Floella says ‘The worst thing was not being believed’
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Floella told her parents that she was being sexually abused at Sunday school, but they did not take her seriously.
Decades later, she is still affected by the abuse and their failure to act on what she told them.
Floella attended Sunday school in a local community centre. An older relative of the person who ran the school repeatedly sexually abused her in the kitchen at the centre. She thinks the abuse began when she was about six or seven.
She remembers that the abuser always had sweets for the children. ‘He would follow us into the kitchen’ she says. ‘I found out later it wasn’t only me.’
The man would lift Floella up onto the worktops, rub himself up against her and touch her while touching himself. Floella says ‘I told my parents and they didn’t believe me’. She sometimes said she didn’t want to go to Sunday school, but they still made her go.
She knows that other children were sexually abused by the same man and that one of her friends also told her parents but was not believed. However, another child was believed when they spoke about the abuse, and the man was charged.
Floella cannot remember much about her childhood, but knows she had difficulty reading and writing and thought of herself as ‘stupid’. She managed to catch up in her teens and adulthood, and looking back, thinks that this, along with being abused and not being believed, meant her self-esteem was very low.
She says she didn’t really think much about what happened to her at all until about 15 years ago when she had a mental health crisis. ‘I don’t know how, but a door opened and it all came flooding back’ she says.
While she was being treated, Floella thought a lot about what had happened to her as a child, particularly the reaction from her parents when she had told them she was being abused. ‘I finally plucked up courage to ask my mum why she didn’t believe me’ says Floella, ‘But all she said was “Oh, so it’s all my fault is it?” There was no “Sorry I didn’t believe you”’.
Floella is now spending a lot of time with her elderly mother, but she doesn’t think she will ever mention her childhood experience of sexual abuse to her again.