Susie got no affection from her parents. ‘The only time I was touched was when I was messed with’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Susie had a very difficult childhood, with a father who was violent and abusive, and a mother who did not seem to care about her.
She says she looked unkempt and neglected, and she did refer to being abused more than once to people in authority, but no one followed up on what she said.
Susie thinks she was about four or five years old when her father started sexually abusing her. It carried on until she was nine, when he left the family home. He and her mother also physically and emotionally abused her.
When she was born her parents had wanted a boy. She says ‘I remember never being wanted’ and adds that she was ‘blamed for everything’.
Susie often wet the bed, and her father would get her out, strip her and ‘mess with me’. She adds ‘He would threaten to kill me if I told. If I wet the bed I was terrified’.
She now wonders if he was ‘turned on’ by beating her because he would often abuse her after beating her, but she would not cry in front of him. She used to bite her nails severely and got infections. She remembers saying to the doctor that her dad had hurt her, but her mother ‘covered it up’.
At school, the other children said Susie smelt. ‘I probably did, as I was always wetting myself’ she says. She explains that she didn’t want to go to the toilet because she often had painful urinary infections.
When Susie moved to junior school, she remembers asking a teacher to look at the sores on her back, and once told another teacher ‘I am really sore between my legs’, but says ‘they didn’t listen’.
When Susie was nine, her father moved out and she hoped the abuse would stop. But he abducted her and abused her over two nights before ‘dumping’ her back home. When Susie tried to tell her mother, her response was ‘You deserved it’.
The abuse has affected Susie’s life greatly. She was unable to concentrate or achieve anything at school. It has distorted her sexuality and she has never been able to have a healthy sexual relationship.
Susie is obsessive about cleanliness. She feels worthless and unworthy.
Susie met a boy in her mid teens who she trusted. They later got married and she says ‘he was my saviour, he was never abusive’.
She finds comfort in her religion. For several decades, she had no contact with her father, but she saw him before he died. She was shaking and terrified, but then thought ‘You can’t hurt me’. He asked her forgiveness and she said she had forgiven him, for her own sake.
Susie concludes that coming to the Truth Project and being listened to ‘is like therapy’.