Kayla says ‘Being abused doesn’t end when the abuse stops, and I think that’s the worst part’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Memories of the sexual abuse she was subjected to from the age of 12 are frequently triggered for Kayla.
She is having therapy to help her process what happened to her, but says this can be emotionally exhausting.
During Kayla’s early years her family seemed a bit more ‘normal’, but this fell apart when her parents separated.
After her parents separated, Kayla’s mum got married again, to a man called James.
She says that her mother was not loving towards her, and often criticised her appearance. When Kayla tried to talk to her mum ‘it was dismissed as silly, stupid, or irrelevant … there were moments that I did feel loved by her, often for academic achievements or if I did something good, but I struggle to remember empathy or a loving environment with her’.
James began abusing Kayla when she was 12 years old. She says ‘I distinctly remember being so uncomfortable around him and finding him disturbing at first’. He often touched her and if she pulled away, he said she was making him feel unwanted and upset. She says ‘I felt like I had done something wrong, so I let him continue doing it’.
James would give Kayla massages over her clothes. Her siblings told their mother they thought it was ‘weird’ but James professed outrage that they were implying he was a paedophile, and the massages continued.
James then told Kayla to take her clothes off because they were in the way, and said it was ‘ridiculous to be embarrassed’. She says ‘I felt so silly’. Gradually she realised that the massages were happening when no one else was home.
Kayla says she always tried to insist on keeping her underwear on or covering herself with a towel but James did not always allow this, and she remembers him touching her breasts and backside.
He took photographs of Kayla, saying they were for her boyfriend. When she told her boyfriend, he said this was wrong and in her embarrassment she then denied it had happened.
Kayla continues ‘As time went on I began self-harming, I never knew why. I started when I was [in my early teens] and it just got worse’. She was referred to children’s mental health services and had therapy.
She was given anti-depressants and later took an overdose. She says ‘I never wanted to die, I just wanted to be admitted to hospital because it was a place I had felt safe and looked after before’.
James began buying Kayla clothes and provocative underwear, telling her that her mum must never see what he’d given her.
He plied her with cigarettes and she quickly became addicted to them. She says ‘Cigarettes became a tool he could use to pressure me to do things I didn’t want to do or act a certain way’. For example, he made her sit with him when he was in the bath.
Sometimes James would take Kayla to another house, and give her drugs. She recalls ‘On one occasion I thought I was going to die ... I remember lying in bed feeling like I couldn’t move’.
Kayla remembers James being naked in bed with her ‘and being so scared if he was close to me or not. I lay right on the edge of the bed’.
She continues ‘James would often use our car journeys to discuss sex, advise about sex with my boyfriends, what he had done with my mum and previous girlfriends. Often I asked him to stop because it was disgusting, but he would get upset and I’d feel silly, stupid, guilty, and scared he wouldn’t give me any more cigarettes’.
Kayla says that at the time she did not identify what James was doing as abuse. But when she was in her early 20s, she had a partner and she mentioned something that James had done. She relates ‘He looked really worried and told me that was wrong … I remember feeling really worried that it would make me look disgusting or messed up’.
However, she says her partner was kind and supportive. He suggested she went for therapy but she began drinking heavily. It was only when she talked to one of her siblings and heard they had had similar experiences with James that she decided to report him to the police and tell her parents what had happened.
Kayla says that since then she has become estranged from her parents. She says ‘They don’t see themselves as part of the problem or take responsibility that they should have protected me’.
Looking back, she is shocked that a therapist she spoke to as a young teenager did not follow up some of the things she said about James, and also that the therapist broke confidentiality with information she told them about her dad.
She struggled to make friends at school and now understands why she didn’t connect with anyone of her own age. Kayla still finds it hard to make friends and feels anxious in social situations and at work, where she often feels ‘like my opinions and voice is stupid and irrelevant’.
She says the abuse ‘affects and shapes my everyday life, and it is so tiring and emotional to process it and reframe it so I can improve my self-beliefs and esteem about myself’.
Kayla adds ‘I experience daily triggers. My current partner is incredible. He knows everything and has been nothing but exceptionally supportive’.
She is having therapy, and says ‘I really hope one day I can identify the abuse as being abuse, and not something that felt like something I just had to get through and get on with’.
Commenting about sharing her experience, Kayla says ‘I can’t really explain why I wanted to … it just felt comforting that there was something like this that I could feel heard’.