Blog: Learning to Survive

on not/belonging

First, what do I mean by the feeling I have had most of my life: that I don’t belong?

It’s not difficult for me to identify elements of my young life which embedded these feelings: my mother’s unstable mental health meant that I was passed between relatives at times, and that I was witness to her withdrawal from me. She would disappear in more ways than one, and, not only was I then virtually on my own physically, I was on my own emotionally too of course. Any three year old who stands aside and observes is bound not to feel part of things.

When I was six and a half, I went to live with my father, his new wife, and their children, aged six months and two years old. As my parents divorced before I was one year old, and as for some reason I didn’t see my father — I had only met him and my stepmother once before moving in with them.

So I entered the house already an outsider, a role cemented soon after by my father’s grooming and sexual abuse of me.

Keeping secrets separates you from the rest of your life. Like most in this situation, I learned to pretend. Pretend to be a ‘normal’ teenager. Pretend that things were okay in my house. This fragmentation — the reality of what I was living through and carrying with me, alongside my daily life in school and with friends — for years and years meant that I lived parallel lives.

I have never presented as ‘damaged’. I was able to keep going simply because I kept going. I guarded my independence once I left the family home, I pulled myself away from everyone and everything — with smiles, with humour, and sometimes out of a real love — in order to keep the ugliness — of me, of my inner life — away from them.

Versions of this fragmentation, this ‘other-ness’, haunt most survivors I think. From it, we know we do not ‘belong’, and feel we never will. It can be such a heavy, unspoken burden in life, one that spills over into ‘not belonging’ anywhere — in your work, in your culture, in society. No matter if others treat you like you belong: if you feel deep down you don’t belong, ‘other-ness’ can be unshakeable.

***

So, second: I know now that I belong. And indeed, never in my life have I felt such a sense of belonging, in every way. You may ask youself, how did I get here? (Talking Heads, 1980).

Over the last few years, the floating icebergs that I used to feel shifting inside me, drifting, have gathered in one place. There are bridges now between them, paths through them, leading one to the other. There is a layer of fresh snow, which, once walked upon, connects the pieces in a kind of knowledge and acceptance.

This fresh snow:

  • everyone I know and almost everyone I meet becomes aware that I am a survivor, and that, yes, I am now thriving
  • no secrets anymore, ever, from anyone
  • my friends and family — all of them — meet me where I am
  • understanding that perfection is not a condition of loving or being loved
  • I allow those close to me to take care of me
  • no pretending, and no soft-pedalling, around my truths, and my mental and physical health
  • I have been hurt, wounded for life — but here I am nevertheless, so blessed to love and be loved

I feel I belong in this world now. And that I am not alone.

***

Finally, third. The connections I have forged with the survivor activist community and its allies have been life-changing, and life-affirming. In a room of survivors, there is no scanning for harm, no second guessing what can and can’t be said. No rush to ‘fix’ difficult emotions.

We are all, each one of us, whole people. With whole lives, separate struggles, and particular concerns. But we are united in our understanding of what constitutes damage, loss, scapegoating, toxic family dynamics. We are united in our understanding of what constitutes abuse. We do not feel the need to prove anything, or even to offer our life narrative. None of this matters. What matters is the drive for change.

We held our first workshop under the umbrella of Remembering Together in March this year. It was possibly the most uplifting experience of my life: the most grounded I had ever felt with others, the most accepted, the most understood, the most unconditional. All of us strong survivor activists devoting ourselves — some across decades — to raising awareness, changemaking, and the prevention of child sexual abuse.

We all know so much needs to change. This project is the first of its kind — putting together a toolkit for archiving survivor activist materials and life experiences. Maybe, just maybe, we can consolidate activities from the last 50 years and begin to say so loudly we cannot be ignored: We are here! We are here! (and more than sensitive-eared Horton cares).

Survivors of child sexual abuse make up 15% of the population. And despite decades of work by individuals and brilliant organisations — this statistic has not shifted. Despite several government reports and inquiries: almost all of the recommendations in them have not been acted upon.

Remembering Together offers a start. A way in to gaining some critical mass. We all know things need to change. But the taboo, the distaste, the revulsion even — all perpetuate the abuse. Time and again our momentum has been dissipated, disbanded, unfunded.

