Millicent says ‘Being told that you are loved does not mean that the person loves you’
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Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Millicent loved music and her parents paid for her to have private lessons.
The tutor groomed her and raped her scores of times, while maintaining that he cared about her.
Millicent grew up in the 1970s and 80s. Her parents were both academic. She describes her father as ‘high functioning’ on the autism spectrum and her mother as slightly ‘socially awkward’.
She comments that these things marked her parents as ‘different’ and she knew, even as a young child, that people seemed to ‘reject’ them, which was hurtful to her.
When she was nine years old, her parents found a private music tutor for her, called Cam, who was in his 60s. The lessons took place every week in his home. Sometimes Cam’s wife was in the house, but Millicent remembers that Cam always told her not to interrupt him during the lessons.
Cam began grooming Millicent almost immediately. He showed her pornographic magazines, on the pretext of telling her the ‘facts of life’. Within about six months, Millicent says, the abuse had escalated to ‘adult sex’ and Cam was raping her.
Millicent has since calculated that between the ages of nine to 11 years, she was raped more than 50 times by the tutor. She says he regularly declared how much he loved her.
She relates that once, when Cam went abroad for a couple of weeks, she had some respite from the abuse, but at the same time she knew ‘he was going to come back’.
Millicent tried to tell her mum that she didn’t want to go to the lessons any more, but she just didn’t feel she could tell her the reason why. She says she never felt that she would be in trouble, but thinks it was the fear of people knowing what Cam had done to her that stopped her speaking about the abuse.
Eventually, Millicent did tell one of her friends what was happening and the friend advised her to tell her mum. When she did this, Millicent’s mum simply said she should stop going to the music lessons, but did not involve the police or take any other action.
Millicent never went back to Cam’s home and her mother organised music lessons for her with a female tutor.
Shortly afterwards, Millicent failed her 11+ and went to the local secondary school. She says this was a very difficult time for her and she felt very isolated, until she moved to a different school which she describes as ‘a more gentle environment’.
By the time she went to university, Millicent’s self-esteem was very low and she was ‘constantly crying’. She met a man who she later married. She describes the relationship as unhealthy; he was controlling, pressured her for sex and used the abuse against her to make her feel there was something wrong with her. ‘I lost my personality’, she says.
Millicent went to a counsellor, which her husband opposed. She separated from him and entered into another relationship with a man she soon realised was ‘just as messed up’ as her ex-husband.
She later reported the sexual abuse by Cam to the police, but says they did not proceed with an investigation because of the time that had elapsed since it happened, and the age of the abuser by then.
Millicent feels that she is not emotionally affected by the sexual abuse she was subjected to as a child, and that she somehow deals with it ‘in an intellectual and technical way’.
She believes that there needs to be a different approach to supporting children who have been abused. Because she felt unable to tell her parents about the abuse, but could talk to her friend, she suggests that peer group support, with a trained facilitator, could be a more effective way of helping children and young people to speak about sexual abuse.
Millicent says she was always adventurous, and wanted to travel the world. When she did this, she gained confidence and is now in a ‘healthy relationship’ with a new husband and their children.