Carys says ‘I felt I must have done something to make it happen and it must have been my fault’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
For three years, Carys was regularly sexually abused in her own home by a music teacher.
She describes the difficult and confusing impacts of the abuse, and the shame she has felt as a victim and survivor.
Carys grew up in the 1970s and 80s. She describes her home as loving, and her dad as ‘a wonderful, loving, caring man’. She adds that he was extremely protective and ‘sometimes his methods of resolving disputes or “protecting” us as children frightened me’. She believes this was one of the reasons she was deterred from speaking out about the abuse.
The male music teacher, who was in his 50s, began sexually abusing Carys when she was 12 years old. She explains ‘The lessons took place in [a] room and the rest of the family did not enter the room whilst they were taking place, so as not to disturb the lesson, but this left me vulnerable to him’.
The teacher would masturbate during the lessons and make Carys touch his penis, and touch her between her legs.
Carys felt physically repulsed by this man but when he sexually abused her, sometimes her body would react and she became aroused. She says ‘This is what made the experience so difficult for me to understand at the time … I certainly blamed myself and felt disgusted at myself by the experience’. Carys says that the teacher did not rape her but she remembers two occasions when she was afraid he would.
She dreaded the music lessons, but she adds ‘I didn’t feel able to stop them because he threatened to tell my family about what had been happening’.
Carys comments that while she probably did want to tell someone, she felt she had done something wrong and also she was afraid that her dad might assault the teacher ‘or worse’.
She continues ‘I knew, if this happened, my dad would get into a lot of trouble so I never told anyone’.
Carys says that ‘by today’s standards of awareness, it would seem a strange thing to do to leave a teenage girl on her own with an older man who was not a professional teacher, but in the ’80s the awareness of the risk just wasn’t there I don’t think’.
The abuse ended when Carys and her family moved to a different area.
Carys explains that for many years, she questioned the ‘seriousness’ of the child sexual abuse she was subjected to. She says that it took her a long time to contact the Truth Project because she believes her experience is ‘extremely minor compared to that of many others’.
However, in her adult years she has come to understand that ‘the impact has been much greater than I ever thought it was 20 or 30 years ago’. She understands more about the dynamics of power and abuse, and that the self-loathing and lack of confidence she feels result from the abuse. She says ‘I really felt that to have allowed this to happen to me I must be weak and cheap and generally not a very good person’.
Having buried the memories for much of her life, she now feels more confident and her work with female victims and survivors of violence helps her. She comments ‘Although I never talk about my own personal experience, even to those very close to me, I do feel that it drives what I do at work’.
Carys emphasises the need to help young people understand the dynamics of power and what consent really means.
She would also like provision for young people to be able to seek help and advice anonymously. She says she would definitely have done this if the support had been available, but adds that she would never have gone to the police, so it is important that children and young people can seek help without having to talk to the police.