There have always been activists. And quite suddenly, without any forethought, I find that I am one.

And I belong here. The joins between the icebergs are smoothed. I am integrated. I am myself, and I know where I belong.

on representation

[image courtesy of Clare Best]

(To get straight to the lyric essay discussed below, please click here: Twenty-five soundings about child sexual abuse and the arts: considering the opera Festen.)

In the Land of Peaks and Troughs (see my last post), here’s how I (we) climbed to Peak 1.

The starting point: how is child sexual abuse represented in the arts, if indeed it is represented at all?

Looking for ourselves in books, films, plays, visual arts, and music is a human thing. We look outward as ways of looking inward. We look outward as a way to reflect upon our own lives and experiences.

Now think for a moment about any mainstream creative endeavour which highlights child sexual abuse, in any way.

I imagine you are still thinking. And that’s because there are precious few examples of ANY art form addressing child sexual abuse. Furthermore, most examples (think of documentaries and books about Savile or Epstein, or murder/detective films and books about a child abusing misfit etc) focus on horror, on sensationalising abuse. Most too turn around a fascination with the perpetrator: what kind of person would do this?

I ask you instead: where are the survivors of CSA? where are their stories, their voices in the mainstream? where are the real lives of this 15% of the population represented?

Last year fellow survivor writer Clare Best and I went to the opera Festen at the Royal Opera House in London. We went because we’d seen the film by the same name, directed by Thomas Vinterberg (1998) and we had read enough to know that this opera brought essentially the same narrative to the stage. This narrative — there is a gathering for a 60th birthday party, where one of the grown sons of the ‘birthday father’ publicly discloses that this same father abused him and his sister from a very young age — happens over the course of 24 hours, in the middle of a house party.

Clare and I have both written libretti for operas, and both have an abiding love for contemporary music. And of course: we are both survivor activists, focusing much of our energies these days working in associated spaces, and considering the nuances of survivorship in the wider world.

Festen was very powerful. CSA was ‘front and centre’ of the narrative, and family dysfunction, reactions to the disclosures — mostly denials through word or action — occupied the majority of the emotional and psychological landscape.

The opera sparked long conversations between us about how and where we see survivors of child sexual abuse portrayed. And how abuse itself — the fact of it — is handled.

We decided — because we are writers! — to explore this terrain together through writing. We both enjoy working in collaboration, and we both had a LOT to say. We swiftly decided upon a form (the lyric essay), and began sending each other prose fragments, poetry, statistics, and reflections upon Festen. Both of us have considered many times how our art — our writings — interact or intersect (or don’t) with our survivorship. And both of us, more and more, have begun to centre our survivorship throughout both our private and public lives. Both of us have worked hard to integrate what we have gone through — our journeys, our healing paths — with our daily lives and loves, with our purposes, and of course, with what we make: our art, our studies, our academic research.

Very soon after beginning our writing correspondence, Clare alighted upon the medical humanities arm of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) as a possible outlet for our work. We were delighted that our proposal was accepted by editor Sabina Dosani, and devoted ourselves to writing without constraint. In the end, we wrote twice as much as we needed, and spent one memorable summer morning pacing around Clare’s dining room table, arranging and rearranging the pages laid out there, divining a structure, finding a path.

We figured it out. After a wonderful peer review report, and a somewhat tortuous copy editing and typesetting four months, Twenty-five soundings about child sexual abuse and the arts: considering the opera Festen appeared in the BMJ last week. It’s the first lyric essay the BMJ has ever published. We are super proud of it. It goes some way at least toward articulating our feelings arising from the opera, and setting it all in a broader, more holistic cultural context.

One aspect I am most proud of it — which makes this a PEAK, aside from the fact that a publication always deserves celebrating — is that the essay has found a home where it is likely to reach whole new audiences. It is a very deep conviction of mine, a fundamental purpose, that we normalise conversations about CSA. That we normalise the fact of its existence and occurrence across 15% of society, regardless of socio-economic levels. It is wholesale, global — but most people, including medics, researchers, artists — have no idea of its prevalence. No idea how it is happening in plain sight, day after day.

