Lucile says ‘I just keep going, always. But the damage to my life has been profound’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
During her first two years at secondary school, Lucile was subjected to repeated sexual abuse by large groups of her peers.
She was blamed and shamed by staff and pupils for being abused.
Lucile attended a large mixed comprehensive school in the 1970s and 80s.
She relates ‘The abuse occurred at the end of what we used to call the first year of secondary school to the end of the second year’.
The first time Lucile was assaulted was on a school coach returning from a trip. Two girls held her down while a boy touched her genitals and penetrated her with his fingers.
She was further humiliated after this attack. ‘When I returned to school, news of what this boy had done to me was widespread, it felt like everyone was talking about what happened. Girls and boys in my year would come up to me to ask me if it was true. There was a lot of excitement amongst my peers.’
Lucile continues ‘It was as if what happened gave permission to the other boys to treat me the same way’. She explains that because of ‘my notoriety’, by her second year, she was regularly subjected to sexual abuse and harassment by groups of boys, some of them older than her.
The assaults occurred nearly every school day throughout the year, in classrooms, cloakrooms, the playground and the streets near the school. The abuse usually involved groups of boys. Lucile would be held down while the abusers touched her and penetrated her digitally.
She describes being grabbed, surrounded and frogmarched, then pushed to the ground to be assaulted. She adds ‘It was quite frenzied at times’.
During the same time that these boys were sexually abusing Lucile, they and other pupils were bullying her, calling her sexually derogatory names, such as ‘whore’, ‘slut’ and ‘slag’.
The abuse ended when Lucile’s mother arranged for her to move to a different school.
Lucile describes the profound and damaging effect the sexual abuse had on her. She says ‘I emerged from that year traumatised and deeply distressed … unable to bear being in my body, unable to bear being me anymore. These feelings grew worse over the next four years’.
By the time Lucile was 17 she was suicidal, and was stockpiling prescription drugs. Because of her poor mental health, the college she was attending said she had to leave if she didn’t have therapy. Lucile says her parents were loving, but were always guided by ‘professionals’.
Lucile continues ‘The therapist I saw was awful. When I eventually couldn’t bear to go any more and phoned her up to cancel, she told me – a 17-year-old girl who was believed to be suicidal – not to leave it too long if I changed my mind as she was dealing with patients with “real problems”’.
With no support in the years following the abuse, Lucile was unable to make sense of the difficulties and distress she experienced.
She describes an overwhelming feeling ‘that there was something “wrong” with me. I didn’t really consider myself a human being …’.
Lucile continues that as she grew into adulthood, she became better at masking her distress and more able to make friends. She adds ‘To this day, any reference or depiction of gang rape is a particularly powerful trigger for me’.
Lucile feels strongly there was negligence by various authority figures, particularly teachers, who knew what was happening but failed to protect her and even went as far as blaming her.
She cites one teacher in particular who knew about the abuse and frequently made critical and sexualised remarks about her regarding what the boys were doing ‘… misrepresenting me as the instigator … on one occasion saying I was a “disgrace” to the school’.
Lucile also has a memory of sitting in the headteacher’s office. She does not recall the conversation in detail but remembers feeling she was being held responsible in some way.
Lucile has a number of views and suggestions about how to help girls and young women suffering the same abuse that she did.
She notes that peer-on-peer sexual abuse is starting to be taken seriously, but says it definitely wasn’t when she was growing up. She says ‘This gaslighting of my experiences … contributed significantly to the perpetuation of my distress … if nothing had “happened” to me, then all the difficulties I was experiencing could only be because of my inadequacy as a human being’.
Lucile feels strongly that society does not take violence against women and girls seriously and still puts the onus on them to change their behaviour. She continues ‘We will only start to make headway in protecting girls and boys from sexual abuse when we finally tackle the misogyny and sexism that is so deeply rooted within our society, and challenge the causes of the toxic male behaviour that so many boys learn from society’.
She questions where the boys who sexually and verbally abused her learned their behaviour and comments ‘Aged 11 and 12, they’d already absorbed powerful and damaging ways of thinking about girls, about our bodies, and about their entitlement to touch us and breach our boundaries’.
Lucile remarks on ‘new toxic influences like online porn and social media’ but she believes the underlying problem is the messages society gives to young boys and men about girls, and consent, boundaries, relationships, respect and autonomy.
She considers that the best way to support victims and survivors of child sexual abuse is therapy, which must be trauma-informed, and says a huge increase in funding is needed. She also calls for radical reform of the thinking in mental health services that victims of abuse have a ‘disorder’ that needs medical treatment. In fact, she says, ‘Emotional distress is not a disease or illness … it is normal to react with great distress to abuse and assault’.
After extensive research and a long wait, Lucile has started therapy which she finds helpful. She says ‘I hope that one day I may achieve a degree of peace and self-acceptance’.
She has also built a successful career dedicated to supporting others.