Eliza says ‘There needs to be a shift in attitude to what people call “attention seeking”’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Eliza’s mother was in a relationship with a man who physically and emotionally abused her and her two children. To escape him, the family went to live in a hostel when Eliza was a young teenager.
She says ‘I was looking for attention … for someone to want me’. A man twice her age took advantage of her vulnerability and sexually abused her.
Eliza explains that to get a break from life in the hostel, she would go walking around the town. She comments ‘I think I had vulnerable written on my face … at school I met similar girls and we’d hang around the taxi rank’.
A taxi driver gave the girls cigarettes, and began to single out Eliza for attention. He bought Eliza her first mobile phone, and then paid for top ups and gave her lifts in his taxi.
She recalls ‘It seems strange but I felt no attraction to him … I was amazed that someone wanted to give me attention’.
He told her that he loved her, and promised that when she was older he would take her away from the life she had and get her a good job.
She describes how he would kiss her and it was ‘really disgusting’ because he would force his tongue down her throat. Then he made her give him oral sex, forcing her head down. She would be retching but, she says, ‘He didn’t care it was horrible for me’. He was in his late 20s, and she was in her early teens.
The abuse went on for about six months. It ended after he attempted to rape her but she convinced him she was ill.
Eliza says ‘I look back and wonder if there was something going on with that taxi rank … I wondered how he could go off for that amount of time ... I wonder if there was a group of them doing it.’
Not long after it ended, Eliza told her mother about the abuse, who went to the local poIice station to report it. But the duty officer warned her mother that she could destroy someone’s reputation by making allegations like that.
Being sexually abused had a serious effect on Eliza as a vulnerable young girl, and continues to affect her as an adult. She was tormented for many years by the thought that it was her fault she was abused. She says ‘I always blamed myself … I thought I must have looked older’. Then she saw a photo of herself at the time she was being abused. ‘I was a child … I can’t believe it took me so many years to realise’.
She says she barely attended school and did not take any GCSEs. She went into a downward spiral of risky behaviour, including drug and alcohol abuse, and promiscuity with strangers ‘with no regard for my personal safety’.
After several suicide attempts, she was admitted to a psychiatriac unit.
Later, Eliza returned to education. She has had counselling. But she still blames herself, suffers feelings of being worthless and has flashbacks. At these times, her relationship with her partner is adversely affected and she says she can be overprotective of her children.
She says ‘I wish I could move forward so it doesn’t have a hold on me like it does.’
At times, Eliza says, she has felt angry with her mum for not protecting her, and she feels there were many other people who knew her at school, at the hostel and the taxi rank, who could have ‘put their heads above the parapet’ and taken notice of what was happening to her.
Eliza would like to feel reassured that people who are in contact with children make the time and effort to try and discover why some children seem like ‘a problem’.
She feels particularly strongly about labelling young females who are having inappropriate relationships as ‘attention seekers’. She says she has come across this in her working life and it concerns and disturbs her.
She says ‘If they seek attention, why do they do it? And if they get attention, it will not be from nice places.’