I’m hoping that publishing our essay in such a mainstream publication brings the ‘everyday-ness’ of CSA closer to home for some. That it manages to break through, at least partially, the reflexive silencing that says too often: be quiet, we don’t need to speak about this, take it elsewhere.

So without further ado: this link will take you to a pdf of the full text.

I’d love to hear what you think.

*Please note that in places the essay alludes to subjects that some readers may find distressing.*

on finding my way (again)

[unattributed image of Catbells, in the Lake District, UK — a favourite walk]

Like so many here on this earth, there is a lot going on for me right now, from every angle: in real life, in the wider world, psychologically and medically. The last few weeks have brought brilliant peaks — and some very tough troughs.

Troughs: I’m having more nightmares. This is of course a CPTSD reaction — I reckon in response to the relentless disclosures of sexual abuse and assault, alongside the disgusting failure of those who are able to hold others accountable — utterly failing to do so. Some nightmares for the first time place me in a bed as a child, with the clear knowledge of my abuser approaching. Others place me in charge of protecting children in a large house — and no matter what I do, the door to the abuser waiting outside swings open.

Carrying this distress through the days, feeling like I must pretend that I am not distressed, when I really felt like screaming — sent me back into therapy for a few sessions, with my wonderful and long-term therapist, whom I have called upon several times in the last 12 years. I am so grateful for her compassion, her understanding of me as a person and writer and survivor — and the permission she gives me to simply feel and accept this anger, this grief, rather than turn to my default: something is wrong with me.

These resurgences of anger and grief have been the undercurrents of these last few weeks, indeed. And I continue to ride them out.

Through them though, emerges the crystal conviction again and again: I will not turn away. I will not shrink. I hold my nerve, I bear witness. Because I survived, and this surviving brings me closer to what must be done. I have room in my heart, and the strength to link arms with thousands of others.

And the peaks — ah the PEAKS! They are footholds up this rocky path: healing, centring, empowering. I wedge my feet ledge by ledge, not knowing quite where the next breath will come from — but come it does, thank goodness.

So. PEAKS to follow here over the next few days. Thank you for coming with me – we got this, together.

‘my incurable anger’

The liminal space of airports can take me one of two ways: either I feel elated by the possibilities that travel may hold, or I feel lost, rudderless, unmoored.

It’s not surprising I guess that what with everything happening in the world right now — the latter pulled me in deep last night, as I traveled back from Germany after seeing our (beautiful, precious, smiling and laughing, curious) grandson. Thank goodness for new life, right now especially, truly.

In the airport I found myself surrounded by businessmen while waiting for my flight. All men. All working. All seemingly contained, professional.

And for the first time in years and years, I was furious at all of them — so furious that I struggled not to cry. I wanted them to be up in arms. I wanted them to show that they noticed what was happening in the world. That they knew they were privileged. That they understood their positions of power — and that they rejected this power, wholesale. Then I wondered how many of them were abusers. I wondered about the women and girls and boys in their lives: were these men good people?

Who knows. All I could see, all I could read in their faces, was that they were unperturbed. Contrary to the triggering and beyond I was going through: they felt safe. They had no reason not to feel safe.

Let’s say that again: they had no reason not to feel safe.

Then I actually did cry as the plane taxied and took flight over Cologne. I saw the lights of the city below, and knew there were thousands of abused people there — the vast majority abused at the hands of men.

We have every reason not to feel safe. I have every reason not to feel safe. I want to scream: look, why don’t you — just open your eyes! You have done this. You run the world so you always win, so you are safe, happy, prosperous — and so you can bask however you choose in the entitlement bestowed upon you by being born male, into a patriarchy.

But they are not looking. Not those men. Not then, and possibly not ever. They don’t have to.

Which is why I cried: I must look. My eyes are stuck open. Every day, and especially right now. Millions of us have to look. We have no choice but to know about all of this, from the inside — and none of us, not a single one, wants to.

We are flayed raw. We are so tired. We are so heartsore.

***

This morning the words that circled my mind in the airport at last found their poem: one of Twenty-One Love Poems, a sequence by Adrienne Rich, the great activist feminist writer, one of only two or three writers whose work has echoed through my life. I first read her poems in 1980.

I’ve added emphasis to the lines I’ve been hearing over and over….

IV.


