Tasha’s chess club was ‘a really easy environment for abusers to get access to children’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Tasha experienced sexual abuse at the hands of her father from ‘as early as I can remember’.
When she was eight years old her father took her to a chess club, but this outwardly respectable organisation was a cover for more sexual abusers.
Tasha remembers her father’s relationship with her mother as ‘controlling, but not violent’, but her mother physically abused her.
After her father involved her in the club, she took part in competitions which were sometimes held at weekends in empty schools around the country.
If the competitions were far from home, Tasha’s father would book a hotel room for them both. She was sexually abused on many of these occasions, sometimes by men who were parents of other children in the chess club, other times by men she had not seen before. Sometimes the abuse was filmed.
By the time she was in her early teens, Tasha was in a ‘desperate state’. She was self-harming, running away regularly and she made several suicide attempts. A psychiatrist working with Tasha, asked her mother if her father was abusing her, but this suspicion was not followed up.
Tasha was admitted to a psychiatric unit and allocated a social worker, but she did not have much contact with her. Tasha found this frustrating, commenting, ‘I thought she’d be the one I’d tell’.
Tasha believes that she gave many signals through her behaviour that things were badly wrong, but she was too frightened of her father to talk about the sexual abuse. She would threaten to commit suicide if she was sent home, saying that she ‘wasn’t treated well’ there.
After some time, she was sent home without any diagnosis. She threatened her father that she would tell the social worker if he touched her again, and the sexual abuse stopped for a while.
Her father sent her to a boarding school, where she found things ‘much easier’. During the holidays she would stay at friends’ homes rather than return to her parents.
She left school before she was 18, and returned home to her parents for a short period. During this time her father came into her bedroom and masturbated while she was lying awake in bed. She remembers that, at the time, she did not consider this abusive because he did not touch her.
Soon after this, she went travelling abroad and has not been in touch with her family since.
She did report the sexual abuse she experienced to the police, but no one has been charged.