Jenna envied her friends who were in care because they were better looked after than she was
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Jenna grew up in the 1950s and 60s. Her parents separated when she was a baby and her mother met a new partner, Nick.
This man sexually abused her and when she confided in a male teacher, he did the same.
Jenna shared a bedroom with her older sister. She remembers that when she was a young child, if Nick visited he would sleep in her bed and she had to sleep downstairs.
Nick used to bathe her and her sister and that he would be quite vigorous with ‘certain body parts’. When Jenna’s sister was 10 years old, she insisted she was old enough to bathe herself. Nick then concentrated on Jenna and became even more intrusive.
When Jenna was nine, her mother suffered a miscarriage. After this, Nick never slept in her mum’s bed again. Instead, he slept on the floor between the sisters in their bedroom. He continued to sexually abuse them. Jenna says he would often take it in turns to ‘manhandle’ them both while masturbating.
As soon as her sister finished school, she left home. Jenna was left alone to to be abused by Nick. He made her wash his private parts until he ejaculated and he showed her pornography when her mother was in bed.
Looking back, Jenna finds it hard to understand how her mother could not have been aware of the abuse.
To avoid being at home, as she grew older Jenna began staying out with friends as much as possible. Three of her friends lived in a children’s home and Jenna says she envied them because they were well cared for. She asked how she could be taken into care too, and they suggested she got into trouble.
She managed to get caught shoplifting, but the ruse didn’t work. She was not placed in care, but put on probation, and no one in the service asked about her home life.
After this, she attempted to run away, but the police took her home.
When she was in her early teens, Nick began hinting that it would not be long before she would be able to have full sex with him. Her sister told her he had said the same to her, and that was why she left home.
Jenna didn’t want Nick to take her virginity so she went to a party, and ‘found someone, anyone’ to sleep with. She told Nick what she had done, and he beat her while her mum stood by and did nothing. Jenna ‘lost a lot of love’ for her mother after that.
At school, Jenna says, she ‘stood out as poor’. She received free school dinners, which were often her only meal of the day. She confided in one of her female teachers about her troubled home life, who suggested she talk to another teacher, who was male.
This man locked her in a classroom, ‘so they wouldn’t be disturbed’, and made Jenna stand between his legs and tell him what was going on at home. She describes how as she did this, he began heavy breathing, rubbing himself up against her until he ejaculated.
After this, Jenna says she began to play up at school. She suffered more sexual abuse from a group of boys who molested her, saying they had heard she would have sex with them.
When she was in her mid teens, she got a boyfriend who later became her husband. She told him what Nick was doing to her, and he confronted the abuser and warned him not to do it again. Nick left that weekend and never returned.
A year or so after this, Jenna became pregnant. Her social worker assumed she would ‘fail’ as a mother as she was young and unmarried.
However, Jenna describes herself as a very 'hands on' mother, who likes to look after her children in a way she never was. But, she adds, her experience of being sexually abused had an effect on her physical relationship with her husband that took decades to overcome.
Jenna wishes the police, social services or the probation service had questioned her behaviour when she was young.
She says that although the sexual abuse has affected her life, ‘I didn’t let it define me as a person or define my life’. She has been successfully married to a supportive husband for many years.