked up? She is a danger to society,’ she says.
But her sister’s conviction has liberated her: ‘I feel triumphant. I’ve been through this hellish battle and now it’s time to get my life back.’
There is something about her bearing that confirms this transformation. Although she cries intermittently when we meet, she carries herself with confidence and speaks with authority.
Now 30 and a mum herself – to ten-month-old Alfie – she is married to husband Dale, 29, and they run a property management company. She also recently qualified as a personal trainer. She is, as she says, ‘reclaiming’ her lost life.
Jassey Snooks (right, pictured with Harriet) was 26 and a mum of two little boys when she started to manipulate her younger sister
Tall and strikingly attractive, she stood to face her sister in court – ‘My legs were trembling’ – and addressed her with unflinching honesty: ‘What I believed was normal was not normal. What I believed was love was abuse. Coming to understand that truth has shaped and tortured my life in ways I cannot fully explain. I will never be the same person I was before this happened.
‘I have lost family, friends, relationships, and at times I have lost myself. I have struggled to eat, to sleep, to work and to function. I have struggled to be the best version of myself for my son,’ she said in her victim impact statement.
Harriet’s courage in pursuing her sister through the courts has divided her family: mercifully, their mother Amanda, 71, a hairdresser, never doubted her youngest daughter. Neither has Harriet’s father, Jeremy, 55. (Jassey is Amanda’s daughter by an earlier marriage.)
But Snooks has continued to traduce her. Now, Harriet is standing up to her: ‘You allowed the world to believe I was lying. You allowed people to believe I was unstable. You encouraged others to turn against me to protect yourself. How dare you,’ she told Snooks in court.
‘You were the sister I once would have done anything for, and you chose to sacrifice me,’ she said, adding that the ‘shame and guilt are no longer mine to carry’ but her sister’s burden.
The process by which Snooks groomed her little sister begins in the charming coastal village of Porlock, Somerset, where Harriet spent her early childhood.
Their mother was then a chef and housekeeper to a wealthy local family. Harriet’s dad, sales director for a clothing company, spent the week working away in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, returning to the family at weekends.
Harriet was a bright, engaged child who loved drama, public speaking and singing. As she progressed to middle school in Minehead, Somerset, she became deputy head girl. Her driving ambition was to win a scholarship to a performing arts school.
Police mug shot of Jassey. She plied Harriet with drugs to ensure she was disinhibited: ‘Drugs are a great tool for a predator,’ says Harriet. ‘She took them too. She gave me drugs, more drugs and vodka’
Jassey, however, then in her mid‑20s, had other plans for little Harriet, who recalls that her big sister was: ‘Slim and gorgeous. She worked in a bar, played pool, and I idolised her.’
Harriet was just 12 years old when, in 2007, Jassey took her to a nightclub in Minehead: ‘She insisted to Mum: “We’ll look after her.” And Mum just assumed I wouldn’t get in.’
Actually, made up by her sister to look older than her years, Harriet did. It was then that Jassey’s piecemeal corruption of her sister began.
‘She offered me a cigarette. I didn’t realise at the time, but I was smoking marijuana. She bought me about five or six alcopops. It was my first taste of alcohol.
‘I thought it was exciting: the dancing, the lights. The word “no” wasn’t in my vocabulary. I was flattered by her attention. I was being groomed, but I didn’t realise it. And she was already telling me to keep schtum to Mum about the drink and drugs.’
When she turned 13, her mother arranged a birthday party for her: ‘My friends were playing pass-the-parcel and drinking Coca-Cola floats, but my sister was already trying to sexualise me. She bought me a strapless boob-tube dress; not from a child’s range at all. I was so desperate to be accepted by her, I wore it. I wanted to be the belle of the ball. I felt special.’
Amanda, meanwhile, was preoccupied. Her marriage to Jeremy was fracturing, she was working long hours ‘and already Jassey was starting to take control of my life’, says Harriet.
The family moved to Chippenham, Wiltshire, where further domestic upheaval ensued: her father went to live in Canada, leaving Amanda more reliant on her eldest daughter, Jassey, for ‘childcare’ while she was working, by now as a hairdresser, supplementing her day job in a salon with evening work with her own mobile hairdressing business.
Harriet, meanwhile, had moved from the cosy confines of her middle school in Somerset to a secondary school – Sheldon Comprehensive in Chippenham – where she knew no one.
‘I hated it and was horribly bullied, physically pushed and called names. I’d been a happy-go-lucky, popular pupil at my middle school and suddenly no one liked me.
‘I told Jassey I was being bullied, and instead of saying: “We’ll sort this out with Mum,” she’d ring the school pretending to be Mum and say: “Harriet’s unwell. She’s not coming to school today.” I was a kid who didn’t want to go to school because of the bullying, and my sister was facilitating my truancy.’
‘Jassey cradled me in her arms when I was a baby (pictured). She was the person I looked up to and trusted more than anyone in the world. Actually I adored her,’ says Harriet
More upheaval followed: Jassey’s marriage broke down, leaving her a single mum to two boys, aged two and four.
Temporarily she moved back in with Amanda and Harriet, and this is when the abuse began in earnest, with Harriet’s first initiation into dating chatrooms like Chatroulette.
‘Jassey said to me one evening: “When Mum’s asleep, come downstairs. I want to show you something.” When I crept downstairs Jassey had the webcam set up. A man was looking at her intently, sweating profusely. Jassey said to me: “We’re going to do this,” and she took her top off. I did too. I was just a child, barely developed. It was the first time I’d seen a man’s genitals. He was masturbating.
