A teacher at Katherine’s school suggested she buy a lock for her bedroom door
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Katherine’s father sexually abused her for the first time on her fifth birthday and continued to do so for several years.
Katherine describes her childhood as ‘a tough time’. The family struggled financially and she remembers a lot of rows and tension between her parents.
For her fifth birthday, she was very happy and excited to receive a dressing-up outfit that she had been longing for, but didn’t really expect to be given. She played in it all day, and in the evening her mother went to work.
At bedtime, her father told her to leave the outfit on so they could ‘play’. This was the first time he abused her.
She describes how she came to dread the end of the day. She says ‘Night times are meant to be peaceful but for me, that’s when dad would want to “play”’.
Katherine explains that sometimes her father came into her bedroom and sexually abused her. She says that in the dim light, she managed to use her imagination to take herself out of the situation. Other times, he would call her downstairs and make her watch pornography on television with him, then reenact some of what they saw, including oral sex.
She remembers one occasion when she was called downstairs to find him watching pornography with a group of men, and being passed around between them and bounced up and down on their laps.
Katherine knows the abuse went on for several years, and she thinks that it escalated to rape. Her father said that if she told anyone about it she would be sent to a children’s home and would never see her family and friends again.
By the time she was in secondary school, Katherine was drinking alcohol. She missed a lot of school and when she was there, she was very disruptive and got into fights. She says ‘That was me – big trouble. My life was a complete mess’.
She did tell one teacher who was concerned about her that ‘things were really bad at home, and I hated my dad for what he was doing to me’. A more senior teacher spoke to her and suggested she buy a lock for her bedroom door.
The abuse ended after Katherine started her periods.
She knows that she was trying to send a message with her behaviour at school and she feels that teachers should have questioned her in more detail. She thinks they didn’t act because she didn’t actually say the words ‘I am being abused by my dad’.
Katherine’s father has died, but she found this did not give her the closure she hoped for. She is having counselling and says ‘It’s the best thing I could have done … it’s hard work but well worth it’.