Verona says ‘I was always in a heightened state of stress as I didn’t know what was coming next’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Verona endured a catalogue of abuse, including sexual abuse and neglect, throughout her childhood and adolescence.
She believes if we invested more in protecting children, it would easily exceed the cost of abuse to services and society.
Verona had a very unhappy childhood, with neglectful and abusive parents. She says ‘my mother gave me absolutely no nurture’ and her father drank heavily and was frequently violent.
She says her father was like a Jekyll and Hyde character; ‘You never knew which dad was going to walk through that door. You didn’t know if he was going to beat the living daylights out of you, hug you nicely, or touch you where he shouldn’t do’.
Verona suffered sexual abuse from both her grandads. She remembers one of them putting his tongue in her mouth when he kissed her, and putting his hand between her legs.
From her records, she knows that her mum told social services she would scream when she had to go to him.
Her other grandfather used to follow her into the toilet and watch her, and then one day offered her a toy in exchange for touching her ‘next time you have a wee’. She says that she agreed because she wanted the toy, not realising what he was doing.
Verona’s earliest recollection of her father abusing her was when he was carrying her and he tried to put his hand in her knickers. She remembers it hurting her and she told him she didn’t want to play that game anymore. He used to take her and her siblings camping, and when the others went off to play, he started touching her between her legs.
This happened frequently. He made Verona masturbate him. He asked her if she liked it, and she says ‘You told him what he wanted to hear to keep yourself safe … he was the sort of dad you didn’t say no to’.
On one occasion when she knew he was going to abuse her, she ran away. He never took her camping again and he left the family soon after that.
One night when her mother was away, Verona was crying after a bad dream. Nigell, her mother’s boyfriend, took her into his bed and started touching her. ‘I just froze’ she says. He then put his penis in her mouth and she remembers how disgusting this was.
Verona told her mother when she came home. The next thing she remembers is her mother leaving home to live with Nigell.
The children had to move back in with their dad. One night he came into the bedroom, pulled the clothes off her, and tried to anally rape her. She says ‘Again I just froze … I didn’t know what was going on’. She doesn’t remember anything else from that night.
Verona says that after that ‘I think I thought “That’s just what happens … I’ll just have to put up with it”’.
From her medical reports she knows she was seen by health professionals because she was very underweight and was always crying, and she was sent to see a child psychologist. She didn’t walk until she was three years old because she was kept upstairs in her cot most of the time.
Her father married again and her stepmother and her two children moved in. She neglected Verona and her siblings. Verona says ‘She was horrible, horrible’.
She now knows her father tried to have his own children taken into care. At first, social services refused to take them, but when Verona was seven years old, she was placed in a children’s home where she stayed for several years.
At the home, she says an older boy ‘pestered me to have sex with him’. A young adult who was the son of one of the staff touched her under her skirt, and a man involved with the local church also sexually abused her by touching her.
She says ‘There was no point telling anyone … no one was going to do anything’. By the time she was in her early teens, she says ‘I was completely screwed up’. She started running away. She once stayed away for three nights, and after being caught by the police was sent to a secure unit for young offenders.
Here, she became addicted to glue sniffing. ‘It took me out of this world … it was my escape route’ she says. She also saw other girls self-harming and copied that behaviour for many years.
The most senior member of staff started to befriend her, and suggested she should go back to the children’s home. He offered to come and visit her there and take her out. She says that by this time ‘I trusted him and didn’t see any reason to be fearful’.
The man came to visit her and take her on outings. One day he pulled her towards him and put his hand up her jumper. She told one of the girls in her dormitory and now knows this girl reported it.
Some time later, the police came to visit her. Verona didn’t want anything to do with the investigation so would not tell them what had happened.
Verona was moved to a halfway house for independent living. She was depressed, not eating properly and glue sniffing. After a hospital admission she gave up glue sniffing, but continued self-harming for many years.
Several foster placements followed, and she was subjected to another incident of sexual abuse from one of the male foster carers. Social services were aware of this but no action was taken.
When she was in her mid-teens, she had a baby and worked to support them, but became very depressed. The eating disorder she had lived with for years became worse and she lost a lot of weight.
She was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. After treatment she was discharged, and after several years got her child back.
Many years later, a support organisation encouraged her to report the abuse by her father and other perpetrators. Her father was convicted and sentenced to prison.
Verona feels she was let down by many institutions and professionals who failed to intervene and help her. She describes her childhood as ‘tragic’ and says ‘I needed someone, even just one adult, to talk to and who would believe me’.
As well as serious mental health issues, self-harming and an eating disorder, Verona attempted to take her own life on several occasions. She has felt unloved throughout her life. ‘For many years I shut my emotions off, I didn’t know what to do with them.’ She has read a comment in her social service files, saying ‘she craves attention’.
Verona does not believe sentences for sexual abusers are long enough. She comments ‘The cost of abuse is enormous … NHS treatments, victims and survivors unable to work. We could invest that cost into prevention’.
Verona is still seeing a psychologist, who she says is ‘amazing’.