Doreen says ‘It would have been nice to be in a long relationship, but I can’t let anyone touch me’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Doreen has vivid visual memories of the teacher who sexually abused her when she was a small child.
Her traumatic experiences have made it impossible for her to settle in a relationship, and she is sad about this.
Doreen says ‘I was a very happy child’. She remembers that she enjoyed playing outside in her garden.
She was seven or eight years old when the headteacher at her primary school sexually abused her.
The head, Mr Smith, used to make the children go into his office one by one, on the pretext of hearing them read. Doreen continues ‘You were called in and he sat you on his knee’. She describes how he put his hand inside the top of her knickers and patted her. She says ‘I didn’t like it but I didn’t dare say anything’.
Doreen has a very powerful memory of how Mr Smith’s face was so close to hers, and how ugly he seemed. She is not sure how many times he abused her, but she remembers that the abuse escalated to him moving his hand around the area of her vagina.
She says ‘I jumped off his knee and ran out, and went back to my class. I don’t know why I didn’t run home. I remember him coming in and looking for me, talking to my teacher’.
Doreen continues that although she found the abuse ‘shocking and horrifying’, at that age she didn’t understand it was wrong and she felt that because of Mr Smith’s position of authority, she had to let him do it. But, she adds, ‘He was so revolting, with his face so close, it was a really nasty experience’.
She also now realises that Mr Smith had an erection when he sexually abused her.
Doreen says that the boys in the school were regularly beaten and Mr Smith made a point of leaving the strap which he used to hit them out on prominent display. She relates ‘I remember my legs giving way once when I was in his office and I saw it on his desk’.
She didn’t say anything to anyone about what the head was doing, but she is sure he was sexually abusing other children. She remembers hearing an older girl talking about the things Mr Smith did. The girl said this in front of the class teacher.
Doreen says that the whole of her primary education was terrifying, never knowing when Mr Smith was going to abuse her. When she went to secondary school, she says ‘I bloomed’.
After she left school she went to work in an office.
Doreen thinks that as a teenager she blocked out the memories of the abuse, but she says ‘I’m now aware it’s had a tremendous impact on me in lots of ways’. She had boyfriends as she got older, but has not been able to maintain any relationships, because she has never been able to enjoy physical intimacy. Even being touched on her arm can make her feel physically sick.
By the time she was a young adult, Doreen was suffering from depression. She was put on medication and she used this to try and take her own life twice. As a result, she was sent to a psychiatric hospital and given electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).
Doreen knows that the man who sexually abused her is now dead, but a few years ago, news reports of high-profile sexual abuse cases prompted her to report him. She says she wanted his name to be known to the police in case any more of his victims and survivors came forward.
She still suffers with nightmares and often sees Mr Smith’s face in these.
Doreen believes that it might have helped her if there had been someone at her school doing pastoral care, but when she was a young child in the 1950s, there was nothing like that. She wants victims and survivors of child sexual abuse to be encouraged to come forward, no matter what age they are now.
She would also like to see support for elderly people in care who have memories of abuse.
Doreen feels sadness that she is unable to have a settled relationship with a partner because she cannot tolerate being touched. She says ‘I see people I was at school with and they’re going round with their husbands. It would have been nice ...’.