Author’s note: I originally wrote the story of my abuse as a story, in the third person. I could not relate directly to the things that had happened to me, or bear to acknowledge the pain I felt, now or then. The original story as presented on this site was very personal and detailed. Now I feel it has served its purpose as a healing tool for me and so I now present a “condensed” account of my abuse during childhood.
I grew up in a family that probably looked very normal and happy from the outside. Mum, Dad, my little sister and me. We lived in a fairly prosperous town in the south of England and we were fairly well off.
However in any family there are always secrets unknown to the outside world and ours was no exception. When I was very young, the secrets in our family were the constant affairs my dad had.
My dad was a very charming and persuasive man. I don’t think he liked or trusted any women but he pursued them relentlessly. He was unfaithful to my mum time and time again, often leaving her for months at a time to cope on her own, then asking to be taken back and forgiven, which she always did.
I idolised my dad and desperately sought his love and attention. The only time my dad would allow me to be with him was on his terms, i.e. to behave as an adult, and a male adult at that! He hated any display of what he called “stupid girlishness” and he could not deal with any negative emotions. If my sister or I started crying about something, for example if we had fallen and hurt ourselves, he would just tell us to “Shut up that racket or I’ll really give you something to cry about”. My sister ended up not caring what he thought and becoming much closer to my mum, but I really wanted my dad to approve of me, so I always tried to act grown-up and not like “a silly woman – like your mother”.
As I got older, I developed physically very rapidly and I began wearing a brassiere at age ten. It was around this time my dad started his campaign to isolate me from my mum and sister and “groom” me so that he could abuse me. I know now this is common behaviour for an abuser.
His campaign was very subtle and cunning and essentially made me resent my mum, by his constantly telling me that my sister was my mum’s favourite, that my mum and sister were “stupid women” but I was his “clever girl” and “as good as a boy”. He took every opportunity to split the family into two camps with my mum and sister on one side and him and me on the other. And of course in my eagerness to prove myself worthy of his love, I took his part in everything and believed all that he told me.
In my constant wish to be with my dad, he allowed me to come to work with him when I was not at school, to accompany him when he went sailing at the weekends, and generally spend time with him away from home.
Just after I had started at secondary school, when I was eleven, was the first time he started to abuse me. He suddenly took on the task of tucking me into bed every night, which was his excuse to molest me. He started by “accidentally” touching my breasts or genitals as he pretended to tickle me. That is how the abuse started, but it didn’t stop there.
Over the months and years my dad found many more “games” to play with me. Some of them he explained were punishments for doing something wrong or not doing as I was told. So I believed I was being abused because I was bad.
For the more than two years that the abuse went on, I lived in constant fear, pain, shame and confusion. I did not understand what was happening… I knew what sex was and how it happened, but I did not understand about sexual impulses… I thought two people decided to make a baby, they “did it”, and that was that. I could not connect what I knew about sex with what my dad did to me. I believed he did it because I was bad, or to “show me he loved me”.
I became extremely withdrawn, often refusing to talk to other people. I began to hate my body and I practised “withdrawing” from my body, taking my consciousness away. At home I wore huge baggy clothes to try and hide my figure but at school I would refuse to wear a coat or jumper even in the snow, preferring to freeze. I threw myself into my schoolwork and took refuge in books and music, living in intricate fantasy worlds in my head.
Some teachers asked me if I was okay, were things okay at home. I did not understand what was happening to me, how could I tell them? Nobody had ever told me what rape or abuse meant, I had no conception that what I was suffering might have happened to anyone else. I knew that there was something wrong, but I thought the wrong thing was in me.
After the abuse had been going on for about a year, my sister read in my diary about one of the games my dad had been playing, and she told my mum. We were on holiday at the time in Devon. My dad overheard my sister talking to my mum, and he raced up the stairs into the bathroom where I was. He told me that my “stupid little sister” had been poking her nose into my diary, that I was “stupid” for writing in my diary. Didn’t I know how disappointed mum would be if she found out what I had been doing with my dad? Didn’t I realise she would probably walk out and leave us? Maybe she would be so shocked she would have a heart attack! (To me, that meant she would die!) So when mum came and asked me about these things, I was to say the game was just a game, we had only played it once, and nothing about any other games we played. Otherwise, she would leave, and it would be my fault, or maybe she would die of shock, and I would have killed her.
Of all the things my dad did to me, I think the things he said to me in that bathroom damaged me most. Now I knew for certain that I was the bad, wrong one, that the things I had been doing were so bad that my mum would go away (or die) if she knew.
How cleverly the abuser transfers the feelings of guilt and shame to their victim! How impossible for a child to see the logic behind the lies!
So of course I followed my dad’s instructions to the letter. My mum in any case was deeply shocked and, as she has told me in later years, had no idea how to handle the situation. In those days there was simply no public knowledge of child abuse, aside from the old “don’t take sweets from strangers” campaign. Nobody talked about abuse in the family, and nobody knew what to do if it happened.
In fact my mum told me afterwards that she thought if she went to the police, they would laugh at her and tell her all men did it, it was a wife’s duty to keep her husband happy enough that he wouldn’t need to.
If I had thought that this would stop the abuse, I was wrong. When we returned from our family holiday the games continued as before, if not more viciously.
Eventually the whole thing came to a head when we were sent home from school with a notice that there was a teachers’ strike the next week. Mum said I could spend the day at work with my dad. I begged her to let me spend the day with her instead. Mum got really annoyed because she had made plans. Eventually she asked me why I didn’t want to go with my dad. Screwing up all my courage I muttered, “because every time I go there, he plays that game with me”.
So, after two years, the games were finally over as my mum now made sure she never left me alone with my dad. She forced him to give me an incredibly insincere apology for “frightening me” (quite what the implications of this were I have no idea). So that was it, we were all supposed to pretend it never happened.
However the effects of abuse can never be forgotten or pretended away. I still lived in fear that the games would begin again. I also felt shamed that my mum now knew how bad I had been. I felt in fact utterly worthless and was constantly depressed.
It wasn’t until I was 15 that I told the truth to the world, or at least someone outside the family. I had written a poem about my dad abusing me for English class, and my teacher sat me down and asked me if the poem was true.
At that point the school called in social services and the police. I had to give a statement to the police. I was told that if he contradicted my statement then it would go to court. He must have told the truth because it didn’t go to court; I was told they had decided it would not be in the public interest to prosecute. (I was not given the choice, being under 18.)
My dad was forced to move out of the family home. There were a lot of recriminations between my mum and me for many years. She couldn’t understand why I had chosen to “rake it all up again” after so many years (well, two!) had gone by. She couldn’t accept that I had done it because I knew he was going to start on my little sister. I had seen the signs for a while. My mum would not believe this.
It took many years and a lot of tears and talking before mum and me were reconciled. Now we are very close and she is very supportive.
As an adult, I had to learn to overcome my feelings of guilt, shame, rage, worthlessness and confusion about sexuality. I went through therapy twice before finally deciding to heal, and with the help of a third therapist, anti-depressants and support from fellow survivors online, I made it through, although not before getting into another abusive relationship (but that’s another story).
It’s now twenty-five years on, and I am finally free of my dad’s shadow.