A trusted family member raped Megan when she was seven years old
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Megan describes her childhood as ‘rich’, although the family was financially poor. Both her parents worked long shifts and they arranged for her uncle, Daniel, to care for her and her sister while they were working.
This arrangement resulted in a serious sexual attack on Megan that has had devastating consequences on her life.
Megan describes how one day Daniel began play-fighting with her and chased her upstairs into the spare room where he raped her. She was seven years old.
She remembers being in the bath the next day and how the water was so full of blood that she thought she was dying. She says she felt she could not tell her parents what had happened – she ‘adored’ Daniel, he was ‘a trusted family member’. She was worried her father would kill him, so she ‘just got on with it’.
Daniel never raped Megan again, but throughout her entire childhood he regularly subjected her to touching, kissing and lewd suggestions. He sometimes did this in front of her parents but in such a way that they were unaware of his behaviour. He would hold her close so she would feel his penis against her, and behave in a sexualised way to her mother and aunt, but they would just laugh at him.
When she was a teenager, Megan confided in school friends about what had happened to her, but she says her friends ‘all fancied him and laughed it off’. She thinks they may have thought she was ‘lucky’.
Megan describes the many ways that the abuse has affected her. As a child, she was frightened of the dark, had temper issues and wet the bed every night until she was in her late teens. The bedwetting meant she couldn’t go on sleepovers at friends’ houses. Her mother was furious at the additional washing it created, and her GP labelled her ‘lazy’.
She says she felt ‘shamed, blamed and humiliated’ at something that was a symptom of her abuse.
Megan went to university and relates how in her first year she drank herself ‘to oblivion, took party drugs and was promiscuous’. She describes this time as ‘like a whirlwind’ and says how out of control she felt.
She went to see a counsellor and in her second year of sessions, the counsellor told her that if she wanted to continue the counselling, she would have to disclose her abuse to her parents.
Megan went home and told her parents. They were distressed and confronted Daniel. He would not admit what he had done, and they told Megan to report him to the police. She did this and returned to university.
Megan says she found it very hard returning home after this and her relationship with her father deteriorated. Her parents never spoke to her about the sexual abuse. She thinks they assumed the police were in touch with her and that she did not want to talk about it.
But Megan did not hear anything from the police. She said she trusted them and had assumed Daniel would be placed on the sex offenders register. A couple of years later, she made a subject access request, and to her shock and distress she received an email from the police which did not give her the information she had requested, but simply forwarded her witness statement.
Megan had never seen this before, was unprepared to receive it and says that reading it retraumatised her. The statement was unsigned, contained material inaccuracies and was written in a manner that she says almost suggested that the abuse was consensual.
She began experiencing flashbacks and nightmares. She complained to the police, received what she describes as ‘a cursory sorry’ and was informed that Daniel had never been arrested.
Megan remains extremely angry that the police let her down as a child and as an adult – first by not investigating the sexual abuse she suffered and second by not considering the potential impact of sending her the witness statement.
She feels strongly that police officers involved in child sexual abuse work need to be properly trained and should have the necessary skills and insight for such sensitive work.