Sheila says schools should watch for children who are ‘making it their business to be invisible’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Sheila and her parents came to Britain as immigrants. For a few years they moved several times and Sheila was not always with her mother and father.
She loved horses, and after the family found a place to settle permanently, Sheila regularly went to ride at a local stables. The owner took advantage of her vulnerability and sexually abused her. She has kept this to herself for more than 50 years.
During the unsettled time after her family came to Britain, Sheila lived for a while with her great aunt and uncle, who she loved and feels were the people who brought her up.
In between living with her relations, she was fostered by two different families, one of whom regularly beat her. She comments that they did the same to their own children so she ‘was not made to feel different’.
By the time she was 12 years old, Sheila, who was an only child, had attended six schools and says she had difficulty making friends. She found comfort in her love of horses, and after her family found a permanent home, she began going to a riding stables every Saturday.
The other girls who went riding were taken to and from the stables by parents, but she cycled there and back. She believes that she was vulnerable because her parents were not visible, and also because she had no friends.
Sheila describes how the abuse took place in the tack room at the stables. After the other girls had gone home, the owner, Shawn, would ‘hoist’ her onto his lap and open up her jodhpurs. She says she didn’t really know what was going on but that she ‘somehow felt special’. She was in her early teens at the time, and thinks the abuser was in his 50s.
She thinks she must have been abused when lying down as she has vivid memories of the ceiling and the rows of saddles and bridles, but she does not remember the details of exactly what the abuser did.
Shawn abused her most weekends for about 18 months, until she persuaded her parents to buy her her own horse and she had no need to go to the stables again.
Sheila never told anyone about the abuse before she spoke to the Truth Project. She says after it happened, she ‘put it away’. She thinks it likely that no one would have believed her or that if she had told her parents, her mother would have been unable to cope and her father would have been very angry and possibly violent to Shawn.
It was only decades later, when she saw a newspaper report about Shawn’s death and information indicating that he was a paedophile, that she was ‘jolted’ into thinking the abuse had really happened and not been in her imagination.
The sexual abuse that Sheila endured has had a very negative impact on her sexual relationship with her husband. ‘It has been a mess,’ she says. She also feels unable to tell her children and that overall it has had a huge effect on her life. She describes herself as very ‘enclosed’ and fiercely private.
Sheila would like opportunities to be available for young girls to talk in confidence in places where they congregate for social activities. She also thinks there should be more awareness raising around possible abuse in settings where young girls attend, such as riding stables.
She relates how she hated school and was bullied, and tried to ensure she went ‘unnoticed’ throughout her school days. She considers that more attention should be given to the ‘well behaved, good pupil’ who may be hiding secrets or potential disclosures.
She adds that she would have been horrified to have told someone at school if they had then talked to her parents. She says consideration should be given to fears that children may have of the implications of talking about abuse and its impact on their family.