When Annika resisted her abusive father, he suffocated her until she thought she might die
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Annika had a very difficult childhood. ‘It was a terrible home’ she says.
Her father was violent towards her mother and sexually abused Annika for as far back as she can remember.
Annika’s mother worked in the evenings. Annika remembers begging her not to go because she felt safer when her mother was home.
Her earliest memory of being abused by her father is an occasion when she was about four years old. She was playing outside and he called her in, told her to go into his bedroom, where he touched her.
She says ‘He must have known I wouldn’t say anything’.
As Annika got older, the abuse ‘got more and more’. Her parents separated when she was nine, and the children lived with their father. She remembers that when she was 10 or 11, she would sleep with her sister and would always try and position herself next to the wall ‘to try and protect myself’.
But her father would send her brother in to get her and take her to him.
She doesn’t remember all the details of the abuse, but recalls that he tried to penetrate her and when she said it hurt, he would simulate raping her.
Annika says that as time went on, he became more ‘demanding’ and got increasingly angry with her. Once, after she cried out that he was hurting her, he started to suffocate her. ‘I honestly thought I was going to die’ she says.
Every day Annika’s school bus went past a police station, and the day after this incident, she got off the bus and went in and told them what her father was doing to her. At first they said ‘Is this a joke?’
Annika and her siblings were placed in a children’s home, and she says that night ‘I felt happy and safe’. But the next day her father was allowed to visit them. The others all said they wanted to go home with him.
Later, her father admitted having touched Annika twice when he was drunk, and was given a suspended sentence. Annika says there was no proper investigation and that if the police had questioned her siblings, they might have found out that her father was abusing her every night.
Annika spent the next five years or so in the care system.
Recently, the police have approached Annika following another allegation of abuse by her father. By this time he had remarried and had more children.
She says that ‘all through my life I have got on with stuff, but I have left my emotions behind’. She finds it hard to make friends because she can’t cope with people letting her down. She feels she functions well on a certain level, and has been able to bring up her family, work and study.
Annika feels very angry that the disclosures she made were not treated seriously, and that the police say they can’t find any records of the initial prosecution of her father. She also feels she has been let down by mental health services.
She feels very strongly that each child in a family needs to be listened to individually, as their experiences are not always the same.
The new case has prompted her to seek support and counselling and to share her experience with the Truth Project.