Pollyanna says ‘I no longer blame myself for what happened. I was just a child’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
It was more than 30 years after she was sexually abused that Pollyanna understood she has complex PTSD.
She says this has had a huge impact on her recovery. ‘It’s as though I’ve found the key.’
Pollyanna shared her experience of child sexual abuse in writing. She grew up in the 1960s and 70s in a large family. She says that as a child she was ‘quiet and generally well-behaved’.
She writes that she was four or five years old when her father started sexually abusing her. He showed her pictures of people having sex, and made her touch him. She adds that her father ‘made this a game that only we played’.
Sometimes Pollyanna’s father abused her in front of one of his friends but she doesn’t think this other man abused her.
He physically and verbally abused Pollyanna’s brothers and sisters. Pollyanna says that when she was about 11, she realised that what her father was doing to her was very wrong, and she managed to avoid being alone with him. Around this time, she discovered he was sexually abusing one of her sisters.
This made her very worried, but she was afraid to tell anyone because her father had threatened that if she did, ‘he would belt me’. However, when she was a young teenager, she found the courage to tell her mother, who called the police.
Pollyanna remembers being taken with her sister in a police car. She was given an internal examination at the police station. She writes ‘No one explained about this, it just happened. It was frightening and upsetting’. She adds ‘No one seemed to talk to us or take us seriously’.
Pollyanna’s father appeared in court and was put on probation. Her mother said that the children wanted him to come home, and he was allowed to do this. Pollyanna says ‘I felt angry, humiliated and let down’.
She says her father did not sexually abuse her after this, but he called her names like ‘slut’ and ‘whore’. She describes how she continued to live in fear of him and was permanently on guard. She cannot remember there being any follow-up by anyone in authority to see if the children were safe.
For a time, Pollyanna did well with her school work, but she says she became depressed because of what was happening to her, and didn’t take her O levels. When she was 17 she went to college. She trained for employment, found a job and left home.
She has only realised recently that the abuse she suffered had a significant effect on her mental health.
Discovering that she has complex PTSD has had a huge impact on her recovery and she says the coaching and reading she has done have been ‘amazing’.
Pollyanna wishes that she and her siblings had been listened to and respected. They were coerced by their mother into saying they wanted their father back but they didn’t, and he was able to go on physically, emotionally and verbally abusing them.
‘I felt disbelief that anyone would allow a monster back into a home with vulnerable children’ she says.
Pollyanna has children and grandchildren she loves very much. Remarkably, she says ‘I’ve had a good life’.