‘I felt deeply confused and sickened. I didn’t fully understand what was happening, only that something felt profoundly wrong and unsafe. What made it even more confusing was that I would do anything I was told, because I adored my big sister and wanted to impress her, even when it didn’t feel right. My heart breaks for that child now.
‘I don’t know if Jassey earned any money from doing this – I didn’t see any – but I do know although she wasn’t working she always had money for drugs and alcohol.’
Jassey’s abuse of her little sister became more systematic when she and her sons moved into their own flat, a short walk from Harriet and Amanda’s home.
Harriet, now 13 and already prematurely sexualised by her sister, sent a boy at school, who showed an interest in her, a naked photo of herself: ‘I didn’t know where I fitted in. I was going straight into the sexual stuff while other children were still holding hands.
‘The boy sent my photo to everyone in our year and the bullying increased. I was thrown into a brook, beaten up, bruised. I cried all the way home. I didn’t want to burden Mum, so I confided in Jass and she encouraged me to stay more often at her place.’
There, over the course of the next two years – between 2008 and 2010 – until Harriet was 15, the abuse continued.
‘It happened about three times a week when Jassey’s sons were asleep in bed. She would take a still photo of us as a tease to get men interested, then we’d put on a sex show for them on the webcam. Some men didn’t even show their faces. All we saw was their genitals. Others wanted to hang around and chat.’
Ironically it was one of these men, knowing how young Harriet was, who was called last year by the Crown Prosecution Service to testify against Snooks, helping to secure her conviction.
Jassey plied Harriet with drugs to ensure she was disinhibited: ‘She gave me amphetamines, ecstasy, cocaine, poppers, weed. Drugs are a great tool for a predator. She took them too. She gave me drugs, more drugs and vodka. I wanted to be cool so I took them, and drank until I was sick.
‘She’d tell Mum I was staying overnight with her so I’d have got over the hangover by the time I got home. I developed a tolerance for drink and drugs and my school attendance got poorer and poorer. I failed all my exams.’
She lost her virginity, aged 13, on a one-night stand: ‘It was consensual. But after, Jassey pressured me to perform even more degrading acts.’
Harriet had one friend, Lucy, who called at Jassey’s flat and witnessed the drug-taking and the sex shows. In fact, it was Lucy who – many years later – was to encourage Harriet’s decision to inform her mother, then the police, about the abuse.
But what actually put a halt to it, when Harriet was 15, was her relationship with a boyfriend, who – like everyone else in her orbit – was encouraged to believe she was 18. ‘He was a really lovely, decent guy and I adored him,’ says Harriet. ‘When he came on the scene, Jassey stopped abusing me. But the relationship ended when he discovered I was only 15.
‘I remember crying and Jassey saying: “Don’t be silly. Just get over it.” She was always very cold.’
Years went by. Harriet now says: ‘I stayed loyal to Jassey out of fear. She has an explosive temper. When I was with her, we always took cocaine. I pretended everything was fine, but it was a numbing tactic.’
Twice Harriet attempted suicide: ‘It got darker and darker because I was taking drugs at home just to obliterate bad thoughts, just to survive. Memory was not my friend.’
She began therapy, and met Dale in 2019 at the property maintenance company for which they both worked. They were friends for a couple of years before a romance began, and in February last year they were married.
‘He’s a very good man from a stable family and he’s never taken a drug in his life,’ says Harriet.
She has now been drug-free for three years, and it was two years ago – in March 2024 – that she met her old friend Lucy who, as an adolescent, had witnessed the debauchery at Jassey’s house.
‘She said: “Do you remember what Jassey did?” I thought: “Oh, my God.” The conversation unravelled. She said she remembered the webcam, the sex shows, the drugs. I was catapulted back into a world I was trying to obliterate.
‘Lucy said: “It was really disturbing. Why did your sister want to do that to a 13-year-old? It was incest and paedophilia.”
‘I’d never labelled it as such. I didn’t even want to admit it was. But she was right. I felt sick. Having heard those words from Lucy, something in my brain shifted. I knew I had to tell Mum.’
Dale, who knew nothing about it – ‘I’d been too ashamed to tell him’ – heard the story with horror and sadness: ‘He trusted Jassey and would never have believed she was capable of causing me such pain. He rang my Mum and said: “You need to come over and speak to Harriet. It’s really, really bad.”
‘Mum came immediately and I collapsed, wailing, into her arms. And she was listening to me. She believed me. She didn’t doubt I was telling the truth.
‘She said I should call the police and I knew I had to report it because it was killing me.
‘I said to Mum: “Are you sure you’re OK with this? It’s your daughter.” And she was so brave. She said she was certain. I think she felt somewhat responsible and guilty, but I never blamed her.
‘How could she ever have imagined Jassey’s brain was so skewed? She had no clue about what was going on.’
The police, too, took Harriet’s complaint seriously. She was supported by an Adult Independent Sexual Violence Adviser (ISVA) from the organisation First Light, and by Horizon Victim and Witness Protection Care.
‘When you are preparing yourself to come forward, these things make a massive difference. It is scary, facing your sister in court,’ says Harriet.
Her family is deeply divided by her revelations: an aunt, cousins and her step-grandparents have aligned themselves against her. But her mother and father support and believe her.
This has empowered Harriet: ‘It has been a turbulent, painful battle,’ she says.
‘But now I’ve triumphed and it’s time to have my life back again.’