Rubie says ‘Certain predatory people can spot vulnerabilities in a room full of children’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Rubie was subjected to sexual abuse as a child by four different men.
For many years, she thought it must be her fault that people saw her as an easy target for abuse.
Rubie’s mother was a single parent, and had to work long hours to support her children. They were sent to a childminder, and Rubie says ‘We couldn’t have been left with anyone nicer. She was warm and affectionate’. She adds ‘Unfortunately, her husband wasn’t’.
Rubie describes how the husband, Ray, would sit her beside him in his armchair and abuse her behind the newspaper he was pretending to read with her.
She recalls ‘I was terrified. I always knew it was wrong and that it should not be happening’. She thinks she was about four years old when the abuse began; she knows she definitely had not started school.
As another way to make ends meet, Rubie’s mother had a lodger, who slept in the same room as Rubie and her sister. The lodger’s boyfriend, Dave, often stayed over and Rubie would hear them having sex. He would make sexual comments as well, and Rubie felt he intended her to hear them.
Dave would send his girlfriend out of the room to fetch him food and drinks, and while she was gone he would sexually abuse Rubie, touching her and making her touch him.
Rubie was being abused by these two adult men over the same period of time. The abuse continued for about two years, until Rubie’s mother moved house with her daughters. Over the following two years or so, Rubie didn’t experience sexual abuse.
Rubie says her mum was doing her best, but even though she was only six, Rubie had to take on a lot of responsibility and domestic duties. ‘I was the eldest and that’s how it was’ she says.
She and her sisters were neglected, and Rubie now knows they were wards of court. ‘I remember a man in a suit used to turn up sporadically, which used to worry my mum and we would have to put on a good front’ she says.
When Rubie was nine years old, her mum married Steve, the father of one of her younger sisters. ‘He hated me on sight’ she says. ‘I remember absolutely pleading with her not to marry this man.’
Steve treated the whole family badly, but Rubie says she and her mum got the worst treatment. ‘I think he recognised that I’d already been hurt and he was a monumental bully’ she says, adding that Steve was extremely violent to her mother.
He would leave pornography all over the house, and constantly spoke to the girls in a sexually inappropriate way, calling them names such as ‘whores’. ‘It was a sexually threatening atmosphere. He basically hated women’ she says.
Steve found it amusing to ply the girls with alcohol. One Christmas Day, he took Rubie to the pub. She didn’t want to go but had no choice. He got her drunk in front of everyone in the pub, and on the drive home he pulled into a layby and raped her. She was 13 years old.
She remembers she was wearing a nice new dress that a relative had bought her.
Rubie’s mum had made it clear she was jealous that Steve was taking her to the pub, and Rubie did not think of telling her what Steve had done.
When she was 14, Rubie thought Steve was about to rape her again and she threatened to kill herself if he touched her. After this he did not sexually abuse her again, but he carried on physically and emotionally abusing her every day.
Steve was well-known as a bully in their community. ‘There was nowhere for us to go because everyone was frightened of him.
In her first year of secondary school Rubie struggled with one subject, and the teacher, Mr A, offered to help her with one-to-one lessons. Rubie remembers skipping to the classroom. She says ‘I was so elated that someone was taking an interest in me … no one took an interest in me’.
When she got there, Mr A called her over and masturbated over her. She continues ‘Then he wiped me down and threw me out of the room … I despised myself for being tricked’.
After this, Mr A would often stand close to Rubie in regular lessons and push his penis against her. He later left the school abruptly and she wonders if he sexually abused another child.
Rubie says that as an older teenager she became promiscuous. ‘I just thought that I was this thing to be used by men’ she says. She got pregnant and social services arranged for her to go to a mother and baby unit. It was the first place that she had lived where she felt safe.
Many years later, Rubie was sexually assaulted. She decided that would be the last time she was abused.
For a long time, Rubie felt fear and shame about the abuse she had experienced, and was convinced it was her own fault. She says she believed ‘there was something about me that made people abuse me’.
She had a mental breakdown and has suffered from severe depression and complex PTSD. She has used alcohol and drugs to help her cope. She says ‘I struggle very much with what I’ve lost and who I might have been’.
Rubie advocates that children should be taught from an early age about appropriate touch, and that parents should be educated about how to keep their children safe. She would like to see more provision of help and support for children who have suffered abuse, with a particular emphasis on helping them not to feel shame and guilt.
Rubie is in a relationship with someone she says is ‘kind and loving’. She has a close relationship with her grandchildren and is working on other family relationships.