Carlie says ‘I don’t feel guilty any more; I was the child, he was the adult’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Carlie and her friend were sexually abused by a neighbour, who was seen as a pillar of the community.
For a long time, she blamed herself for not reporting it, and says ‘I’m still angry he got away with it’.
Carlie grew up in the 1970s on an estate ‘where everybody knew everybody’. The man who abused her, Jeffrey, was in his 60s, owned a local business and was highly respected by everyone.
She and her friend always greeted him politely and were encouraged by their parents to offer to pick up things from the shop for him. She doesn’t remember how it was that they started going into the house, but she remembers being in the front room and him putting them on the floor and touching them.
Carlie was about seven or eight when this began. She comments ‘Years later, I can see his front room ... every detail … pictures on the wall. That's the bit people don't get; it's with you every day’.
The abuse escalated to Jeffrey making them perform oral sex on him. Afterwards he gave them money, and Carlie says ‘I struggle with thinking about this … we were getting paid’. He told them they must never tell anyone what he was doing.
She remembers Jeffrey’s wife coming home one day and him hurriedly making the girls get dressed. Carlie says she thought years later ‘Did you never wonder why there were two little girls in your front room?’
Carlie says she always knew that if they told anyone ‘it would all have kicked off’, probably because of the way her family would have been treated, due to Jeffrey’s standing in the community.
But after a while the children began to realise that what was happening was wrong. They started trying to avoid going past Jeffrey’s house, but their parents kept telling them to see if he wanted any shopping.
Carlie says other girls would go to the house and she suspects that he carried on abusing others after she and her friend stopped going.
When she was a teenager, Carlie told her GP about the abuse. She has a very clear memory that he did not seem at all surprised when she told him the name of the abuser. She says ‘I remember to this day thinking “You knew”’.
Carlie’s doctor referred her to a local mental health service. She went to the appointment on her own, as she still hadn’t told her family what had happened to her.
She says ‘It was absolutely horrible’. She was asked a lot of questions, including why she kept returning to the house. She says it made her feel the abuse was all her fault. ‘I came out and thought, “I’m never going back there”.’
She never did go back, nor to the GP, and there was no follow-up.
When Carlie was about 20, she told her mother about the abuse. Her mother just said ‘Don’t tell your dad’. Carlie doesn’t blame her for this, adding that her parents were from a different generation.
Carlie says it was only when she got older, she realised the abuse wasn’t her fault. ‘I felt anger that he got away with it, and angry I never did anything about it.’
She feels the attitude of the mental services staff was completely wrong, and that they were not equipped to help a child who had suffered sexual abuse. She says the way they treated her was actually worse than the abuse itself.
Carlie has found trust and relationships difficult, and some aspects of sex. She has a supportive partner but has only told one friend the details of what happened to her.
She thinks there is now much more awareness about child sexual abuse, and that this is a good thing. But she is concerned that victims and survivors are still afraid of not being believed, and having to go to court. She says good-quality support is crucial to reassure children that abuse is not their fault.
When Carlie heard about the Truth Project, she saw it as an opportunity to do something positive. She says ‘I can’t do anything about the past now, but if I can do something to prevent this happening in the future, I have a duty to do that’.