Martha says ‘I didn’t know what a dad was supposed to be like’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Martha and her sister were abused by their birth parents and were put in care.
Her foster father groomed and sexually abused her. She says because of her early experiences with her birth parents, she didn’t know that what he was doing was wrong.
Martha was about 10 years old when she was taken into care. She says after the abuse she suffered with her parents, her foster father ‘seemed to be a nice, friendly man’. She says she remembers feeling ‘you had to trust adults around you, because you’ve been taken from somewhere you’ve known your whole life’.
But the foster father betrayed this trust. He made Martha watch pornography with him and would rub his genitals against hers. He abused her at home and in his car.
Martha describes feeling like an ‘emotional robot … not connected to my emotions at all because of what had happened with my birth parents’.
After some time, Martha says she became rebellious and was moved to another placement. Her sibling was living with the foster parents and Martha pleaded with her support worker not to leave them there alone. But no one asked her why she was so concerned.
As she grew older, she started to realise she had suffered from sexual abuse in the foster home. She says she ‘pushed it away’ when it first dawned on her but eventually she told her new foster mother and the matter was reported to the police.
The abuser, the foster carer, was arrested and charged. Martha was later told that there were other girls who were part of the prosecution case and that she was the oldest of them. She says this made her feel very guilty that if she had spoken out sooner she could have stopped the younger girls being abused.
Martha says that during the lengthy police investigation, she received very little information and support. She says the latter was put in place, but felt like a ‘tick box exercise’.
She says that at first the police were very confident of a conviction, but in the end it was decided there was not enough evidence to take the case to court.
Martha felt very let down by this but was told that she had to accept the decision.
She also feels let down by the professionals involved in her life who all made assumptions about her behaviour and did not ask her any questions.
Martha would like to see more support for victims of child sexual abuse and their families.