Georgia says ‘I wanted to run to my mum and tell her everything … but I didn’t want to upset her'
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Georgia says ‘I used to spend the week dreading the weekend coming round’.
This was because she had music lessons on Saturdays with a teacher who sexually abused her.
Georgia grew up in a family with a father who worked long hours away from home, and a mother who was ‘a good mum who spent a lot of quality time with us’.
She had lessons at a local performing arts school where a teacher, Timothy, played the piano for the classes. He also offered private piano tuition and Georgia went to his home every weekend for lessons.
Georgia thinks she was about six or seven years old when Timothy began sexually abusing her. She chooses not to give details of the abuse, and she isn’t sure how long it went on for. She thinks that he was about 60 at the time.
She remembers that at each visit, Timothy made sure he did teach her piano for some time so that it would be obvious she was making progress. She also recalls that sometimes there were other pupils present and she was always relieved if there were, because then Timothy would not abuse her.
On one occasion Georgia’s older sister came with her for a lesson. Timothy asked Georgia to go to the shops. She says ‘I beat myself up about this’ because she thought he might be abusing her sister while she was gone.
But, she adds, the sisters never talked about being abused. ‘It was like she knew and I knew but we never talked’ she says.
Georgia says that she longed to tell her mum, and finds it hard to understand why she didn’t because Timothy did not threaten her. She says ‘That doesn’t make me feel great’.
One day Georgia came home from school and the police were in the living room with her sister. She thought then her sister must have said something about the abuse.
The police did not question Georgia, but some time later, her mum asked her if Timothy had ‘done something’ to her. She told her mum that Timothy had cuddled her and said ‘No’ when her mum asked if he had done anything else.
Georgia didn’t want to tell her mum because her sibling was very unwell at the time and she didn’t want to give her any more worries. She says this is now her biggest regret.
She adds that she feels angry that the police didn’t ask her if she was being abused when they spoke to her sister, so she didn’t get an opportunity to report the abuse she endured.
‘Why didn’t someone put two and two together and think it must have happened to me too?’ she asks.
She doesn’t know what the outcome of the police investigation was because no one talked to her about it.
Talking about the ways she was affected by the abuse, Georgia says she was isolated as a child. She has suffered with an eating disorder as a teenager and as an adult, and would cover her body up in baggy clothes. She is troubled with feelings of guilt that she didn’t report the abuse.
She has had difficulty with relationships. She has had some counselling but recently asked for more support as she feels she is having difficulty coping.
Georgia would like to see clearer information about abuse available to the public and more education in schools on the subject.
She works with vulnerable children and adults, and is glad there is more support available, but she wishes that had been the case for her when she suffered child sexual abuse.