Justine says ‘After my dad died I was passed from one man to another’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Justine was seven years old when her father died.
She lived in poverty, was neglected and several people took advantage of this to physically and sexually abuse her.
Justine says that because her mother struggled to cope with her six children, social services were involved with the family.
When Justine’s mother went out socialising, she used to leave the children with babysitters, some of them teenagers.
Justine recalls being sexually and physically abused by three of them – two boys and one girl. This began when she was about nine, and she says the same thing happened to her younger sisters.
One of the boys rubbed his penis on her and touched her genitals. She was also hit with wet towels, and had water thrown on her.
Justine and her sister told their mother, and showed her their bruises. She said she would ‘have a word’ with the babysitters, but the abuse did not stop.
Once a week, Justine was sent by her mother to visit a man called Paul, who her mother was dating. Justine was supposed to get money from him. He would send her out shopping and give her something to eat. She says he began taking her into the bedroom and ‘playing with himself’ until he ejaculated. She was about 11 when this happened.
Justine says she started taking a friend with her for protection but Paul began sexually abusing this girl too. He sat between them on the sofa, put a cover over them and molested them underneath the cover. He would then take one of them into the bedroom. He gave the girls money when they left. The abuse escalated to rape, and went on for a few years.
Her mother began to see another man, Fred. He had daughters of his own, and Justine says he was ‘a vile man’. Fred began to abuse Justine almost immediately and she discovered years later that he had abused his own children too.
She says that her mother had many men in the house, but comments ‘they weren’t interested in my mam, they were only interested in her little girls’. And she adds ‘If you have no food as a child, they know you’re going to do it'.
Justine says that she and her sisters were taken in and out of care because of the neglect they suffered. She does not know if social services were aware of the sexual abuse.
When Justine was in her early teens, social services insisted that the family went to an assessment centre, where Justine’s mother could have lessons to help her look after her family. Volunteers at the centre did activities with the children. One of them – a man called Roy who was in his 20s – ‘took a shine’ to her. He was on probation.
Justine says that as she saw it at the time, Roy ‘began a relationship’ with her. She now understands this was abusive but she believed she was in love with him.
She questions why social services and probation services allowed a man in his 20s with a criminal record to work with children.
When she was in her mid teens, Justine married Roy and stayed with him for over 30 years. He was a violent man. She says ‘I feel like now, he made me what he wanted … he conditioned me’.
She had children and worked in any job she could to provide for them, because she was determined to give them the best life possible.
As they grew up, her children began to encourage her to enrol in college. Justine also began doing voluntary work and got involved with a domestic violence project. She says this gave her courage and strength to eventually leave Roy.
Justine would like to see better ways of interviewing children, with professionally trained staff who can build trust with children. She would like schools to be taught to recognise the early signs of abuse in children and to teach children at an earlier age ‘what is ok and what is not ok’. She hopes that sharing her experience will help other children.
Justine is immensely proud of her children and how well they have done, and having grandchildren makes her very happy.
She feels she has come to terms with all that happened to her as a child. She says ‘You either let it get you down or you move on … I always wanted better for mine’.