Suranne thinks that education about sexual abuse is the key so ‘kids are more likely to speak up’
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Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Suranne often stayed with her grandmother. A man who lived nearby sexually abused her over many years.
When she told her GP, it was noted down as a ‘sex problem’.
Suranne grew up in the 1970s. Her parents both worked, so during the school holidays she would go to stay with her grandmother, who lived in a small village in the country. All the neighbours were very friendly and her grandmother never locked her front door.
One of her grandmother’s neighbours had a son called Alfred, who was in his early 20s. Suranne remembers he was dirty and he smelled, and local people used to call him ‘a waste of space’. She now thinks he had learning difficulties.
Alfred was unemployed, and he would often come round to her grandmother’s house and ‘just sit there’. Sometimes he would take Suranne and other children out for the day. No one questioned this.
One of Suranne’s earliest memories of the abuse was when she was about four years old. Alfred took her to a secluded location. He penetrated her with his fingers; she remembers he always had dirty fingernails and this repulsed her.
He tried to get her ‘to do things to him’ and kept asking if he could put his penis inside her. Suranne says she refused many times but he would say ‘if you really liked me you would let me do it’. Eventually she said he could, and he raped her.
The abuse continued until Suranne was 13 years old. If she said it hurt, he would tell her to ‘think of something nice’. He also used to tell her that no one would believe her if she spoke about the abuse, but her grandmother would get into trouble and go to prison.
Suranne says Alfred sometimes abused her in his bedroom at his parents’ house and she recalls him having a lot of pornographic magazines, but at the time she didn’t know what they were.
She believes his parents must have ‘had an inkling’ of what was going on as they walked in on him abusing her a few times.
When Suranne was a teenager, she says she had a ‘eureka moment’. She was at a sleepover with some friends and they were talking about sexual abuse, and she realised she was being abused. She remembers feeling very shocked.
She started to avoid and hide from Alfred, until he eventually ‘lost interest in me’.
When Suranne was 16, she went to see her GP because she was ‘feeling low’. She told her doctor that she had been sexually abused. The doctor did not ask her any further questions, and wrote in her notes ‘sex problem’.
After this, Suranne says, she ‘put it away in my brain’. Following the birth of her first child she suffered from postnatal depression, and ‘then everything came out’.
She has suffered with anxiety, PTSD and depression, and has self-harmed. She finds it hard to sleep, and to go out. She says she went through a phase of being promiscuous. She struggles to trust people and thinks she has been over-protective of her children.
Suranne has never told her parents about the abuse because she wants to protect them.
She thinks that a recent awareness campaign about child sexual abuse has been ‘brilliant’ and she wishes she had known that what was happening to her was not a ‘normal thing’.
Suranne has seen many counsellors, and still has therapy. She feels she has been stable for several years. She says ‘I understand my mental health condition is related to the abuse, and I know what triggers me’.