When kids do come forward, it’s important that the immediate default position is believe them and act. Source: News Limited
A principal encouraged parents to let the school deal with child sex complaints rather than police.
OUT of all the evidence so far given to the child sexual abuse royal commission by senior staff at a Toowoomba Catholic primary school, I was struck by the words of the school’s child protection officer.
In giving her evidence to the commission in Brisbane last week, Catherine Long wondered why more of the children didn’t have the courage to come forward.
Let me explain this apparent “lack” by offering a first-hand account of what it’s like to be the target of a pedophile.
It’s my hope this helps shed understanding on why kids don’t come forward or why, when they do, it’s important the immediate default position is to believe them and act – which then takes courage of a different kind.
My abuse began when I was eight years old and continued for three long years.
He was my divorced mother’s new partner and first touched me the second time we met. Encouraged to crawl into bed beside him, his hand wandered under my nightshirt. I told my mother and she brushed the incident aside.
A few weeks later, he moved into our small apartment.
Waiting until my mother was asleep or watching television, he would turn on the bathroom light and, using it as a beacon, kneel by my bed, burrow under my bedclothes, into my underpants, and touch me.
I can recall vividly the first time it happened. The sensation of being utterly powerless and afraid haunts me still. I lay motionless, hoping he would stop.
He didn’t. Aware I was awake, he asked me if I enjoyed what he was doing.
Even now, I’m ashamed to admit I said “yes”. Not because I did but because, like most children, I’d been raised to please adults and wanted nothing better than to do so; I thought if I said “yes” he would stop.
He would touch me until he had satisfied himself and then stand, his knees creaking, and leave.
I told my mother what happened the next day. She said I was dreaming. I told her the following day when it happened again and she slapped me across the face. I was accused of being a “drama queen with a vivid imagination”.
After that, I kept my mouth shut.
The other reasons I remained silent are complex but, at the most fundamental level, were about not being believed.
In her opinion piece in Wednesday’s Courier-Mail, Professor Karen Healy wrote how people have difficulty reconciling someone they know well with their image of a pedophile. It does not make them evil or bad, it makes them wilfully ignorant.
Abuse perpetrators, Healy wrote, “are aware of this flaw in human perception (to only see what’s before them) and expend much effort on making themselves seem beyond reproach”. She’s right.
He wore two faces – the one I saw and the other he donned for everyone else. I’d marvel, how can they NOT see?
We also hear about people being accused wrongly or in spite. I cannot think of a more malevolent allegation. Yet, underreporting of sexual abuse is far more common than false reporting.
One by one, I watched many adult allies being co-opted and felt I had no one to whom I could turn.
Over time, his whispered questions about pleasure became mingled with threats. I wouldn’t be harmed but others I loved would – including my dog (a threat he later acted upon when he killed my fox terrier, Mini).
I bore his attentions, in the bathroom, the bedroom, with stoicism, fear and denial. I lost weight, became withdrawn, pensive, escaped into the safe world of my imagination; tried to get into Narnia through my wardrobe. I read voraciously, exhaustively.
Not even the blood on my thighs, the bruises on my back from beatings, the malnutrition I began to suffer cued my mother or others that something was wrong, not when I smiled so much.
When I threw all the hairbrushes he’d used to abuse me sexually in the bin and refused to explain why, I was punished. I stopped showering, my personal hygiene became unbearable and I was ostracised at school … still he didn’t stop.
Trust, in myself and in the adult world was decimated. I was on my own – dirty, ashamed, afraid and with a great capacity to pretend nothing was wrong.
It was first the actions of my school principal and later my father and stepmother, that saved me. Though I’d been given several opportunities to “confess”, I’d opted for denial. Not because I lacked courage but because it was less painful, less intimidating.
Slowly, I was coaxed, with love and the rebuilding of trust, to talk. Given credence by my stepmother and father, the police and other authorities became involved, tests were done, statements taken and I was eventually removed from danger.
From that day forward, I refused to be his “victim”.
My life then and now wouldn’t be defined by what he took.
For that reason, I never call myself a victim and, only when I have to, do I refer to myself as a survivor.
I’m simply the girl who grew up to be many things but who, to this day – like all those brave children who may or may not talk – wants to be believed.
Dr Karen Brooks is an associate professor at the UQ Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies.
Email: brookssk@bigpond.com
