Margaret says the belief that she was a girl and should do as she was told was ingrained in her mind
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
When she was about nine years old, Margaret struck up a friendship with an older girl. Ganivia had a disability and didn’t have many friends, and she invited Margaret to her house. But Ganivia was being sexually abused by her father, and she groomed her new friend to be abused by him too.
Ganivia’s parents had separated and she lived with her father, Maurice. He showed the girls pornography, saying ‘this is what women do’ and then touched them. Ganivia joined in with the abuse and Margaret says this made her feel it was what was expected of her too.
The abuse went on for about two years and sometimes she was in pain because of it. Maurice compared the girls’ bodies and said Margaret was deformed but his daughter was perfect.
She says Maurice was manipulative and made her feel she couldn’t tell her parents. He also said he would ‘go after’ her dog if she told anyone. Margaret’s parents knew Maurice and once when they went on holiday they left the dog with him. Margaret remembers being scared he would hurt it and when they got home, her mother commented ‘Someone has hit that dog’.
Margaret relates that Maurice made himself so friendly with her parents it seemed ‘he was always there’. Her parents were church goers, and they never thought Margaret was unsafe with Maurice. In fact Margaret was encouraged to go to Maurice’s house during the holidays.
She describes how the abuse caused many conflicting and confusing feelings for her. Maurice made her feel abnormal because she didn’t enjoy being abused, and Ganivia told her the abuse was perfectly normal.
She says she hated Ganivia, but later felt guilty as she realised she was also a vulnerable child. She knows that the nuns who ran the school that Ganivia attended said she had a bad temper, and she wonders if Ganivia was more affected by the abuse than she realised.
The abuse ended when Margaret was 11 or 12 and Maurice got a new partner with children.
Decades later, the sexual abuse she suffered still has a major impact on her life, and she feels she has been unable to do many things she would have been capable of.
She married, but the abuse affected her sexual relationship with her husband. She adds that the marriage has lasted because her husband has been very patient and supportive. She has children and avoided putting her daughters in dresses, as she remembered Mauruce would find it easier to abuse her when she wore dresses.
She has difficulty in trusting people, even her colleagues at work. Sometimes she feels she can really only trust her dogs. At times she has felt that ‘life was cheap and death was an option’.
She has had counselling for the sexual abuse she suffered.
Margaret says she sometimes checks obituaries to see if Maurice is dead. She says she would feel relieved if he died but also that she did not get justice.