Unlike most schoolchildren, Estelle did not look forward to the long summer holidays
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Estelle grew up in a large family. She says it was a warm environment but they struggled financially and socially because her father suffered from severe mental health issues.
Estelle comments that when she was growing up, there was considerable stigma attached to mental health conditions and as a result her family experienced some social isolation.
They were also short of money. Her father died when she was a young teenager and she has great respect for her mother who she says ‘did an amazing job’ despite the challenges.
Her mother was grateful for the help of a teenager who offered to take Estelle out during weekends and school holidays. But the older girl sexually abused Estelle and her revelation about this, years later, was met with disbelief and scorn.
The girl took her to the park and swimming. On these outings, the older girl bought Estelle crisps and sweets, which to the young girl, was ‘a really special thing’.
But the teenager was also sexually abusing Estelle when she took her out. Estelle thinks it began around the time she started school and went on for about two years. She has a clear memory of ‘skipping along’ and being a happy child before the abuse.
She also has a poignant recollection of sadness during the warmer months, knowing that summer was coming and she would have to spend more time with her abuser.
Estelle felt that she couldn’t get away from her abuser because she was ‘always there offering to help’ and Estelle’s mother needed that help. She remembers that her abuser would take her to a cafe in the market and make Estelle put her hand up her dress. Estelle says this made her ‘feel awful’.
She had a best friend who was being abused in a similar way by the same girl, sometimes when they were together. She told her best friend they needed to tell someone but the other girl was petrified and didn’t want to.
Estelle remembers that when she started school, she thought ‘this was what people did with each other’. She would say to the boys ‘if you want to do that to me, you can’. Later she started to feel ‘dirty and frightened’. Her schooling suffered and she was moved from the higher sets in the class to the lower set.
Her abuser had threatened her, telling her ‘if you don’t do what I say that man [who lived on the estate] will kill you.’ She also told Estelle that she would not be able to have children if she didn’t comply with her demands.
As a young teenager, Estelle restricted what she ate. She feels that although the abuse had stopped some years before she may have been trying to stop herself becoming like her abuser, who was a really big person. She insisted on wearing two pairs of knickers for a long time and later she started wearing only black clothes. She says her mother knew she was ‘going through something’ and she supported her.
Years later, when Estelle had her third child, she was hit hard by sudden depression. She now wonders if this was brought on by feeling vulnerable in labour with a midwife who was ‘very stroppy and not nice’.
She became agoraphobic and ‘could literally not walk out of the door’. She says ‘Everything that I had kept the lid on had come out … all those feelings of fear … of being outside … when I look back on it now, I think gosh, that must have been how that little girl felt’.
Estelle’s trauma affected her ability to work properly, to earn and to have friends. She says she finds it ‘so difficult to relax around people - especially women’ and that for a long time she went into relationships with people who didn’t treat her well. Her first husband subjected her to domestic abuse.
She describes a long journey of recovery, aided by antidepressants, counselling, meditation and sheer determination. A couple of years ago she qualified as a nurse, and she says she is proud of herself now.
Because she was doing so well at school ‘and then suddenly wasn’t’ and because of her sexualised behaviour, she feels that school staff should have been concerned about her.
Estelle has reported the abuse to the police but says they were not interested. After the revelations about Jimmy Savile, she went back to the police but again, no action was taken. When Estelle said that her abuser needed to be found because she could have abused others, she says the police officer said, in a nasty tone, ‘Oh well they all say that’.
She would like it to be understood that some women do commit sexual abuse.