Sheridan’s abuse drove her to attempt suicide. She was not happy or relieved when she woke up in hospital
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Sheridan’s father was a teacher who taught at a local school. When she started primary school at the age of four, Sheridan was in a class taught by Mr Jenkins, who knew her father.
Mr Jenkins began to visit Sheridan’s home, and over time he used his relationship with her father to gain her trust and sexually abuse her.
Part of Mr Jenkins’ grooming tactics was convincing Sheridan not to trust her parents. He would tell her they didn’t love her and even that they were trying to harm her by putting poison into her toothpaste. Sheridan says this seemed credible to her as a little girl because her parents were so insistent about her brushing her teeth, and she came to believe Mr Jenkins was the only person she could trust.
Each week at school, Mr Jenkins taught a session in a corner of the classroom with a pull-around curtain. He instructed the children to line up and to enter the curtained area one by one. He always ensured that Sheridan was last in line and he would sexually abuse her behind the curtain.
She says: ‘The abuse began slowly’, with Mr Jenkins pretending that his fingers had ‘slipped’. It progressed to serious sexual assaults which included oral sex and anal rape. The abuse took place every week that she was at primary school.
Sheridan remembers how confused she felt, because she trusted the teacher – she questioned whether his behaviour was normal and part of her knew that it wasn’t.
She was also terrified by what he did. She says ‘I wet myself every single day.’
Sheridan tried to tell the headmaster of the school what was happening but was told not to ‘be so silly’. Subsequently two girls from Sheridan’s school reported that Mr Jenkins had ‘jumped on’ them but the matter was not taken seriously and resolved as ‘tickling’, with no further action taken.
Sheridan says she thought this incident was another opportunity to tell someone about the abuse, but when she tried to speak to her mother about it, the response was ‘Little girls should be careful what they say.’
Sheridan now realises that some of her behaviour should have caused adults around her to ask questions. She has a very distressing memory of being six or seven years old and spending a night with her father in her parent’s bed while her mother worked a night shift as a nurse. Confused by the sexual abuse she was suffering, she tried to masturbate her father. He moved her hand away and did not question his daughter’s behaviour.
She remembers asking her father, when she was about nine years old, what rape was. His answer described only vaginal penetration and this led her to believe that she was not being raped by her teacher.
However, she had started to bleed from her anus and was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. The bleeding stopped when she moved to secondary school and the abuse ended.
The sexual abuse caused Sheridan to grow up with a ‘profound distrust of adults’ and she had ‘no sense of belonging to anyone or anything … a deep sense of loneliness and confusion’.
When she was a teenager, she told her parents about the abuse, but they told her they didn’t want to ‘make a fuss’. By this time, she was drinking alcohol to the point of blacking out and began taking illegal drugs and antidepressants to ‘self-medicate the pain’.
On one occasion she woke up in a hospital bed after overdosing and cutting her wrists. ‘I was not happy when I woke up,’ she says. ‘It was not a cry for help ... I was chasing oblivion.’
Sheridan describes a long period of being ‘anguished, desperate, chasing anything to change how I felt’. After being homeless for a time, she entered a 12-step programme and accessed counselling, which she says was helpful.
But the abuse still affects her life. She says, ‘A lot of my childhood memories are gone – blacked out – good and bad.’ She does not have children and says she feels ‘terrified’ that she could become an abuser herself.
Following a report made by another girl who attended Sheridan’s school, Mr Jenkins was prosecuted and received a custodial sentence. She was aware of the court action at the time but chose not to give evidence against him.
Sheridan says she has been ‘clean and sober’ for many years and has forged a career with a keen interest in safeguarding. Her relationship with her parents remains difficult as she believes they knew about the abuse.
Sheridan firmly believes that mandatory reporting of disclosures of abuse is essential. She feels strongly that people in positions of power within institutions ‘must not be able to assert discretion of any sort as they have a vested interest in the investigation not taking place’.
She thinks ‘a great deal has changed’ since the time of the abuse but adds ‘A lot has stayed the same too ... there is so much rhetoric about protecting children in the UK and beyond, but we don’t truly do it.’