Sarah Dennis points to a four-inch zig-zag on her chin and says: “This is where he broke my jaw. It was hanging off my face.

“He stabbed me in the head with a kitchen knife. Another time he slashed my legs. My body is covered in the scars from my previous boyfriend.”

Worse are the scars that Sarah, can’t show.

For more than 12 years, the former junkie walked the street to fund her £300-a-day crack and heroin habit.

“I’d need the crack to enable me to do the job,” said Sarah, aged 40, who would have sex with up to 20 men a night. “Then once it got daylight, I’d need the heroin to bring me down.

“I’d earn £300 a night but in the morning I wouldn’t even have enough money for a sandwich. I’d spent it all on drugs.”

Sarah, who grew up in Northern Ireland, fled to London to escape the Troubles.

But once in England, she found new troubles when a manipulative and abusive partner persuaded her to go on the game.

By the age of 27, the mum-of-three was smoking heroin to numb the pain of his abuse and the shame of turning tricks.

“I was so naive,” she said. “I got sucked in. I thought these people really cared about me but they didn’t.”

She lost her children, her health and her happiness.

But three years ago, Sarah’s life took a turn for the better when she moved into the Manor Women’s Project in Pleck Road, Walsall.

The centre is run by couple Alison Cattell and Robert ‘Greg’ Gregory, who originally ran a homeless hostel in the same terraced house.

Eight years ago they noticed that two-out-of-the-three people they housed were on hard drugs.

“I said to Greg, ‘Can’t we do something to help these people?’” said Alison, aged 28.

“So we decided to do some research.”

Armed with clipboards, the couple visited crack houses, magistrates’ courts and drug hostels and spoke to as many addicts as they could.

They wanted to know why the system wasn’t working and they heard the same answers again and again.

“People said it was no good sending them to rehab away in the country with the sounds of birds singing and streams trickling by, only for them to go back to their old life in the inner-city,” said father-of-three Greg. “They said they needed people 24/7, not just once a week and they said they wanted to be in charge of their own recovery.”

And so the Manor Women’s Project was born.

Its success is unparalleled. The ‘staying clean’ rate for girls who stay at the hostel the recommended three years is 75 per cent – one of the best in the country.