Willow says ‘Everything I am is despite my abuse’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
After Willow’s parents separated, she was sexually abused by a cousin, with the knowledge of her mother and his.
This led to her displaying sexualised behaviour at school and becoming vulnerable to more abuse.
Willow shared her experience in writing. She is of dual heritage, and describes growing up in a city suburb with her family, in a ‘smart’ home in a ‘nice area’.
Later, when her parents separated, she moved with her mother to a flat in a deprived area with high rates of unemployment and poverty. ‘Home became more chaotic’, she says.
Willow recalls being abused for the first time by an older male cousin. She thinks she was about four years old, and he was seven years older.
The abuse happened in her cousin’s house, in the bedroom he shared with his brothers. ‘There was no attempt to conceal what was happening’ she says, adding that his brothers knew what he was doing. He told her not to tell her dad, and she says ‘I took that to mean that my dad would be angry with me if he knew “what we had done”’.
Willow knows the abuse happened to her ‘lots of times’ and thinks it went on for about two years.
She continues: ‘I then showed sexualised behaviour and acted very inappropriately for my age.’ She describes putting herself in situations with older boys that led to sexual touching.
In her teenage years, Willow says, she was sexually abused by several older men, ‘all in plain sight’. This included a man in his 20s who would collect her from school in his car and take her to various flats to sexually abuse her. She was 13 at the time. She believes the school did nothing about this as he was considered to be her ‘boyfriend’.
Willow says she is sure that her mother and her cousin’s mother both knew about the sexual abuse, from comments they both made regularly. She says she is not angry with her cousin as she views him as a survivor too – his father had let him and his brothers look at pornography from a very young age.
She writes that as she got older, ‘I would take incredible risks with my safety and show no regard for my wellbeing, be it drug use or unsafe sex’. For years, she could not shake off the feelings of ‘being filthy, slutty, unlovable’ and says ‘I didn’t see what happened to me as abuse until quite recently’.
Willow feels that their respective parents failed to supervise them and teach them boundaries. She also thinks that staff at her schools should have acted on her sexualised behaviour and risk taking.
However, she says she feels no animosity towards her parents. Despite the inadequate parenting, she knows they loved her and says they were ‘trying their best but they too were the products of their own upbringings’.
She would like to see enough support in place to deal with abuse so that mistakes can be avoided in the future. She would also like to see wider acknowledgement of the fact that sexual abuse can affect everyone.
Willow has had therapy, and she says this has been invaluable. She went to university and has a good career. ‘I am a survivor’, she says. ‘I am educated, articulate and happily married.’