Vicky ‘felt sick’ when the man who had abused her as a small child approached her years later
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Vicky came from a large family with many brothers and sisters. She says her mother was a very strict woman who always made sure her children were well dressed. Vicky was very close to her father, whom she describes as ‘my world’.
Vicky says she had a ‘good childhood’. However, she adds that she hated school and had a very difficult and unhappy time there. While still a small child, she was harshly treated by a teacher and sexually abused by the school caretaker.
She was a quiet child and the youngest in her class. She was left-handed and says her teacher would force her to write with her right hand. Her mother confronted the teacher about this, but the teacher denied any ill treatment. Her mother chose to believe the teacher, who went on to treat Vicky even worse.
When Vicky was about five years old, she became aware that the school caretaker would look at her and her friends and wink. One day he looked up her skirt and she remembers his behaviour making her feel uncomfortable.
The boiler was in the girls’ changing room and the caretaker would cough and walk in when the girls were getting changed for sports. He would pretend to be doing something with the boiler, but he always focused on Vicky and would wink at her. Vicky says she once told her father that she did not want to get changed in the room.
The abuse progressed as the caretaker befriended Vicky. She is not sure how this happened but thinks it could have been partly because he looked like her father. The caretaker began taking her into a cupboard room at the school where he would pull up her skirt, pull down her pants and start ‘prodding’ her.
The caretaker sometimes took her and some other girls to the church attached to the school and he would abuse her in a similar way when walking behind her up the stairs to the tower. She remembers telling him to stop doing it.
At some point, the caretaker began giving Vicky money – she knew that he gave other girls money too. He created more opportunities to abuse her by getting her to help with the cleaning after school. During this time the caretaker would take her into the headteacher’s room and ‘do things’ to her. He would also take her into the library and make her lie on the floor with books of naked women by her side that he would look at while he ‘did things’ to her.
Vicky says that when she was around 10 years old, she realised what was going on was wrong and she tried to keep her distance from the caretaker.
Because she was so unhappy at school, Vicky played truant regularly and struggled with her school work. After she left primary school, she went to the teacher’s house who had hurt her when trying to get her to write with her right hand. Vicky says she wrote a rude word on the walls of the house, for all the things the teacher had done to her.
When she was still a teenager, Vicky’s mother died, and the children were brought up by their father. She says she was close to him; she describes him as ‘the glue that kept the family together’. When he died years later, Vicky was devastated and says her family drifted apart without him.
She knows that, at some point, the caretaker moved to a different school. The last time that she saw him was when she was about 16 or 17 years old. She was in a pub and he sat down next to her as if he was her ‘best friend’. He put his hand on her knee, which she says made her feel sick. She is convinced he abused other girls.
Vicky describes the impact of the sexual abuse on her life as ‘massive’. She feels that she is ‘not good at relationships’, one of which ended because of issues relating to sex.
Following the death of her father, she tried to kill herself with an overdose. She says she felt that all the strong men in her life had left her. The ambulance crew found her holding a picture of her father. She now feels that she was being ‘selfish’ because she did not think about her children at the time.
After the suicide attempt, Vicky had counselling, and this was when her memories of the abuse by the caretaker came back to her. She was not able to talk to her husband about it, although she says he knew something was wrong – she had nightmares and would wake up screaming. The caretaker had keys to all areas of the school and to this day, she hates the sound of rattling keys.
Vicky says she has never trusted anyone and has never told anyone about the abuse that she suffered because she felt ashamed about it and has blamed herself all her life for what happened. She struggles to understand why she went to see the caretaker when he asked her to. She did want to tell her father but worried that, even in his 70s, he would have killed the abuser. She wonders if her mother suspected something because once when the caretaker visited the family home, she told him to ‘keep away’ from her girls.
Now a proud mother and grandmother, Vicky feels that she learnt a lot from her parents but has chosen not to be as strict they were. She has worked hard professionally, but says she has always prioritised her children, who have been very successful.
She believes that there should be better checks on people who work with children and that children should be made aware that not all people can be trusted.