Emilia felt compelled to report the abuse she suffered after she began working with children
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
As a working adult, Emilia completed training in child protection.
This made her realise that she had experienced sexual abuse during her childhood.
Emilia lived with her mum, dad and sister until her parents split up. ‘My poor mum struggled quite a lot and she asked social services for help.’ The area she lived in was very deprived, and Emilia and her mum were involved in community volunteering.
Through this work, Emilia met a couple who wanted a babysitter. Emilia was keen to earn some money so she was happy to help. When the couple arrived home after an evening out, the wife would go to bed. The father of the children, Greg, started to kiss and touch Emilia, and he raped her when she was 14. The abuse continued for a couple of years.
Emilia says she thought of Greg and his wife as her friends. ‘They treated me like a grown-up, they gave me alcohol and I didn’t have any friends at school’ she says.
When she was about 16, she told her mum what was happening. ‘I said I didn’t want her to tell anyone, but really I was calling for help to get me out of the situation’ she says. After this, she and her mum had no more contact with Greg or his family.
Emilia went on to work in childcare and completed a number of child protection courses. ‘That was what made me start to realise what had happened’ she says. When she had children she began to feel even more disturbed about what Greg had done.
She telephoned the police but couldn’t go through with reporting the abuse.
A few years later, after she tried to report concerns about a family she was working with, Emilia became very worried that she wasn’t doing enough to protect other children, and she decided she had to try again to report Greg. ‘I knew I had to do it’ she says.
She contacted the police and gave a few interviews and statements. During the investigation that followed, Emilia discovered that when she was a child, a couple in the neighbourhood had called social services to report concerns that Greg was sexually abusing her.
Social services had contacted her school, but no one in either of these institutions took any action.
Emilia recalls another occasion when she was in Greg’s house and he and his wife had such a bad fight that Emilia called the police. When they arrived, Greg’s wife told them ‘He’s sleeping with the babysitter’, but they did not speak to Emilia.
During the court case a number of organisational issues made the process of giving evidence much more stressful for Emilia. She feels strongly that these sorts of practical issues need to be addressed for the sake of all victims and survivors. ‘To give evidence you need to be calm’ she says.
She adds that she did have very good support from the dedicated police worker and also an independent support worker.
Greg denied the abuse but he was found guilty and sentenced to prison. His name is on the sex offenders register for life.
Emilia says she has a very supportive partner. She now wants to move on and try to put her experience behind her, but she says ‘What it did to me and my family will take a really long time to heal’.