Being abused made Leila feel that sex was the only reason people would be interested in her
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
As a child Leila craved attention from her emotionally distant parents.
This made her vulnerable to sexual abuse by a teacher who made her feel ‘special’.
Leila’s mum suffered with depression and her dad worked long hours. Leila had to take on responsibility for her younger siblings.
She describes herself as a ‘lonely and quiet child’ and thinks that she longed for validation and praise, but was bullied by other children in the school. She says ‘Sometimes I struggled to understand who was my friend and who was bullying me’.
When Leila was about 10, she and a neighbour would sometimes play together. He had an older male friend who sexually abused both of them. He made them touch each other's genitals while he watched, and he made Leila take off her underwear so the two boys could look at her.
When Leila went to secondary school she did very well in all subjects, and particularly wanted to excel in maths. The subject teacher gave her a lot of praise for this, especially, he said, because she was a girl. She says ‘This made me feel special and unique, things that I craved’.
Leila and the teacher began sending ‘friendly and flirty’ messages to each other by phone and on social media. She says this ‘made me feel mature and adult-like, being paid attention to’. She would stay late after school and he would stroke her leg or hold her hand. They told each other about their ‘secrets’.
The messages became sexual, and once Leila sent the teacher a revealing photo of herself, which he said he liked.
One day, the special attention the teacher paid Leila stopped abruptly. She says ‘I felt a coldness towards me’. Then he contacted her to say his line manager had commented on how much time they were spending together. They talked about going away together.
As time went on, Leila began to notice that he flirted with other girls in school, and would make sexist and racist remarks. She also noticed that he was quick-tempered with the boys, and often verbally abused and bullied individual pupils. She says ‘I began to see that he was an unpleasant man’.
She and another pupil who was being bullied by him went to report his behaviour to a senior teacher. Leila says they didn’t feel they were believed or taken seriously, but some pupils were asked if they wanted to move classes. She did not tell anyone about the sexual abuse she had suffered because she was sure that she would be publicly blamed and humiliated.
The grooming and abuse by the teacher had a significant impact on her life. As a teenager Leila began to have mental health and anger issues, and she used to disappear from home without telling her parents where she was. For a long time Leila believed that the teacher’s behaviour was normal.
Leila has abused alcohol and drugs, and has self-harmed. She says her understanding of how relationships worked was skewed; she became very promiscuous. She comments ‘I thought this was the only way to get people interested in me … that sex was the only worthwhile thing about me’.
She is still very self-deprecating and expects people to think badly of her. She suffers with feelings of shame.
Leila says that schools should never allow pupils to be alone with any member of staff after hours, and she would like to see more counselling services available for school children. She thinks some children who are being abused ‘slip through the net’ because they don’t show obvious signs and says it is important that professionals are aware of this.