Alvita says ‘I believe in speaking up because I’ve been silent for so long and it doesn’t help anyone’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Alvita says that being sexually abused at a young age by a relative ‘opened up doors for other people to touch me’.
She feels that institutions that should have protected her may have been less concerned about her because she is black.
Alvita is of African-Caribbean heritage. She had a difficult childhood. Her father was not interested in her. Alvita was beaten by her mother, and often not given enough to eat. She never felt valued by her mother, who favoured her younger children by a white father because they were lighter skinned.
This meant that when she was being sexually abused she didn’t tell her mother ‘because she wouldn’t have cared’.
Alvita was seven years old when her cousin Izaak started sexually abusing her. She can’t remember how long this continued but she remembers being touched by men until she was 14.
She struggled all the way through school. ‘I never handed in a piece of work’ she says, adding that she used to truant all the time but ‘the teachers didn’t care … I used to think that if I was a different colour, brown, lighter, white, I would have been treated differently’.
By the time she was 15 she had stopped going to school completely and her mother threw her out of the house. She became homeless but social services said she was too old for them to help her. When she was 16 she went to live in a hostel but she was evicted because as a ‘crazy teenager’ she didn’t follow the rules.
She had a child when she was 18, found a place in a mother and baby unit, then got a house and started studying. She says she didn’t want her daughter to have the same start as her.
Alvita believes that race was a factor in the way she was seen and treated by authorities.
She says ‘Being black back then and growing up how we did, I don’t think we mattered so it was kind of hard.... A lot of black girls my age struggled because they weren’t accepted … I know a lot of black girls who’ve been sexually abused … that’s why I want to speak up’.
She feels that staff in schools need to be alert to possible signs of abuse that are not necessarily obvious. ‘If a child is withdrawn and they don’t speak up and they’re just in the corner, quiet, that’s the child you need to look at’ she says.
Alvita adds ‘If you have an inkling of something, you need to do something. If my child was abused, I’d expect people to help her’.
She has issues with trust which make her question people she is close to. She is very protective of her daughter and wonders if she is too strict.
Alvita now works to help rehabilitate offenders. She doesn’t hate Izaak because she believes everyone deserves a second chance.
Alvita has not had counselling, but she has started writing about her experience.