Kaz's Story

Chapter Two

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I became extremely withdrawn, often refusing to talk to other people.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!

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