Tamzin was afraid to say she was being sexually abused. ‘I thought I would be in trouble, or get sent away’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Tamzin took up martial arts when she was a young girl, to try and protect herself from her abusive brother.
But the instructor sexually abused her, raped her and threatened her.
When Tamzin’s older brother was 12 years old, her parents started leaving him to babysit their two younger children when they went out.
Tamzin says he was always physically aggressive to her and her other sibling, and when she was about seven or eight he started sexually abusing her. ‘I remember him coming into the bedroom lots of times when they were out’ she says. He would make her carry out oral sex on him and do the same to her.
Tamzin endured this abuse for a few years, and when she went to secondary school, she decided to take up a martial art ‘to protect myself from him’.
She took to the sport immediately and progressed very quickly. When she was in her early teens, the instructor, Jon, moved her into the adult class. He would make a point of being her partner in practice, and he started touching her breasts during moves.
Tamzin says ‘I was dumbstruck … I didn’t know what to do’. But, she continues, it was hard to avoid him. One day Jon turned up at her house and asked her mother if Tamzin would babysit for him and his wife while they were working in their business during the evenings.
Her mother agreed. While Tamzin was upstairs with the baby, the instructor kept coming up from the business premises and touching her. Sometimes he drove her home, parked up and made her masturbate him.
Tamzin’s brother had stopped sexually abusing her at this stage, but she only had a brief respite before Jon started abusing her.
Jon told her that if she ever spoke to anyone about the abuse, he would bar her from his martial arts classes.
As well as sexually abusing her, Jon intimidated Tamzin by driving backwards and forwards past her house in the evenings. She says ‘He was creepy and controlling’. Her mum once noticed him doing this and mentioned it, but Tamzin says ‘I couldn’t speak out, I was terrified’.
Then Jon asked Tamzin’s mum if she could stay overnight to babysit because his wife was in hospital. She was still in her early teens, and he gave her alcohol. She says ‘I was really drunk ... I remember him helping me upstairs into his bedroom’. He raped her, using a condom. Tamzin says ‘I thought, this is what sex is’.
Jon continued raping her until she was in her mid teens. Sometimes this happened when the martial arts team travelled to events.
Some years later, Tamzin married and had children. She says she tried to continue life as best she could, but her marriage broke down.
She says she felt she had kept all the secrets about the abuse to herself, but it started to have a serious effect on her and she had a mental breakdown.
Tamzin says she feels constantly vigilant. She can’t handle people in her ‘personal space’ and she hates crowds. ‘I can’t join in with things in case anyone touches me … if that happens I freak out’.
She says she has been accused of being ‘hard-faced’ and having no empathy. She has done things that she sees as making herself unattractive, because if she is complimented on her appearance it makes her feel vulnerable. She says ‘I never want another relationship’.
Tamzin believes that every school should have a ‘safe person’ who children can talk to and who could monitor children for behaviour changes. She says ‘teachers are under enormous pressure I know’ and thinks this would help.
She would also like to see careful monitoring of children who take part in sporting and other activities, with regular, simple questions about how they feel about taking part.
Tamzin has recently had therapy which she says has helped her tremendously. She has also arranged to speak to the martial arts governing body about the abuse she suffered.
She adds that she has had difficulty working but her employer has been supportive.