Natalia says that being sexually abused ‘will affect me until I take my last breath’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Natalia’s grandfather sexually abused her and other members of his family.
When he was confronted, he admitted the abuse, saying ‘Yeah, but it ain’t done them no harm’.
Natalia lived with her parents and two younger siblings in a rural area near to her grandparents. The first time her grandfather sexually abused her, she was about three years old.
She says ‘I don’t think I was the only one – us kids used to talk … he was doing it with my younger sibling and a cousin’.
When Natalia was eight years old, her father lost his job and the family moved to a city. After this, because both her parents found work, they sent the three girls to their grandparents during the school summer holidays.
Natalia explains that she slept in a box room on her own, while her younger siblings shared another room. The memory of him coming into the room still causes her considerable distress. She says ‘I would pretend to be asleep, so he would finish and go.’
She spoke to one of her aunts about the abuse when she was 10 years old. Her aunt’s response was to hit her, swear at her and call her a liar. Natalia says ‘she slapped me so hard it left finger marks on my face’.
A few years later, Natalia’s grandmother died, and on the day of his wife’s funeral, her grandfather sexually abused her. She describes how she went upstairs to get away from all the people drinking at the wake. She sat on her grandmother’s familiar bedspread, and her grandfather followed her and abused her. She remembers the smell of alcohol on his breath.
Natalia was just a teenager when this happened but this was the last time he touched her. Soon after she and her family went home, she found the courage to tell her mother about the abuse.
She explains ‘I knew I had to, because my gran wasn’t there to hide behind any more in the holidays’. Natalia says that although she believes her grandmother was aware her husband was an abuser and she was bullied by him to an extent she protected the children.
Natalia vividly recalls the moment she told her mother. ‘Mum was stood at the kitchen sink. I was terrified because I had told before and was not believed and slapped … I could see her freeze and tense up.’
She told her mother details of the abuse and her father asked her to confirm it was true. Both her parents believed her and reassured her. She adds that her mother said the revelation was like ‘pieces of a puzzle fitting together’ from comments the children had made and the way they behaved over the years.
Natalia’s mother told her later that her father phoned her grandfather to confront him about the sexual abuse. Her grandfather admitted it, adding ‘But it ain’t done them no harm’.
Natalia says she never saw her grandfather after that, and her father never spoke to him again. Her grandfather is now dead.
Contrary to her grandfather’s dismissal of the effects of his behaviour, more than 30 years after the abuse ended, Natalia is still in considerable distress. She gives a powerful account of the numerous ways she has been severely affected by the abuse.
At school, she had no confidence and was bullied. She never wanted to play sports because the changing rooms were an ordeal for her, and did all she could to avoid being noticed. ‘I didn’t want to exist’, she says.
Because Natalia didn’t feel safe outside her house, she missed more than 200 days at school before anyone contacted her parents. She adds ‘That’s how insignificant I was, no one noticed I was missing for a year’. Her life was greatly affected by these absences as a child.
She says she behaved badly as a teenager and became promiscuous, letting ‘boys do what they wanted’, because ‘this was how I thought people loved you’. In her late teens, she was treated for cervical cancer.
She entered into violent and emotionally abusive relationships, including her first marriage. ‘I didn’t think I deserved any more’, she says.
During this period, Natalia wanted to be a childminder and asked for a reference from her doctor. But her husband told the doctor she had been sexually abused, and the doctor pronounced she was ‘unfit’ for the job, as in his opinion, she would abuse any children put in her care.
Natalia describes how angry she was at this declaration. The doctor claimed her reaction proved he was right. This incident affected her mental health, and although she knew it was unjust, she says it planted more doubts about herself. She became obsessed with not getting pregnant, and eventually persuaded a doctor to sterilise her.
She recalls the day this was done. ‘No counselling was offered. I remember sitting waiting and I thought I didn’t want it, but I didn’t speak up as I would get into trouble for wasting people’s time’.
Natalia is now in a happy marriage with a loving and supportive husband. They spent a considerable sum on fertility treatment but it was unsuccessful. She has friends and is popular with their children and says ‘I actually think I would have been a good mum’.
She finds it hard to leave the house and to trust people, she cannot sleep in the dark and is ‘hypervigilant to every sound’. The smell of alcohol causes flashbacks of the abuse for her, and she feels exhausted from ‘living my life on flight or fight mode’.
She adds that she is determined not to use the sexual abuse as an excuse to misuse drugs or alcohol, and she tries ‘to be a witness rather than a judge’ of people, understanding that if they are acting in a certain way, there may be a reason.
Natalia also reminds her friends to speak carefully and kindly to their children. She says she wishes that when she was younger, someone had taken time to build up her confidence, and that her school had given her more support.
She now knows that after she disclosed the abuse, her parents contacted social services and discussed pressing charges against her grandfather. But at that time, she and her sibling would have had to give evidence in open court, and her parents did not want to put them through that.
She says she understands their decision, but says ‘I don’t feel I had justice’.
Natalia is still debilitated by low self-esteem and memories of the sexual abuse she suffered as a child. She says ‘It will affect me until I take my last breath … it comes back in so many ways ... I wonder sometimes what my life could have been .. what would I be?’
She concludes ‘I don’t have a purpose in life but I don’t want my life to count for nothing. I don’t want no other boy or girl to go through what I did’.