I come home from you through the early light of spring
flashing off ordinary walls, the Pez Dorado,
the Discount Wares, the shoe-store… I’m lugging my sack
of groceries, I dash for the elevator
where a man, taut, elderly, carefully composed
lets the door almost close on me.—For god’s sake hold it!
I croak at him.—Hysterical, he breathes my way.
I let myself into the kitchen, unload my bundles,
make coffee, open the window, put on Nina Simone
singing Here comes the sun… I open the mail,
drinking delicious coffee, delicious music,
my body still both light and heavy with you. The mail
lets fall a Xerox of something written by a man
aged 27, a hostage, tortured in prison:
My genitals have been the object of such a sadistic display
they keep me constantly awake with the pain…
Do whatever you can to survive.
You know, I think that men love wars…
And my incurable anger, my unmendable wounds
break open further with tears, I am crying helplessly,
and they still control the world, and you are not in my arms.

will we get there?

So many are asking this question right now: survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, allies of survivors, and the general public.

Who will be charged? Who will be prosecuted? And importantly: will this global explosion around sexual abuse and sex trafficking change anything?

***

I was up at the University of York this week, diving into a set of materials gathered by relatives of a long-term survivor activist in the UK. She was clearly an incredible woman, and built her huge network brick by brick through paper, telephone, personal relationships (before connectivity of any sort). This work is a fundamental part of a larger project I am working on with some colleagues, and it’s very exciting — here’s the LinkedIn page. The project only officially started this month, but we have done work around it now for the last six months. I can go into details once the website is up, in about two weeks!

Meanwhile, the archive material around this amazing survivor activist blew me away:

  • she worked so hard. She ran support groups, distributed leaflets, lobbied politicians and attorneys. She involved much of London, and had strong connections throughout the UK. Against all odds, she kept going for decades. I am only now, after about five years of doing this myself, beginning to understand how much this will have cost her.

  • toward the end of her life, she wrote about how ‘nothing had changed’, in all her 40 years of campaigning. Her voice was as strong as ever, but she didn’t and couldn’t understand why what she and others were screaming about CSA wasn’t being acted upon. Sound familiar? I cried.

  • I cried too because she knew everything we know now — in the 70’s. She had statistics (which haven’t changed), questionnaires, testimonies. She wrote plainly and directly, no sugar-coating. She understood and distributed leaflets about how to keep safe. She understood manipulation, coercion, and taboo. She shouted about it all — but to what end? I am heartbroken by how painful this must have been for her.

  • I cried the hardest because: in the 70’s and 80’s I knew very little about sexual abuse. I had no words for what was happening/had happened to me. I thought I was the only one. I was terrified and ashamed. All I knew was that I hated it. Sitting in the archives with her vast materials, I just kept thinking if only I’d known, if only someone had said something to me, if only I’d seen a leaflet, if only I’d had someone to turn to.

And now I say: if only any of her work (and the work of many others) had been acted upon, think how many potential victims might have been saved.

***

Basically, the project above is about developing a way to archive survivor activist materials — to record past activisms, make connections, and to build upon it all going forward. So we know who has come before us, so we can consolidate their work, honour them, and effect change — rather than what we too often do now: seemingly invent the wheel era after era, and risk getting precisely nowhere therefore.

Do I think the global Epstein ‘scandal’ will lead to change? Will society begin to understand that the root of abuse is power? Will we stop blaming victims? Will we believe them? Will we change what constitutes ‘evidence’ in cases of CSA and SA? Will we acknowledge the sheer prevalence of CSA? Will we open our ears and eyes? Will we help the children — and succeed in imprisoning more than the current 2% of men and women who perpetrate abuse?

We have SUCH a very long way to go. The materials I poured through this week turned me inside out. She fought with all she had — and over 40 years later, devastatingly, almost nothing has changed.

We have to do better. We have to do better for not only the millions upon millions of survivors of CSA, but for the millions upon millions of potential victims of CSA.

So please don’t stop talking about CSA, now that the ball is truly rolling. Please be an ally. Please don’t turn away. Please accept that children are being abused all around you: that is, at least 1 in 6, 15% of the population. These are FACTS, as difficult as they are to accept.

