Aimi says ‘I was a beautiful child, but I choose now to be 18 stone as it makes me unattractive to men’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Being sexually abused by several perpetrators has left Aimi with an enduring distrust of men, along with many other distressing after effects.
She feels strongly that all victims and survivors ‘need to be listened to, even if it’s after 20 years’.
Aimi was born in the 1970s. From what she has been told by her family, she knows that she was about three years old the first time she was sexually abused. She went missing in a park where she had been taken to play by an older girl. After searching the park for Aimi, the girl began trying the doors of the houses opposite.
She discovered the little girl with a teenage boy. He had undressed her and was on the point of raping her. Aimi was told that people in the local area ‘dealt with’ the boy.
Aimi’s earliest direct recollections are of living with her mum, stepdad and younger brother. She says that she had a good childhood, she was given ‘lovely toys’ and had good experiences.
A couple who lived over the road with their small children invited Aimi’s mum and her children for dinner. Aimi remembers they had a ‘fantastic meal’. She was about nine years old.
But on another occasion, when Aimi visited the neighbours with her family, the man took her and the younger children upstairs to show them a toy. She remembers that he took his genitals out of his trousers and and pushed them into the side of her face. He then put his hands into Aimi’s pants, and made her bleed.
She remembers using the toilet the next day and calling for her mum as ‘it was painful to pee’.
Some time after, her mum asked the neighbour to come round and show Aimi how to use a new gadget she had been given. Aimi knew this would mean that he would be alone with her in her bedroom so she refused his help.
Over the next few years, Aimi says her good relationship with her mum deteriorated and she went to live with an uncle. She says, ‘I really do believe the abuse had a massive part to do with it. I was close to my mum, but as a child I didn’t know why she didn’t protect me, but she didn’t know’.
Aimi’s uncle was a drug addict and she says she ‘went off the rails’ whilst she was living with him. She became aggressive, getting into fights, and her learning declined. Her school attendance was erratic and the headteacher told her she would end up in care if things didn’t improve.
By the time she was in her early teens she stopped attending school completely. She had moved to live with other relatives who had a chaotic lifestyle. She says, ‘it was me taking care of them’.
Aimi has children but finds it difficult to trust anyone to care for them and is particularly uncomfortable with any men being near them.
When she considers the effects of being sexually abused, she says, ‘I turned into this horrible child, I shunned any love away from me from that moment on’.
She adds that although her memories are at times hazy ‘I always knew it had happened ... I’d wake up sweating ... things have unravelled over years and years’.
Aimi has experienced difficulties with her mental health, and attempted to take her own life. She suffers with anxiety and deliberately gained a lot of weight in an effort to ward off male attention.
She thinks it is crucial to educate adults and parents so they are aware of predatory behaviour by abusers, and can spot signs of abuse in children. She is distressed by suggestions that investigating child sexual abuse is a waste of money.
She would like to see longer sentences for perpetrators of child sexual abuse.
Aimi concludes that child sexual abuse ‘is a massive thing that changes your life’, but, she adds, ‘I don’t want to be a victim, I want to be fine’.