Charles says when he had therapy ‘For the first time I felt I wasn’t responsible for the abuse’
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Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Charles feels that even though he has had a good life with many happy experiences, he is still very preoccupied with the sexual abuse he endured more than 50 years ago.
‘It seems to be the most significant thing that happened to me and I don’t understand why’ he says.
Charles grew up in the 1960s. He describes his parents as hard working, aspirational working class, but he felt that he let them down. He says ‘From the word go at school, I didn’t fit in’.
He felt the teachers hated him, and he got into trouble and frequently played truant. The only thing he enjoyed was going to Scouts. One of the Scout leaders, Ged, ran a business in the village, and Charles recalls ‘There were always a lot of kids around him there’. Charles thinks Ged was about the same age as his dad was at the time.
When Charles should have been in school, he would walk around the neighbourhood. He is not sure how it came about, but he started going to Ged’s business during the day.
Charles comments ‘He didn’t mind that I was off school, or smoking’. After a while, Charles says, Ged ‘got friendly, and started saying soppy things’. One day, Ged undid Charles’s trousers and groped him.
He says this became the ‘normal routine’ over the next couple of years. He adds ‘I liked him … he was the only adult I could talk to’. He would steal small amounts of money from Ged’s cash box for cigarettes. ‘I used to think it was fair exchange’ he says.
The abuse by Ged escalated to masturbation and oral sex.
Meanwhile, Charles says he was getting into more and more trouble at school, and was referred to a children’s clinic. He saw a doctor each week, who was a ‘stuffy old man’. Charles did not open up to the doctor about what was happening in his life.
Ged arranged a camping trip for Charles and some other boys, but just before they were due to leave, Ged was arrested. Soon after, Charles’s mum asked him if Ged had ever touched him. Charles said no, and when the police asked him the same question, he said no again.
Some other boys testified against Ged, who was convicted and given a suspended sentence. Charles continued going to visit Ged, and the abuse carried on.
He comments ‘I was an unhappy kid’. He relates an occasion when he ran away from home and swallowed a bottle of painkillers. He was sick, and picked up by the police, who sent for his parents. He says they pretended nothing had happened and he was sent back to school the next day.
The abuse ended when Charles stopped going to visit Ged. He left school with no qualifications and worked at a series of jobs. Some years later he became interested in community work, went to college and obtained qualifications.
Charles has had a successful and fulfilling career, but struggled with confidence and feeling like a failure. He drank excessively, and after another attempted suicide he had therapy, which helped him manage his feelings of guilt and shame. He says ‘When you’re 14, you think you’re grown up and responsible for everything. Sometimes I look at a photo of myself at that age to remind myself I was a child’.
During news coverage of a high-profile child sexual abuser, Charles heard a police officer encouraging victims and survivors to report abuse, no matter how long ago it happened. He went to the police station in the area where he now lives, and says ‘They were great’.
They contacted the police in the area where Charles was abused, and he says this force were also very good. They discovered that Ged had died several years previously.
Charles says ‘I didn’t want to sue anyone, but I wanted him to hold his hands up and say sorry’.
He finds it hard to understand how he could have been absent from school so often, but no one raised any concerns about him. ‘I wandered around town in my uniform; no one ever challenged me’ he recalls.
Although having therapy has been helpful, Charles says he still thinks about the abuse he suffered several times a week. He says ‘It’s crazy, it doesn’t go away. So many wonderful things have happened in my life but this is the one I think about. For many years I would try and push it away, but it didn’t stay there, it kept coming forward’.