Ninette wants people to be aware that children can perpetrate sexual abuse
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Badly bullied, with her family overseas, Ninette was isolated at boarding school.
She had no one to turn to when a male pupil sexually abused her for five years.
Ninette’s dad was a serviceman and the armed forces paid for her boarding school fees in the UK when he was posted abroad.
Just before she started school in the 1980s, a number of her much-loved relatives died in a short space of time.
To add to Ninette’s difficulties, as soon as she arrived, she was subjected to terrible bullying from the other girls in her dormitory. ‘They were awful’ she says, relating how they would wipe their bottoms with her clothes and throw her possessions out of the window.
When she tried to get up and get dressed in the morning, they accused her of looking at them and called her a lesbian. ‘I was completely isolated’ she says.
One day, Kris, a boy who was in the year above Ninette, asked her to meet him in a secluded area.
He pinned her into a corner and kissed her. Ninette says ‘I’d never done that – I didn’t know what the hell was going on’. She explains that she was below average height for her age, and Kris pushed her down and penetrated her with his fingers.
Ninette tried to get away, but she was physically trapped. Kris told her not to tell anyone ‘because if I did, they’d say I was a slag’. She says ‘Everyone hated me anyway, I didn’t need to give them any more ammunition’.
Later, she thought she had started her periods, but she was bleeding because he had injured her.
After this, Kris ordered her to meet him every day. She tried to avoid him by attending after-school activities but he began intimidating her and making suggestive gestures that she was afraid her classmates would see.
So Ninette would meet him, and the sexual abuse escalated. Kris made her touch his penis and perform oral sex on him. She had no idea about sex or what she was doing.
The abuse continued for five years. Ninette constantly warned Kris she was worried about getting pregnant, so he raped her anally.
Ninette enjoyed learning and managed to detach herself from the abuse so she could do well in her school work.
Each ‘house’ at the school was managed by a housemaster. At one point, Ninette wrote her parents a long letter, saying she was homesick and unhappy and wanted to be back with her family. She didn’t feel she could tell them what Kris was doing.
Ninette’s housemaster read the letter and told her she was naughty for upsetting her parents. ‘I wasn’t allowed to write home any more’ she says.
After this, the housemaster made a point of picking on Ninette, punishing her for minor mistakes.
While Ninette was still at school, the telephone support service Childline was launched. After seeing an advert about it on television, Ninette dialled the number from a phone box, but hung the phone up immediately. ‘That was the closest I ever got to telling anyone’ she says.
Ninette used to go home for the holidays, but she felt too ashamed to tell her parents about the sexual abuse. She did try to talk to her mum about the housemaster’s unfair treatment of her, but her mum didn’t take it seriously.
After Ninette left school she went back to her family. Her mother was suffering with a mental health problem, but no one explained this to Ninette and she did not realise.
'I thought she hated me, because I hated myself’ she says.
Unable to cope with sixth form college, Ninette left home and moved in with a group of young people, then lived on the streets for a time.
‘I drank quite a lot, and lived in the moment. If nothing bad was happening to me at that moment, that was good’ she says. ‘My way of dealing with everything was “Don’t think about it”.’
She relied on other young people she knew to feed her, until she managed to get a job and support herself.
Ninette was very resourceful, and believes one reason for this was that she had had to travel and fly long distances abroad to see her parents at a young age, with virtually no supervision.
When she was in her early 20s, Ninette reported the abuse by Kris to the police. She says ‘The police were amazing … wonderful’. They charged him with multiple offences, which he admitted, but he claimed she had ‘wanted it all’.
The Crown Prosecution Service decided not to prosecute. The police officer involved in her case wanted to appeal this decision but Ninette did not want him to. At the time, she was in an abusive relationship and had no support.
‘Ever since then I have carried so much guilt’ she says. She intends to go back to the police.
Ninette says she has wondered how Kris had such a knowledge of sex at the age of 12. But she adds, he continued abusing her for five years and definitely understood his actions by then.
Ninette suffers with flashbacks and severe anxiety. ‘I don’t think anything good can ever happen to me.’ She has been diagnosed with PTSD and suffers with a physical condition linked to trauma. She has recently accessed therapy and feels this will be helpful.
She has difficulty with sexual relationships and has been involved with abusive, violent and alcoholic partners.
Ninette considers that safeguarding is much better than it was when she was a child, but it still needs improvement. She would like to see more support available for victims and survivors of abuse. She comments that this could save health services money in the long term.
She thinks that there should be awareness that children can also be perpetrators of sexual abuse, not just adults. ‘Everything is about older people abusing kids … what happened to me wasn’t kids playing doctors and nurses, it was a long-term attack’ she says.
Ninette is now married to a supportive man. She says at first, she thought ‘he was too nice for me’, but she has overcome this feeling.
She has gone back to education. She says ‘I always felt my education was taken from me and that was such a big regret. I want my life back, I don’t want him to beat me’.