Paraic thinks there is often a connection between child sexual abuse and fundamental religious practice
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Paraic was raped by a Sunday school teacher, who said that the abuse was ‘God’s work’.
When he told a teacher what was happening to him, he was caned.
Paraic chose to give a written account of his experience of sexual abuse. He writes that he grew up in the years following the Second World War, in a moderately Christian, secure family.
He says ‘I was a happy child, until a little before my 11th birthday’. He writes that he was intelligent, well-brought up and felt loved by his family, but most of the time, he preferred to play on his own.
When Paraic was 10 years old, a man in his neighbourhood, who had taught him in Sunday school, began grooming him and then sexually abusing him. Paraic states that the abuse was anal rape, and the abuser told him they were doing ‘God’s work’ and that this was their secret.
He sometimes bled as a result of the abuse, and had to put a cloth inside his pants to hide this. The abuse went on for about over six months, until something happened that Paraic describes as so unpleasant that he decided to tell a teacher he thought he could trust.
But the teacher caned him; he says ‘for lying, I suppose’. After this, he writes that he refused to go to school or ‘anywhere else for a long time’. He was seen by various doctors but says that none of them ‘came near to asking me the right questions’.
After a few months, he returned to school and says he got through it by immersing himself in academic work, always pretending to be happy and hiding his emotions.
He went to university in a large city and was doing well until he was struck by what he now knows to be PTSD. He says he ‘went off the rails’; he was living rough, gambling and shoplifting. He was raped by two men. After this, his mental health deteriorated even more and he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital.
Paraic made a recovery; he believes this was partly due to when he was in hospital, and feeling freed of ‘having to maintain a pretence of being happy all the time’.
About 15 years ago, something happened that prompted him to tell his wife, children and two friends ‘in various degrees of depth’ that he had been sexually abused. He explains that he had previously told his wife some details of his troubled life before he met her, but not about the abuse.
Paraic outlines how he has been affected by the sexual abuse. As well as attempting suicide when he was at school, he has suffered flashbacks. He has a phobia of medical examinations and in the past has struggled with trust and intimacy.
At one stage, he felt so hypervigilant he would stay awake for days at a time, and he still takes measures to avoid feeling trapped by any situation. He finds any sort of confrontation or criticism very difficult. He has a physical condition as a result of being raped.
He did seek counselling but the only therapy he found helpful was limited to a few sessions.
Paraic feels very strongly that all children should receive sex education appropriate to their age and parents should not be allowed to remove children from this on religious grounds. He comments that because he had not had any sex education by the age of 11, it was very difficult for him to recognise for sure ‘that what was happening was wrong’.
He says it would have helped if he had been believed and protected when he told a teacher, and that later, when his behaviour deteriorated, he says ‘I might just still have been OK had teachers taken me aside and tried to find out why I was behaving oddly instead of punishing me’.
He would also like to see appropriate counselling available for victims and survivors for as long as they need it.
He says he knows that some people have had a worse time than him and overcome more difficulties. But he adds,‘I’m aware too that such thoughts are unhelpful’.