Tyler says ‘I feel more damaged now than I ever did, worse than when I was a child’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Tyler was sexually abused by a female friend of his violent mother.
Thirty years on, he gives a powerful account of the harrowing effects of the abuse that he still lives with.
Tyler’s father died in the 1980s, when Tyler was still a young child. His mother drank heavily and physically and emotionally abused him in a variety of ways.
When he became a teenager, Tyler explains, he became too big for his mother to bully and so she did not want him around. She sent him to live with a female friend, who groomed him and then sexually abused him.
He says that this happened gradually, and at the time, he enjoyed it. For the first time, he experienced warmth from a female and it was preferable to being at home. However, at some point during the three years of sexual abuse, the female friend introduced a man into the abuse. Tyler explains that the man did not ‘directly’ abuse him.
He left school in his mid teens and began working, and went back to living with his mother. She still drank heavily and their relationship continued to be very difficult.
He began to drink himself, he became promiscuous and started getting into fights. A year later, he was sent to prison. He describes himself at this time as ‘confused, wild and needing anger management help’. He says he enjoyed the routine in prison but he did not receive any help.
Tyler describes the significant damage that the physical, emotional and sexual abuse caused him, and how this continues to affect him. He understands that as a young teenager, he thought that having sex was ‘grown up’ and it took him some time to realise it was abuse.
He says that his mother made him feel worthless, and he became a ‘people pleaser’, believing that he had to keep people happy and that the way to do that was through sex. This has led him to have numerous dysfunctional relationships. He has experienced intrusive thoughts and vivid dreams, feeling dirty and disgusted with himself.
Tyler describes living as a ‘hermit’ in middle age; he stays indoors most of the time and shops online to avoid contact with people.
Looking back, Tyler feels that a lot of opportunities were lost to identify his problems and give him help and support. He says that at school he was ‘angry and temperamental’, regularly getting into fights. The staff knew his father had died, and that he was reluctant to go home. But he did not have any visible marks on his body from the abuse by his mother, and he thought at the time that people would not believe him if he told them what was happening.
He now recognises that in secondary school he made inappropriate comments to female teachers, and feels he was ‘too forward’ for his age. He says, the teachers did not question this, but laughed and were ‘flirty’ with him.
Tyler believes that prisons should be given extra resources to enable them to help inmates address what may be the source of their offending behaviour. He thinks that acknowledging child sexual abuse in prison would not be easy, but believes that with sufficient support and understanding, it could help people change their future.
He would also like to see more education in schools to make sure that children are able to recognise what abuse is and who to tell. Finally, he thinks there should be more information about child sexual abuse, with helplines and support available, in all public places.