Please raise your voices. Please commit to advocating for cultural and social change at the deepest levels. Otherwise — I’m pretty sure that everything will die down, and continue as it was. It’s the path of least resistance after all, and I have witnessed now how easily so much can be lost.

So please: let’s be the change. We need every one of you.

where so many of us are right now

But we can do this.

More soon.

Hold tight.

anger

Safe to say it’s been a grim few days, on top of already grim days, on top of a hard year.

I was raised never to be angry. Never to disrupt. Never to raise a fuss. For abuse victim survivors of any sort, anger can bring with it a variety of outcomes, all bad: more abuse perhaps, to ‘put you in your place’; more attention, which may draw eyes to the abuse, which in turn will definitely destabilise your life — and make everything worse. This repression of anger is familial, environmentally necessary. It kept my father from flying off the handle, from making everyone suffer.

But it’s also often cultural: be reasonable. Somehow this has become the reigning metric of so many of our lives. And it has its roots in the primacy of logic. We are encouraged to stand back, to be ‘objective’.

Of course this whole ‘reasonable’ approach has the effect of removing us from our emotional selves. It downplays our emotions, our views, and ultimately is a form of gaslighting: you don’t really feel this, how could you think/feel this, and finally, you’ve got it all wrong.

Case in point: the last time I spoke to my father, in 1987, it was on the phone. I was shaking with fear and anger, struggling to hold the earpiece to my ear. I said that I wanted him to accept responsibility for what he had done to me, that it was sexual abuse. His response was to laugh, and say I’d been reading too many magazines. I then said that unless he did as I asked, he would never see any future children I might have. He laughed again.

***

In fact: he never did see my children. In that moment, that last conversation with him, I somehow managed to hold onto the importance of what I felt, of right and wrong. I somehow, and possibly for the first time, managed to speak to him, however terrifyingly hard it was — and it was — with my whole self.

This won’t be the only post I do about our whole selves, and what this means to me.

For now though I’ll say that I’ve got better at anger. I’ve got better at not always having logical reasons, at not having to explain every last thing — at just feeling something. Feeling something is not in itself threatening, not in itself dangerous.

So what do we do now with these equal measures of anger and despair? When it sometimes seems that any full-throated reaction is ‘too emotional’, ‘too political’, ‘too extreme’?

Sunday January 25th, the day after Alex Pretti’s death, I felt, like a lot of people, incandescent with rage. And grief. All day. And I couldn’t see how I was going to get out of it. Would I just have to get used to this hopelessness — would we all?

At the end of the day I had a text conversation with family. All of us are distressed. We all have loved ones in the US; we all care.

I said that I was so angry, didn’t know what to do with myself. Our younger son M wrote:

…you can have a day of being furious

…but the goal is not to trick yourself into thinking

you’re fighting BY getting angry.

In other words: anger is the justified by-product. Of grief, of horror, of despair.

But it’s not, in itself, The Fight. In itself, anger does not do any useful battle.

How do we ‘fight’ then? How do we make sure we are heard? How do we make a difference?

We are heard by being whatever loud means to us — through the written or spoken word, through image, through music — in our houses, on the streets, on the phone. By breaking barriers, pushing through the societal and familial boundaries we have been hesitant to question before now.

It is very much time to ask questions and demand answers, and to keep doing it, to press and press at it all. I think we know this. It’s time to stand together. To break all the silences which form the hierarchies which control our lives — the ‘families’ if you will, which declare how we should act and what we should say.

Nope. No more. It’s time.

I’m so grateful to son M for giving me some clarity through my overwhelming feelings. And yeah: I’m extremely proud to have played a part in raising him.

are we finally at #metooCSA?

So. I spent the first nine months of 2025 feeling pretty freaked out: everything seemed worse, and likely to keep getting worse. Pillars of what most people in the world have taken to be truths and even basic human rights crumbled and continued to crumble. I for one felt that the ground I had stood on my whole life was shifting, inexorably. And I know I wasn’t the only one. I know so many felt this and continue to feel it. Unfortunately, this hasn’t changed yet in any real way.

As I mentioned in my last post, the overriding feeling for me through this became the one I dread possibly the most: we were being silenced. At every turn.

Then came the US government shutdown and the Epstein files saga. And I started to notice: wait, survivors are standing up together. With allies. At least some people are starting to build some momentum.

