Harlie endured years of grooming, control, coercion and sexual abuse by a martial arts instructor
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
After her martial arts instructor manipulated and sexually abused her, Harlie considered suicide at the age of nine, and still lives with many impacts that significantly affect her.
Harlie describes a difficult family life; her father was violent, her mother had mental health problems and neither parent showed much interest in Harlie and her siblings.
She was seven years old when she joined a martial arts club run by an instructor called Stu, who was married with children. She quickly became aware that when Stu adjusted her positions, he was using this as an opportunity to touch her on her chest and between her legs, and she would try to get away from his hold.
The instructor started giving her back the money her mum had given her to pay for the session. He often pointed out that her parents were not interested in her, and started picking her up early for martial arts class, and taking her to activities like swimming lessons. ‘I was reliant on him for things you would expect a parent to do’ Harlie says, adding that Stu told her to lie to her mother about where she was.
Stu continued his manipulative behaviour, telling Harlie that his wife didn’t love him or hug him, and she remembers thinking ‘That’s really cruel’ and feeling sorry for him. He encouraged her to help herself to snacks from the club tuck shop, then said he had caught her stealing but he would keep ‘her secret’.
Harlie relates how the instructor became more aggressive in the way he touched her. When he took her swimming he would get her to swim between his legs and move her head to his groin area. He once yanked her costume down and she felt a stabbing pain ‘down below’. She is sure he put his fingers inside her. She was about nine or 10 years old at the time.
Further abusive behaviour by Stu included him making Harlie completely undress so he could weigh her before tournaments, and taking Polaroid pictures of her, and watching her and other girls getting changed through a hole in the wall. She describes the embarrassment she felt, and how she would try and move away.
After she, her sibling and a friend realised that Stu was touching all of them, she told her mother what he was doing. Her mother said Stu might be doing it ‘accidentally’ and told her to tell Stu they didn’t like it. When Harlie did this, he ignored her for a while in classes and made it clear she had disappointed him, which she says really upset her.
It wasn’t long before he began to touch her again and she recalls that she decided she wasn’t going to fight it. ‘His touch got harder and more invasive’ she says. She tried to protect her sibling and the younger children in the classes by volunteering herself to demonstrate martial arts moves with him, so that he could not touch them.
Some time after this, Stu persuaded Harlie to go with him to his house on an errand. She said no at first, but he pressured her so that she felt guilty. He sexually assaulted her there. She struggled but he was a ‘heavy weight’ on top of her. She remembers focusing on the unusual stitching on some furniture and adds ‘I can’t remember anything that happened, but feeling sick and shocked inside me, and hurting’.
When he drove her back, Stu told her not to tell her parents. She recalls feeling sick and being in a lot of pain. ‘Nothing made sense, it was all hazy, almost as though I wasn’t in the world. When I went to school, everything sounded different.’
After this, Harlie says she became distant from her friends and began to hide away.
When she was in her mid teens, she left the club, but when she heard some younger children had joined she was worried about what Stu would do to them, so she went back for another few years.
Some years after she left, she heard that Stu had been sent to prison for raping a girl in the club.
Harlie has not reported Stu to the police for abusing her. She says she is prepared to give a statement, but worries that her mother would be questioned and that this would damage her fragile mental health.
She has suffered many serious effects from the decade of sexual abuse she endured. She has considered suicide, and still has the scars from mutilating her own body to try and make herself unattractive to Stu. She had an eating disorder, drank too much and got in trouble with the police as a teenager.
Harlie’s trauma is triggered by certain smells and situations. She has difficulty sleeping and has abused drugs.
She has a strained relationship with her husband, particularly over their sex life, and says she is a very over-protective parent. She finds it hard to trust her husband, or any men.
Harlie says that sports clubs should be regularly spot-checked by an independent, external person, who should speak to children and their parents and ask them carefully how they are feeling.
She is seeing a therapist and has a career working in safeguarding. She believes she has gravitated towards this work because of her experiences.