Seth has a supportive partner who encouraged him to share his experience with the Truth Project
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
For his entire childhood, Seth was subjected to an ordeal of sexual, physical and emotional abuse by adults in different institutions.
He became so conditioned to being abused that he saw rape as a usual form of ‘punishment’.
Seth was three years old when he and his siblings were taken to live in a children’s home. He lived there for 11 years, and he remembers it as ‘a horrible place … like a fortress’.
The children were petrified of the staff and were forbidden to speak to anyone from outside the home. Abuse and humiliation were the norm, with harsh and cruel physical and psychological punishments. He remembers how one of the matrons would incite the children to fight with each other.
Seth was about five or six years old when he was sexually abused and raped by Mr Thomas, a relative of one of the matrons at the home.
Mr Thomas would lock Seth in the cellar as punishment, and then abuse him there. He spent many hours in the cellar and says he even ‘befriended’ the rats down there as his only company.
Seth says he believed the rape was his punishment; he didn’t understand it was abuse and not ‘normal’. The assaults caused him such bad injuries that he was in constant pain and was once sent to hospital.
One day Mr Thomas and the matron told Seth they were going to teach him about the ‘birds and the bees’. They brought a young girl, who he now thinks had a learning disability, into the room. She was naked and they told him to touch her, but he refused.
Seth was also sexually abused by two of the female members of staff.
After attending school with an injury, Seth told a teacher he had been hurt by the staff. Later he was summoned to the matron’s office and made to do hard physical labour as punishment throughout the night, for ‘spreading rumours’.
He remembers that on Sundays at the home, ‘strange people’ would come and ‘choose’ children, and take them away, and they were never seen again.
Seth tried to run away from the home but he was always caught and punished. His mother occasionally visited but he could never tell her what was happening, because a member of staff would be in the room.
When he was about 14, Seth and his brother left the home and went to stay with their mother and her husband. But their stepfather was horribly abusive to their mother and the boys ran away. They committed a petty crime to get money to survive and Seth was sent to an approved school.
Here, he endured more sexual abuse by a man who came into his room at night, and a church minister.
He says the abuse ‘has left me as a person permanently damaged’. He suffers from frequent flashbacks and nightmares, although he is now receiving psychiatric help for this. He has abused alcohol, and has difficulties with relationships and trust. He has felt suicidal at times.
A few years ago Seth reported the abuse to the police, but he has been very disappointed by the response. After waiting two years he received a short letter saying the police could not find any record of the children’s home he was sent to in the 1950s.
Seth says that has made him feel the police don’t believe him. He has been in contact with other survivors of abuse at the home.
In his late 30s, Seth met his current partner who he says has helped him to begin dealing with his past.
He adds ‘She gave me the opportunity of moving from being so isolated to being part of a normal family’.