And then, Virginia Giuffre’s powerful memoir, Nobody’s Girl. It was being read — albeit with a kind of horror still — but it was being read. Not everyone was turning away. It was not ‘niche’ reading. It was not in a bubble. It was mainstream.

Guiffre’s experiences in her childhood home and beyond have the exact shape and tone — down to what is said, the manipulation, the physical responses of her abusers — of not only my own experiences as a victim survivor, but the experiences of every survivor I have spoken to about it.

But she then goes on. She places the abuses in the context of our cultures and our societies. She makes clear that she was not the exception. That child sexual abuse is endemic. And that it’s all about power. Many — across mainstream media, and certainly across socials — sat up and took notice in ways I’ve not seen before.

If you haven’t read the book — read it. It may be triggering for some of you, so take care. And some of you will find it very upsetting. What I would say to that is: welcome to our world. Survivors carry aspects of her story — as she did — every day, day in, day out. We don’t have the luxury of ‘not engaging’ with abuse. We have lived it, and it will never go away.

I’m just stating facts.

***

It’s tempting to turn away from activism — whether quiet or loud — because more often than not it meets with disbelief, horror, embarrassment, or dismissal.

And yet, somehow this latest series of events hasn’t skidded to a stop at a dead end. Somehow a ball is still rolling.

In 2017, the #metoo movement went viral. Begun by a survivor of child sexual abuse, Tarana Burke several years before, it gathered sexual violence as a whole under its umbrella. Various offshoots developed, including #metooinceste, which started in France.

However. From my and other CSA survivors’ I know points of view — we never really felt heard with #metoo. Like so many, I have been sexually assaulted as an adult, and I felt #metoo supported these disclosures. But despite the origins of the phrase, I never felt that it could hold Child Sexual Abuse, or CSA. The viral wave swept it elsewhere. Soon, any hint of #metoo in relation to CSA simply disappeared.

Something is happening now though. Does anyone else feel it? NOT just around Epstein and his cronies (including we know who). But around the whole space of CSA. In the last six weeks or so, my Threads and Bluesky and even Instagram feeds have been flooded with disclosures, with CSA survivors who have never before gone public about the abuse they suffered — now feeling safe to disclose, or that it’s necessary to disclose, or that they know it’s time to disclose, to connect some dots, to be here in solidarity. And the vast majority of these disclosures identify family and family friends as perpetrators. Unsurprisingly.

One way or another I’ve been working in this space for about six years. And almost the whole time, I have felt that my words, my experiences, my desire to connect and amplify — to make a change, somehow — have had almost no impact beyond the (beautiful!) survivor activism community. My greatest frustration — the thing which has done me in time and time again over the years — has been the sense that we are not being heard. That no one is really — really — listening.

I feel a shift now, though. A lasting shift, I hope. A solidarity across ‘types’ of sexual abuse is coming to the fore, a space for all survivor stories and testimonies. As are vocal allies, who are saying over and over, in public and on socials: ‘listen to survivors’, ‘believe the survivors’. I am sensing that there is a gathering together of activists, survivors, and allies into what we have long been working for: a survivor-led #metooCSA movement. We are gaining critical mass — for our voices, and for change.

Thank you always Tarana Burke, for your courage, and your words.

A Year Later: starting 2026

[image from Juneau Empire]

I have been writing and re-writing this post in my head for months.

What happened? I considered this for weeks.

What I did not want to admit (to myself, or anyone) was how completely shaken I was by the re-election of an abuser to the White House. His re-emergence, followed by lawless action after lawless action, rendered me almost paralysed.

What is the point of working away in my small corner of the fight against Violence Against Women and Girls, when the whole world order has turned justice on its head?

More pointedly: every survivor I know hears an abuser in his voice. An abuser, and a bully. We have all known this since at least 2015. We all recognise it. And for the last 10 years, we have not been heard. And as we all know: when we talk and no one hears, we are silenced, again.

It took me several months to realise that I was simultaneously triggered and silenced by happenings in the US. Again and again I felt that any voice I had ever had was useless. I see now that I have spent the last year being re-traumatised, over and over.

The reality is: the country where I grew up is being dismantled. The values I thought we all shared (more or less) have evaporated. Any ‘noise’ I might be able to make surely disappears into thin air.

