When her grandfather abused her, Tatiana says ‘I didn’t feel a bad person was doing a bad thing to me’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Tatiana’s extended family on her mother’s side were very close, and she spent a lot of time at her grandparents’ house.
When she was about nine years old, her grandfather started sexually abusing her, but she did not understand this at the time.
Tatiana says the abuse continued regularly until she was 16, in her grandfather’s house and sometimes his car.
She now sees that he groomed her for a long time before, but she did not realise it. When he started abusing her, she says she had no understanding she was a victim – she was led to believe it was something that she and her grandfather were ‘agreeing to do together’.
Tatiana explains that her whole family were very involved in the church, and her grandfather was a church leader.
When she started university she made a group of friends. They all became very close and she spoke to them about the abuse. She says that up until then, she had never told any of her school friends or her family about it; it had been ‘an uncomfortable secret’.
At home during the summer holidays, she attended a church group and told the group leader about the abuse. The leader advised her to tell her parents and also tried to help her arrange counselling through her GP. Tatiana explained the reason she wanted counselling, but she was told it would not be available free of charge.
Tatiana later told her parents what her grandfather had done. She says her parents were devastated, but her dad suggested it was best to ‘let sleeping dogs lie’ as it had been some years before. Although she told them that she didn’t want them to take any action, she says that, deep down, she did want them to ‘take the responsibility’.
Some time after this, her grandfather became terminally ill, and Tatiana’s family were very involved in caring for him. She says ‘this was a very weird time’. Another member of the church advised Tatiana to speak to her grandfather about the abuse before he died. She did this, and he apologised to her.
After her grandfather died, Tatiana had some therapy at university, which she found helpful. She decided she wanted to tell her extended family about the abuse. A family meeting was arranged – she says it affected them in different ways, but everyone agreed that her grandmother should not be told.
Tatiana is now estranged from her extended family since disclosing the abuse. She feels she has ‘compartmentalised’ the sexual abuse and that she has ‘lived two parallel lives’.
She feels angry with the church leader for not doing more about her disclosure. She believes the leader was ‘well-meaning’ but should have reported it to a higher authority in the church and the police.
Tatiana says she achieved at school and was well-behaved, so she doesn’t think anyone there could have realised ‘anything bad was happening’.
However, she believes that if there had been education about child sexual abuse at school, she might have recognised that her grandfather was grooming her. She says ‘there was a lot of talk about stranger danger’, but this was far removed from what was happening to her.