Helena feels proud of the way she is dealing with the effects of being abused as a child
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Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Helena was sexually abused by some older cousins, and then by her father.
She was not protected by social services, the care system or the police.
Helena’s parents met overseas. They had a volatile relationship and when she was about four years old, her father brought Helena and her brother back to the UK.
From the age of eight, for about three years, she was subjected to sexual abuse by several older male cousins. They molested her, and she remembers sometimes they pushed objects into her bottom.
Helena says ‘Abuse was rife in the family’. When she was nine years old, her father started to abuse her. He raped her when she was 13.
A year later, she ran away from home, went to social services and told them about the abuse. She was interviewed by the police but they suggested she return home. Because she did not want to do this, Helena told the police she did not want to go on with the case.
Helena was placed into foster care. She says her foster mother was ‘mean’. Even more upsetting was the fact that her father was in regular contact with her foster parents, and this made her feel she couldn’t get away from him.
She describes her father as very manipulative. He gave her large amounts of money, and eventually convinced her to go home. Because she had told the police about him abusing her, she says she didn’t think he would do it again if she went home, but he did.
Social services did not check up on her after she returned home. Her father continued abusing her until she was 16, when she left home for the last time. She was able to claim benefits and be financially independent of him, and she says she was ‘relieved to be out of it.’
Helena says the abuse had a ‘massive’ impact on her life. She has suffered with depression and anxiety, and feels she has little self-respect. She describes feeling ‘dirty and horrible and that everyone knew I was dirty’.
She adds that she used to feel that ‘sex was something men were entitled to’. For a time, she would get drunk and ‘sleep with anyone’, then become upset because they were not interested in her the next day.
Helena would like children to be educated and made aware of ‘what is not supposed to happen in a family’. She thinks she did not report the abuse when she was younger because from a young age, she expected people to use her. She is glad that people are now more open to talking about abuse. ‘You previously brushed under the carpet’, she says.
She believes that if she had been placed in ‘good’ foster care, with better safeguarding, she would not have gone home again.
Helena no longer sees her father because, she says, ‘he will not take responsibility for his actions … he intended to do what he did’.
She was in an abusive relationship for several years, but later had a child with another partner, and says she decided ‘I needed to sort my life out’.
Helena feels that her son and her religious faith keep her ‘level’ and she describes herself as ‘naturally resilient’.
For years, her father told her she was ‘thick’ but she is now studying for a degree and feels very proud of that.