A television interview with a survivor of sexual abuse triggered distressing memories for Chester
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Chester was sexually abused when he was 11, by a Scout leader.
He buried memories of the abuse for more than 30 years and spoke about it in detail for the first time when he came to the Truth Project.
Chester joined the Scouts when he was 11 years old. He loved outdoor adventures and he enjoyed the trips and weekends away. He took up all the opportunities he could to go on these.
A leader called Robby offered to take him with a small group of boys on several weekends away to train them to be young leaders.
Robby, who Chester thinks was in his 30s or early 40s, started talking to the boys about women, and some of the things he had done with them. Chester says that he and the other boys ‘were fascinated’, and he can see how easy it was for the leader to ‘hook them in’.
Robby began showing the boys pornography. The abuse then escalated to the leader masturbating in front of the boys and encouraging them to do the same.
Chester says that at the time, he ‘didn’t have a clue what was going on’. He didn’t tell anyone because he didn’t know it wasn’t right.
By the time he reached his mid-teens, he realised that what had happened was completely wrong. But he still felt he couldn’t tell anyone because he was worried that they wouldn’t believe him, and also he worried what they would think of him.
Instead, he says, he chose ‘to completely forget it and blank it’, and he thinks he did ‘a pretty good job of locking it away for 30 years’.
Chester joined the armed forces, got married and had children. He says he had a ‘normal, happy, everyday relationship in every way’ with his wife.
After he left the armed forces, he says, he ‘changed into a completely different person’. He felt angry, he isolated himself from his family and began drinking heavily.
Chester managed to hide his problems at work, but he says his behaviour had a ‘massive effect’ on his family. Then one evening when he was watching television with his wife, an interview was shown with someone who had been sexually abused as a child. Chester burst into tears.
After 30 years of suppressing the memories, Chester told his wife about the abuse he had suffered as a young boy.
He says that he is triggered more and more frequently, and finds that he gets very upset. His wife does not think he is coping with it. He has had counselling to help with his anger and alcohol issues, but he has not been able to talk about the abuse until he came to the Truth Project.
Chester knows that the Scout troop he was in was disbanded. He has asked the Scout Association why this was, but they could not give a reason and he wonders if they were ‘brushing things under the carpet’. At least four other boys were abused at the same time as him, and he wonders how many more there were.
He says he would like to sit in front of Robby, and get him to apologise.
In his current employment, Chester is very careful and conscious of safeguarding procedures, which he says were non-existent at the time he was sexually abused.