Joanie says ‘I have a massive conflict. I know now it was sexual abuse but I don’t feel like a victim’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Joanie was sexually abused by a family friend who groomed her into believing he was her boyfriend.
She only realised she had been abused when she was an adult, and she still feels very confused about it.
Joanie grew up in the 1980s and 90s. She was sexually abused by a friend of the family, Nick.
She relates ‘He became good friends with my dad. He was in our house nearly every day, and when they went out, mum and dad asked him to babysit’.
This gave Nick the opportunity to sexually abuse Joanie. He would sit her on his knee while they watched television, and touch her. She says ‘Looking back I can’t believe how brazen it was … he did it with my brothers in the room’. Nick also got her to touch his penis when she was in her bedroom.
Joanie was six or seven years old when the abuse began, and Nick was 10 years older.
Nick was very keen on outdoor activities, and he would take Joanie canoeing and rambling. He worked for a charity connected with sailing, and he was training to be an outward bound instructor.
When she was 12, he took Joanie and his parents on a boating trip and this was the first time he raped her. The abuse, that she thought at the time was a relationship, went on until she was in her mid teens and Nick moved away.
She says ‘During this time I was completely in love with him. When you’re 14 years old and you have an older boyfriend, you think “Cool”’.
She says she was quiet and well-behaved at school. ‘I never caused any issues.’ But she recalls ‘When I was about eight I wrote a very sexualised story and my parents were called to school. I might have said something if they’d talked to me on my own’.
Her mum and dad asked Joanie afterwards if she had got the idea from watching films with sexual content.
By the time she was at secondary school, Nick was regularly picking her up from school in his car.
For a while, she began seeing a 19-year-old male. Her mother took her to see the family doctor, who gave Joanie the contraceptive pill, but did not question whether she was having sex or who with.
It was only when Joanie was an adult and completed safeguarding training for her work that she began to understand she had been groomed and sexually abused.
She had some counselling and was encouraged to report Nick to the police. She says they handled her report with great sensitivity, but she found it very difficult knowing that Nick would realise she had reported him. He denied everything and Joanie chose not to give evidence against him.
Joanie says that over the years, she did think about what had happened to her when she was a child, but she shut it away ‘and got on with it … I didn't feel like I'd been raped … it wasn’t a violent act. I felt I’d consented but I know now I didn’t have capacity to consent’.
She comments ‘He did a good job of grooming me and I hope he never did it to anyone else. He had massive opportunities because he was working with children on the outward bound activities’.
Joanie believes that professionals working with children should be prepared to ask questions if they suspect something is wrong, and they should be particularly alert about quiet children.
She would like to see more counselling available for victims and survivors of child sexual abuse.
Joanie says ‘I’ve seen the damage it can do to people so I think I have been quite lucky’.