Joana Geronimo was raped and tortured and her family slaughtered for supporting a separatist movement in Angola. But, having found sanctuary in the North-East of England, she is now in danger of being deported. She tells Women's Editor Lindsay Jennings her story.

IT is the click, click clicking of boots down the dark corridor that Joana Geronimo can recall clearly. The sound of boots was a sign of impending brutality. When they stopped outside her dank prison cell, Joana and the ten or so women occupants would cower in terror, waiting for one of them to be taken away.

"I would say, please don't let it be me, please don't let it be me," she whispers. "You didn't want it to be the person next to you, but you didn't want it to be you either."

Joana grew up with her mother Eva, father Adriano and younger brother Delcio, in Cabinda, in the former Portugese colony of Angola. Adriano worked for the separatist movement, the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda (FLEC), a group fighting for the independence of Cabinda from the Angolan government. Joana would help too, handing out hats and T-shirts to people at school in the fight for liberation.

She was just 14 when the soldiers came one night in December 2001. The family had already been forced to flee to nearby Kwanza Norte after their Cabinda home had been ransacked. Joana had gone to a party with her son Osvaldo, who is known as Geronimo, and Hermenegildo, Geronimo's father, in the town. It was her neighbours who warned her of the horror which would confront her if she went home.

"They had heard people in there, shouting and screaming. They said, 'they've killed your parents, they are dead'. We were crying," says Joana.

Her entire family had been shot dead and Joana knew that the soldiers, from the Angolan army, would not rest until they had found her. It wasn't long before they cornered the couple in a street, and took Hermenegildo off in one car with Joana and her five-month-old son in the other. It was the last time she saw Hermenegildo.

They took her to a prison which from the outside looked like a house. Inside her prison cell there were no beds, only a few mats on the floor and a bucket in the corner of the cramped room for a toilet.

'They would come every day. They would ask many questions and I didn't know the answers," says Joana. "Sometimes when they came for you they didn't want to ask you questions at all. There could be three or four of them, they would rape you. They would hit you, put things in the fire and hit you on the back, on the legs. They would mainly hit you with wood.

"Sometimes they would come and ask questions or show me pictures of people they thought were members of FLEC and they would ask me if I knew them. I wouldn't know the answer and they would take Geronimo from me. I never knew where they took him."

Being separated from her baby was one of the hardest things Joana endured in prison. When she couldn't answer their questions, the soldiers would take him for weeks at a time and return the distraught son to his mother just as suddenly as they had taken him.

"They would bring him back and he would be crying, but I never knew what they did to him," she says.

The terror continued for 12 months. Day after day, Joana waited for the click, click of boots on concrete. Then, one day, Joana and a handful of other prisoners seized their chance. It was Christmas time and the soldiers were drunk. One of them had left a door open and the prisoners ran for their lives, Joana barefoot and dressed in a skirt and top.

They fled to a nearby church, one of the male prisoners carrying Geronimo in his arms.

"I was scared because it was still in the same area," says Joana. "We knew the soldiers were chasing us. They could see people and ask them where we were and even give them money. We hid where the nuns slept."

Joana stayed there for about six months. The priest at the church managed to get her treatment by Red Cross workers. She had more than 40 scars across her body from the regular beatings and torture. The repeated rapes had left her with a sexually transmitted disease and the wounds on her legs were badly infected.

"A nurse told me that if I had been in prison much longer without medical help then they would have had to cut my legs off because the infection was so bad," she says.

It was clear that Joana could not stay in the country. The priest smuggled her to Rwanda and secured her travel documents before putting her on a plane.

She ended up in Newcastle, just days after her 16th birthday in June 2003. Unable to speak English, she was put into sheltered accommodation which was full of single men who terrified her with their late-night comings and goings. Three months later she was moved to a house in Byker, where gangs of youths gathered outside her house, urinating in her doorway and shouting racist abuse.

Finally, she was given a little flat in Heaton in the city. She began going to Barnardo's Byker Sands Family Centre in Newcastle where workers noticed that Geronimo was acting aggressively towards the other children, lashing out and shouting. Slowly, Joana began telling them the reasons why her little boy had such anger. Through therapeutic play, Geronimo, who's now four, blossomed into a happy, contented little boy. He now goes to Byker Primary School and even has a Geordie accent. Joana learned to speak English and began talking through her pain with counsellor Edna Davis at Barnardo's Mosaic Project, which helps victims of sexual abuse.

But now she faces the new fear of being deported back to Angola.

When she turned 18 in June, she learned that her discretionary leave had run out. Home Office officials are considering her application for extended discretionary leave, but she has no idea how long it will take for it to be considered, whether it will be weeks or months. She has some hope in that her case is being backed by Newcastle East MP Nick Brown.

The staff at Barnardo's Byker Sands Family Centre are also supporting her claim.

"We have worked with Joana and have got detailed information from her, proof of her asylum claim," says centre worker Carol Jackson.

More than anything, Joana would just like to have a teenage life. She is only 18 but has endured enough pain for a lifetime.

"I miss my family and I have to live with my memories," she says quietly.

She still has flashbacks, where she can hear the sound of those boots, click, click, clicking down the corridor.

She can barely sleep, fearing that the boots may come to her door in the middle of the night, this time in the form of immigration officials, ready to deport her back to Angola.

She knows that if she returns with Geronimo, the soldiers will find them.

"It would be very easy to know where I am from because of my accent and they know that people from Cabinda fight for their freedom," she says, her eyes downcast.

"My big fear is that they would do the same thing - or worse. I just want to stay here and be safe with my son, to get a job and to work. That is all."