Khloe says ‘Not one person at any time asked “What’s wrong with you?”’
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Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Khloe was sexually abused by her father for so long that she says she ‘normalised’ it.
She wishes that someone in authority had asked her why she ran away from home and took an overdose.
Khloe was very young when she was taken away from her mother, who remarried and had another child. Khloe was sent to live with her grandparents and then moved in with her father and stepmother.
She was sexually abused by her father on numerous occasions from the age of about five to 13. She says she has always thought of the abuse as ‘very minor’, such as her father ‘sticking his tongue down my throat’ and grabbing her breasts. He took photos of her and sometimes took her into his bed and tried to rape her. Khloe knows now this was not in any way normal but at the time, she says, she became ‘so used to it’. She adds that she felt ‘lucky’ he did not manage to rape her and she feels many children had to put up with ‘worse’.
Khloe was also physically abused by her father and stepmother. They moved home a lot, and this meant she often changed schools. She remembers there being some kind of court case about her and being asked whether she was happy at home, but this was done in front of her father and she was scared to say how she felt.
Her father stopped sexually abusing her when she was about 13. She says that around this age she was becoming more aware of boys and sexuality, and realising that her father’s behaviour ‘really wasn’t right’. She used to freeze when he sexually abused her. She started resisting him, but he continued grabbing her breasts and kissing her. She still feels repulsed at the memory of it.
Khloe started running away from home, but was always returned to her father and stepmother. No one asked why she was doing this, and she remembers being told once by a social worker that she had a lovely bedroom, and she should go home. She was also threatened with being sent to a secure unit.
Khloe took an overdose of painkillers and was taken to hospital in an ambulance. Again, no one asked her the reason why she had done this. She was referred to a psychiatrist but whenever she saw him, her father sat outside his office and would then ‘interrogate’ her on the way home in the car.
When Khloe was in her mid teens, she got a job and left home. She would go home occasionally to visit her younger half sibling because she was worried about them. On one of these visits, her father tried to sexually assault her and she never went back.
Khloe suffers with PTSD and has panic attacks. She finds it hard to have contact with men and she is aware that she often minimises things, in the way she did with the sexual abuse. She says ‘It’s what I grew up with and to me it was completely normal … I just accepted it as “all dads do that”’.
She adds that while she understands people in authorities do difficult jobs, she wishes someone had asked her more questions about why she was behaving the way she was.
Khloe believes there should be an age-appropriate approach to help children disclose sexual abuse and more funding for services for victims of child sexual abuse.