Sue shared her experience and hopes it will draw a line under the sexual abuse and help her move forward
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Sue grew up in an isolated part of the country and attended a small primary school, where there were few visitors, after-school clubs or external influences.
Her primary school headteacher, Mr Parker, abused her and other children, and she knows that this was common knowledge in the community. She believes that there were ‘so many opportunities to stop this man’ but he was allowed to continue.
She describes how pupils would not go into Mr Parker’s office on their own, as he would try to make them sit on his lap; he was known as a ‘letch’.
When Sue was nine years old Mr Parker taught her class. This is when he began to abuse her, standing behind her rubbing her shoulders, and moving his hands inside her clothing stopping inside her knickers. Sue said that ‘he picked on one child and that was me, perhaps because I was a bit more developed’.
This happened every day as he came over to check her work. She says: ‘It was horrible’ and that Mr Parker ‘was just an evil, horrible man’.
Sue remembers the children would talk about how close Mr Parker stood to them and that one girl said she had told her mother about it. She recalls many more comments she heard over the years, from another staff member at the school, local people and her own relatives, which lead her to believe that everyone knew about Mr Parker’s behaviour.
The abuse stopped when the class moved on to the next year’s teacher. Sue never told anyone what had happened to her because although she ‘knew it wasn’t right, you weren’t sure that it was wrong. The teachers never taught us.’
After Mr Parker retired, he continued to be involved with the school. When Sue made it known she was going to talk to the Truth Project, she learned that he used to put his hand up the skirt of a girl he told to sit next to him in the school minibus. From the responses Sue got, she feels there was a sense of ‘It happened to everyone, why are you bringing it up now?’.
Sue says she had never been able to tell anyone what happened to her until she attended the Truth Project. She describes the impact of the abuse: ‘I felt dirty. That feeling is still there. I didn’t want people to judge me for what happened. I felt tarnished and I am probably a different person because of that … I have probably let people treat me quite badly. I can be a bit of a doormat.’
As a teenager, Sue describes herself as being sexually promiscuous, and taking lots of risks. This ended when a work colleague began to act in a similar way to Mr Parker, and she says: ‘I realised this was stupid. You do have ownership over your own body and I moved away from him … I realised men aren’t all powerful.’
Sue adds that she has felt shame and guilt about not reporting the abuse and that she might have prevented someone else from being abused if she had.
She still feels her abuser is in the background – memories of the abuse keep coming back, and she keeps people ‘at arm’s length’ and finds close relationships difficult. She adds that her own experiences strengthen her resolve to protect her own children and grandchildren from abuse, but this makes her question why her own parents did not act to protect her as a child.
Sue hopes that sharing her experience of abuse with the Truth Project might help her to draw a line under it and move forward.