Allison was terrified into believing it was her responsibility not to disclose she was being abused
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The church official who sexually abused Allison as a child applied further cruelty to ensure her compliance and her silence.
He said that if Allison’s relative, who took care of her, ever found out, they would have a heart attack and it would be Allison’s fault.
Allison was born in the 1960s. She describes the relative who took care of her as a ‘fire and brimstone religious’ person, who berated Allison’s mother for having a child outside marriage.
She says that the relative ‘...insisted I go to church with [them] morning, afternoon and evening … every single week’.
One of the church officials, Jeff, was involved with the choir. Allison attended rehearsals with Jeff.
Allison recalls ‘He very quickly befriended [Allison’s relative] and offered to help the family during troubled times’.
She thinks the abuser was in his late 30s and describes him giving the appearance of being ‘holier than thou’.
Allison describes the shame she felt when Jeff forced her to perform sex acts on him.
She writes ‘The way he got me to comply was quite simple’. He knew that her mother had problems and that her relative had a medical condition. She says ‘He used this knowledge by reminding me that the shock of knowing what I was doing would be too much for my [relative], and it would be all my fault and such a shame if [they] ended up having a heart attack’.
The abuser also told her that he could do whatever he liked to her, because he only had to say sorry to God afterwards and he’d be forgiven.
When Allison’s mother died, this tragedy made her determined to try and avoid him and resist his demands. She adds ‘However, I was terrified that somehow the truth would emerge, and as I now only had my [relative] I had to protect [them] at all costs’.
As she grew older, Allison says, ‘I gradually realised he didn’t really have any power to make me do anything, in fact he had more to lose if the truth came out’.
After the abuse ended, Allison says ‘I confess I went off the rails a bit’. She says that she became ‘promiscuous’, feeling that if she had boyfriends around, ‘they’d keep him at bay’. She married someone she says was ‘unsuitable’ and the marriage later broke down.
She once bumped into Jeff when she was with her children and he told her he ‘couldn’t wait’ to get to know them. After this menacing encounter she left the area but still could not bring herself to tell anyone what Jeff had done.
‘I bottled it up and kept the secret buried deep within me for many, many years’ she says.
Allison reproaches herself for not stopping Jeff sexually abusing her, even though she was a child. She says ‘If only I’d had the guts and the common sense to stop it right at the beginning, he’d have gone to prison and the abuse would have been stopped’.
Allison says another impact of the abuse was that she could not tolerate sexual contact. She drank heavily and suffered from flashbacks. She had a nervous breakdown and attempted to take her own life.
While she was in hospital, she read a news item about a child sexual abuse case. She says ‘It was literally like a dam burst’ and she poured out her experiences to a nurse. She was diagnosed with PTSD.
Allison continues ‘Eventually I was given anti-depressants and managed to hold down a job and have a “normal” life’. But seemingly innocuous remarks or situations would trigger flashbacks.
Because her [relative] had passed away and could not be hurt, Allison decided to report Jeff to the police. She was told that because the abuse had occurred more than 20 years previously, ‘it would be his words against mine so they were not going to do anything … they let me down big time. I felt cheated, I wanted the truth to come out’ she says.
Allison continued suffering with depression and flashbacks. She later saw a therapist who helped her find ways to deal with this and suggested that she try reporting the abuse again. This time, the police promised they would follow up the case, but they then discovered the perpetrator had died.
She describes the pain and frustration she feels. ‘I will never see justice done and the truth will never be told to the people who lived in the area who probably thought he was a decent human being. That really hurts.’
Allison says that therapy has helped her work on her feelings of guilt ‘for allowing him to take advantage of me .... but some feelings of guilt remain and probably always will do’.
She has also found support from a mental health charity and this has helped her to manage the flashbacks. She comments ‘It’s far too late for me to have any kind of meaningful relationship. Still, there’s no point in musing over what might have been’.
Allison concludes by saying that she hopes her account may prevent similar things happening to other children. ‘If young people are aware of how these (mainly) men get away with it, it will stop other youngsters from falling for their lies.’