Kenny says ‘society should not tolerate organisations protecting their image rather than children’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Kenny describes a happy family life with a good relationship with his parents.
They were proud that he was in the local church choir and he did not want to upset them with the ‘horrible secret’ that he was being sexually abused.
Kenny explains that the choirmaster, Aron, became a friend of the family, ‘someone my parents trusted’.
Aron began sexually abusing Kenny soon after he joined the choir at the age of eight. He says ‘I didn’t realise how wrong it was at first’. He describes how he would ‘zone out’ when Aron was abusing him, then try to get on with his day and forget about it.
Kenny believes that there were aspects of his personality that made Aron target him. He says ‘I think he realised I was a quiet, emotional, caring sort of boy. I think that’s how abusers can identify victims who might want to avoid telling people’.
He adds ‘I had all sorts of thoughts that if I tell my parents it will cause them stress’ and says he was also scared his father might assault Aron and get into trouble.
As Kenny got older, he became more aware that what Aron was doing to him was wrong. When he was in his early teens, he and some of the other boys in the choir began talking to each other and he realised that Aron was abusing several of them.
Kenny says that talking to each other gave the boys confidence as a group, and they decided to do something. They reported Aron to a member of the church. The result was an announcement that the choirmaster was retiring, and a new one was appointed. He remembers feeling it was a ‘cover-up’, but he left the choir and tried to get on with his life.
As an adult, Kenny was aware that he sometimes became very emotional about what had happened to him, and he increasingly found that if he drank, he got into a depression. ‘I realised I had to do something’ he says.
He went online to look for the abuser and was horrified to find that he was still a choirmaster. He describes how he felt: ‘It hit me like a sledgehammer … I had visions of little boys like me being victims.’
Kenny made a report to the police and told his elderly parents what had happened. They were shocked but supportive. He was assigned a family liaison officer who he says was ‘brilliant’.
Some of the other victims gave statements, the perpetrator was prosecuted and given a prison sentence. Kenny was surprised that Aron pleaded guilty, and says that in some ways he was relieved. He says that when the abuser looked up at him in court and looked terrified ‘that made me feel better … I thought “the tables have turned”’.
Kenny says the abuse has had a lasting impact on him, but ‘other victims had it worse’. He has mild PTSD and tends to be hypervigilant. He adds ‘I wonder what sort of adult I’d be if that hadn’t happened’.
He adds that one thing that particularly hurts is that his parents were so proud of him and had photographs of him in their house, but these pictures meant something very different and painful to him.
Kenny was disappointed that the church did not take its safeguarding duties seriously and thinks that perhaps organisations that behave in this way should be prosecuted. He went on to successfully sue the church.
He feels that schools and other organisations should raise awareness with children and their parents that perpetrators come from all walks of life and are often good at targeting victims, who are likely to be quieter children. He believes that ‘paedophiles have a perverse skill at finding people who are less likely to talk’.
Kenny says he is glad that he took action and the abuser was convicted.