Elisa says ‘People aren’t aware how much abuse there is … it takes so much to survive it’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Elisa was seven years old when her older sister disclosed that their father was sexually abusing her.
Failings by the care system allowed him to go on and abuse Elisa and her other sisters for several more years.
Elisa’s older sister ran away from home, leaving a note to say why.
Social services were involved and her sister was placed in a children’s home. But her father was allowed to visit her. Elisa says ‘He told her that mum would kill herself and he promised he would not touch her again’.
The case against her father did not proceed. Elisa’s sister came home, and Elisa says ‘Mum kicked her all over’.
After that, the family moved to a different area. ‘Looking back I know why’ says Elisa.
The sexual abuse by Elisa’s father did not stop; it got worse. He started sexually abusing her and she remembers telling him that if he did it again she would say something to her mum. She doesn’t think this would have stopped him though, as their mother was not at all protective towards her daughters.
Elisa is not sure when the abuse ended. She recalls that after she started secondary school, she sometimes woke up in bed naked, when she had gone to bed wearing a nightdress. She says ‘When I was an adult I looked back and thought “my god”, because he used to give us alcoholic drinks at night’.
Elisa missed a lot of school. She says ‘We weren’t well off, and I got bullied’, and she adds that she wet the bed until she was a teenager.
She is sure her mother knew their father was sexually abusing and raping his daughters. She once heard them arguing about it, and it sounded as if her mother was jealous.
Elisa also remembers ‘healthcare people’ visiting the house about the bedwetting. They had charts and electric mats with alarms, but no one asked the girls if they were ok.
When Elisa was in her mid-teens, she became very concerned about one of her other sisters, who attempted suicide several times. The girls went to the police. Elisa says ‘There were three of us saying what he’d done’, but the case did not proceed because the Crown Prosecution Service said there was not enough evidence.
Elisa says ‘Social services had promised to support us, but once the case was dropped they didn’t, and it was hell’. The extended family turned on the girls, threatening them and calling them names. Their father didn’t deny abusing them, but said it was Elisa’s older sister’s fault that he had.
More recently, years after she left home, Elisa went to the police again because she was worried her father had contact with relatives’ children. But she was told again there was not enough evidence to prosecute him.
Elisa describes how she was affected by the abuse for years after it ended. She had problems with drugs and alcohol, and got involved in abusive relationships, ‘searching for that bit of love you never had’.
In her 20s, she had what she describes as a ‘massive breakdown … it hit me again because I had never dealt with it’.
Elisa says she wants to see more protection and security for children,and that authorities should ‘look harder and believe people’. She feels she and her sisters were let down by social services who allowed her father to visit her sister in the home, and also because they lost the girls’ files.
She is also disappointed with the criminal justice system for its failure to prosecute her father. ‘It could have saved me from getting abused if they’d stopped him after it came out about my sister.’
Elisa has had counselling, which she says ‘saved me’ and inspired her to return to education and train to be a counsellor.