No one had ever looked at Tamara, or talked to her, the way her abuser did
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Tamara’s mum suffered with mental health difficulties and was in constant fear of ending up in a mental health hospital. This meant that the mother and daughter roles were reversed.
A man groomed her with flattery and attention, then sexually and verbally abused her. She blamed herself for what happened.
Tamara’s mum was pregnant and in a relationship with a man who Tamara says did not ‘do any harm’ but made it clear that he did not like Tamara.
They were living in temporary accommodation waiting to be rehoused on a housing estate that Tamara says was ‘not very nice'. It was decided that she would attend a school close to the estate and in the intervening period get a bus from her temporary home to school.
Tamara was 12 or 13 years old at the time and was very developed, having been through puberty when she was about nine or ten. She was obsessed with books, and was always reading.
On her first day of school she waited at the bus stop in her school uniform reading her book. When she got on the bus, she asked for the fare twice, then looked up and saw the bus driver staring at her. She remembers thinking that no one had ever looked at her like that.
The bus driver gave Tamara her ticket, touched her hand and continued to stare. She describes feeling as if he was looking through her. She sat down feeling ‘really uncomfortable’ as the bus driver kept staring at her through the mirrors. At one point he was so distracted that he mounted the kerb.
She changed sides of the bus so he couldn’t see her, but he leaned out of the window and moved the mirror. It was so noticeable that another passenger asked if she was okay. She told another girl in school about the incident, who said that she should tell her mum. Tamara decided not to, as she thought it was ‘just one of those things'.
Two days later when she got on the bus the same driver was there. He said to her: ‘I have never seen anyone quite like you’. Again, he stared at her all the way to school and when they arrived, he said to her ‘don’t get off the bus'. She says she swore at him and later told some girls in school what had happened. One of them said ‘he fancies you’, but she was not interested at all in boys.
A few days later Tamara saw a car parked outside the school and a man inside staring. She thought it was the bus driver but says she wasn’t 100% sure. She says she knew at that point ‘something wasn’t right’ but didn’t see what she could do.
The driver continued his behaviour on the bus and Tamara began to catch different buses to avoid him. After she and her mum moved to the new house, she would still hide when she saw a bus.
Tamara says this was a very difficult time for her. She was unhappy at school and didn’t like her new area. On top of this, her mum was ‘all over the place with health’.
A few months passed, and Tamara became friends with ‘a really good group of lads’. One day they were all at a nearby bus terminus, when a bus pulled up and one of the lads said he knew the driver and the group should go and sit on the bus. As Tamara and the others approached the bus she remembers her heart going as she recognised the driver. She quickly linked arms with one of the boys.
Tamara told her friends that she had to go and began walking home. The bus drove slowly past, stopped and the driver called her over. She says she doesn’t know why she went over but she did. The driver told her how beautiful she was, and that he had been thinking about her. She remembers how flattered she felt.
He asked Tamara to meet her the next day and she just laughed. But she had had a bad day with her mum and she decided to go. The driver talked to her and was interested in her. She says no one had ever properly talked to her before – ‘he talked about history and was really intelligent’. She thought ‘he’s not a weirdo, he’s nice’.
She continued to meet him for a few weeks and he was ‘always nice.’ He said he was her boyfriend and she remembers wondering if this was the case, why they didn’t go out.
Then one day he said he would take her out. She got dressed up and he picked her up in his car, but then took her to a dark road. He started touching Tamara’s leg and holding her hand, kissing her on the side of her face. She thinks he sensed she was uncomfortable and nothing else happened.
Tamara went home and told her mum. She says her mum ‘went mad’ and phoned the bus company. Their response was that the girls were putting the drivers off their jobs and it needed to stop. Tamara’s mum said that the call handler had said to her ‘they are sluts, these girls’.
Soon after Tamara went to meet the driver again and he took her to the same dark road. He started kissing her and pushed her the seat back. Tamara says she was telling him to stop it but his hands ‘were everywhere’. He was saying to her how she made him feel. Then he was on top of Tamara and tried to push his hand down her trousers. She kept asking him to stop, feeling something bad was going to happen.
She says she doesn’t know how she found the strength, but she pushed him away and ‘butted’ him. She thinks now if she had not done this he would have raped her, but at the time she thought that he was going to kill her. She says has always felt that it was her fault.
Tamara describes how angry the driver was: ‘white with rage and panting and sweating’. She managed to get out of the car, but he persuaded her to get back in and took her home.
Later when she got undressed, she was bruised and sore, particularly on her pubic bone and at the top of her legs.
Upset and confused, Tamara returned to the bus terminal and saw her abuser, but he ignored her and drove off. She says she was devastated and didn’t know what she had done wrong. Her mum told her she had phoned the police and they said that Tamara was a teenager and shouldn’t be hanging around with bus drivers.
One day, Tamara saw the bus driver on the street and he called her a ‘little slag’. She never saw him again.
After this, Tamara says she ‘went a bit off the rails’ and some people told her she would end up in a remand centre. She was determined to prove them wrong and thinks the anger she felt pushed her.
She has looked at her reports from school at the time and can see that her grades significantly dropped. She wonders ‘why did no one see?’ She did not have anyone to turn to and she believes that because she was from a council estate and her mum had mental health issues nobody looked out for her.
Tamara thinks that her abuser knew that she was vulnerable. She says she knows now that he groomed her but doesn’t like to say it as ‘it makes it real’.
She has since achieved a degree and has had a successful career helping vulnerable people.