Naomie says her experience of sexual abuse ‘was a case that didn’t have to happen, because I told people’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
From a very young age, Naomie had to support her mother, who had serious mental health issues.
This was obvious to her school, and she also reported sexual abuse to teachers, but no action was taken.
Naomie’s mother migrated to the UK from a country where she faced discrimination because of her ethnicity. Naomie now knows her mother already had mental health problems when she arrived, which became worse after she gave birth to Naomie.
Naomie says ‘My mum blames me for the difficulties in her life’.
After Naomie’s parents separated, her mum became physically and emotionally abusive and was neglectful of her children. By the time she was eight years old, Naomie says ‘I was doing my absolute best to protect my younger brother … and make sure he was happy and fed. I had to learn to shop for food and do the cooking. I was quite overwhelmed’.
The children still saw their dad regularly but Naomie says he was not much help.
Naomie’s mum started seeing another man, Micky, who moved into the family home. Their relationship was extremely volatile.
Micky started walking past Naomie’s bedroom door – her mother would not allow her to close it – and taking photos of her. She says ‘I found this very weird … my dad had never been like that’. Naomie was about nine or 10 years old at the time and also found Micky very intimidating.
Micky then began coming into Naomie’s room when she was sleeping. She would wake up to find him touching himself and taking intimate photographs of her. She says she was so scared that sometimes she pretended to be asleep when he came in.
As Naomie got older and went to secondary school, she began to realise the implications of what Micky was doing. She looked at his laptop and saw he had posted pictures of her online. There were images of other children too.
Naomie says she became angry and defensive towards Micky. She tried to keep away from him, but this made her mum angry. Micky had a violent temper and would sometimes smash things in the house.
One day, he threatened to turn his attention on Naomie’s little brother. She says at this ‘I lost it. I was very defensive of my brother’. She argued with Micky and he left the house. His relationship with her mother broke up, and this made her mother more depressed.
As a young teenager, Naomie says she became more and more angry. ‘I felt no one at school understood why I acted the way I did, but they knew my mum had issues.’ Her mum had a lot of contact with the school, and was frequently very abusive to staff and abusive to Naomie in front of her teachers.
Sometimes her mother’s behaviour was so extreme that the school called the police, but Naomie says ‘There was never any action. Sometimes I was held in the safeguarding office, but then they spoke to my mum and dad and it was decided I was overreacting’.
Naomie started mixing with other kids who ‘didn't fit the mould’. She made friends with a boy called Henrie. She says ‘he was quite disturbed and had a terrible home life’, with parents who were drug users.
Naomie felt sorry for him and wanted to help, but Henrie turned on her and started physically and sexually assaulting her. This went on a few times a week for several months, and Naomie felt she was supporting Henrie by allowing him to hurt her.
‘I had led a life believing people could do what they wanted with my body’ she says. She would often go home badly hurt and try to deal with her mother, who was usually in a disturbed state.
At school, the staff thought Naomie was self-harming and tried to get her to say why she was hurting herself. Naomie told more than one teacher that Henrie was hurting her.
By the time she was in her early teens, Naomie was struggling with her mental health. She says she felt in total despair. ‘I was so confused and felt completely trapped.’
But then she made friends with a boy who is now her long-term partner. He gave her a lot of support and encouraged her to get help.
Naomie started seeing a psychologist, and a report was passed to the school about Henrie. She was about to start her exams, but because there were concerns about Henrie’s welfare, Naomie was asked to change her timetable and sometimes stay at home so she would not be in contact with Henrie. This meant she became isolated from her friends, who then stopped talking to her.
‘I understand they had concerns about Henrie but it wasn’t fair that I’d been hurt and I had to stay away from school’ she says.
When she went to college, one of her tutors helped her get counselling as she was experiencing flashbacks.
Naomie later discovered from school records that some teachers had expressed concerns about her but had not reported these. ‘It made me really angry’ she says.
She feels that one reason the school failed to address the issues about her mum’s mental health was because they were ‘trying to avoid being seen as racist’, and also possibly that they were a relatively well-off family.
Naomie says because she hadn’t been raped, it took her many years to properly understand she had been sexually abused.
She would like to see better systems in place to support both sides involved in peer-on-peer violence.
Naomi feels mental health services are not set up to deal with complex experiences like hers. She saved up and funded counselling herself.
She thinks that greater understanding of mental health issues might have helped her. She says that people understand more readily the difficulties children have if they are looking after someone with a physical ailment.
Her mum would not seek diagnosis and treatment, and at times Naomie wished her mum had a physical rather than a mental condition, because it would have been easier to cope.
Naomi believes there should be a legal responsibility for any professional to report concerns about children, and a more effective way to link up concerns from different agencies
She says ‘I am at a stage where I can live with what happened to me, but it terrifies me that things can go unnoticed’.