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IICSA published its final Report in October 2022. This website was last updated in January 2023.

Lucie

Lucie

Lucie was devastated when the police said they could not prosecute the man who raped her as a child

All names and identifying details have been changed.

Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.

Lucie was raped when she was five years old by a young teenage boy.

She feels angry that because of a legal technicality, he cannot be prosecuted.

Lucie and her sibling were sometimes sent to their aunt’s house for childcare. The aunt looked after several other children, sometimes overnight. Lucie describes a ‘revolving sleeping arrangement’ which meant that her cousin Charlie sometimes slept in the same bed as her or her sibling.

Charlie raped Lucie when she was five or six years old. He was a young teenager at the time. She remembers going to the bathroom with ‘sticky stuff’ inside her and not understanding what had happened. 

Lucie asked Charlie not to do it again, but he threatened to scare her and hurt her if she didn’t do what he wanted. He also anally raped her. She remembers her sibling walking in on them once, and she had to pretend they were play-fighting. She knows she didn’t understand what Charlie was doing to her, but she knew it was wrong and wanted it to stop. 

When her sibling told a friend something about Charlie and what he was doing, the friend’s parents contacted Lucie’s parents. Her sibling ran away from home when their mother tried to talk to them about it. Their mother asked Lucie if Charlie had done anything to her, but she was too embarrassed and scared to admit it. But the children did not get sent to their aunt’s house any more. 

Later in life when Lucie was under a lot of stress in her job, she spoke to a counsellor about matters relating to her job. Although she hadn’t planned to, she also disclosed her childhood sexual abuse. 

Lucie later gave a statement to the police. She says she found it very distressing, going into detail about the abuse. Her parents were ‘devastated’ when they realised she had been abused as well as her sibling.  

Charlie was arrested but the prosecution did not go ahead. The police told Lucie that he was under the age of criminal responsibility when he raped her. They referred to the legal principle of ‘doli incapax’ which meant under the law at the time, a child under 14 did not know the difference between right and wrong.

She says that it was devastating to be told by police they couldn’t do anything after she had gone through the ordeal of describing the abuse.

The police said it was the decision of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) not to go ahead but when Lucie spoke to the CPS, they said it was the police force’s decision not to investigate further.

Lucie says she is determined not to let the matter rest. She wants the police to investigate again and review the terms under which the law is applied to non-recent child sexual abuse.

She says the abuse has had a huge impact on her family and she has suffered from depression, and has felt suicidal. As a teenager she had an eating disorder. She has difficulty sleeping.

Lucie would like to see a change in law so young abusers can be held accountable for their actions, regardless of the law at the time they offended.

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