I remain pessimistic when it comes to the US managing to take care of its people. This feels a very long way from achievable at the moment.

However. In the last few months, the plight of the Epstein survivors, and the involvement of men and women who occupy the most wealthy and powerful positions in the world in their trafficking — have crashed my worlds together.

Thing is: we are all the same. As survivors, we are all the same. Whatever our backgrounds, whomever our abusers. Whether ‘it’ happens once, or repeatedly over years and years or perpetrator after perpetrator: we must join forces. Our homes (or lack thereof) made us vulnerable to sexual abuse; in this, we are a community.

We must not allow the isolation that inevitably accompanies our abuse to silence us. We must not consider some peoples’ experiences of abuse more harmful or ‘worse’ than others. We must understand that we are in this together, all of us.

Only then will we be able build upon the voices and experiences of survivors toward real cultural and social change: toward accountability, restitution, prevention.

I come to this post today through partially gritted teeth. I’m not sure if any of this will do any ‘good’. But I can’t not try. The last year has shown this to me in technicolour: I have to keep trying. I have to. The one thing I know is that I would do anything to save a child from going through what one in six of us goes through, worldwide. To that end, I have managed to keep going with a couple of projects, quietly, which will soon come to a kind of fruition. But I know I need to use my voice too, publicly. It’s so important that we do this if we can. And I can.

So here I am. More soon.

this time of year

For as long as I can remember, the holiday season has too often brought with it a pervasive melancholy. When I was little — before going to live with my father at age six — Christmas could feel uncomfortable for me: as the only grandchild for a long time, all eyes were on me, wherever I celebrated. There are numerous photos of me in front of my grandparents’ white artificial tree, this last one when I am six years old, back in Texas for Christmas, two months after moving to Virginia.

Thereafter, Christmas becomes outright fraught. With my sister and brother and stepmother and father, the dynamics intensify. I am aware of being ‘the stranger’ in the celebrations, and I remember one particular photo of my stepmother cuddling my brother and sister on the sofa to one side, while I stand in front of the tree, my tightly clasped hands behind my back reflected in the mirror behind me. Just thinking about it breaks my grown-up heart.

I have been reading The Child Safeguarding Review Panel – I wanted them all to notice over the last couple of weeks. This UK report came out in November (2024), and focuses exclusively on Child Sexual Abuse within the family. It’s a depressing read in almost every way: what is missed, who isn’t believed and why, the devastating lack of resources for abused children and families, the over-reliance on ‘evidence’ and on the children themselves disclosing. However, a couple of aspects have struck me with force: first, that so often neglect is a hallmark of an abusive environment. If a child is not neglected, if a child is being cared for, watched out for — sexual abuse is much less likely to occur.

I was emotionally neglected throughout much of my childhood, and when I was living with my mother, physically neglected as well. Despite growing up in a firmly middle-class household, it’s clear that some basic needs weren’t met. This in turn contributed to making me vulnerable; I welcomed any attention I could get from my family, specifically my father. I now see that he groomed me by showing me attention, and then manipulated this into sexual abuse.

Pretence is another common denominator in abusive households. In my life, these layers of everything having to appear ‘fine’ and ‘happy’ seemed to triple at Christmas. We often went to family in Alabama, Florida, or Texas for a week over the holidays. The strain of having to appear ‘just fine’ cast a long shadow every year. The sheer irony of opening presents, having to ‘be a child’ amongst other children haunted me from the moment my father started abusing me. I wasn’t like other children — and I knew it. My childhood was irretrievable. I knew this too.

At Christmas, I often felt trapped. The family was forced into close proximity. I had no friends nearby, nowhere to go, nothing (except reading) to distract me. And I absolutely dreaded nighttimes. I was utterly terrified that my father would come into the room I was inevitably sharing with my siblings or with cousins — he’d done so before — and that then they would ‘find out’ what was happening.

The awful thing here is: I really felt it was my responsibility to keep up family appearances. It was my job to be careful, to make sure no one found out, because otherwise…..otherwise what? All these decades later the only answer I have is that if anyone found out they would simply hate me. Hate me for ruining their lives. Blame me for everything going ‘wrong’.

I am lucky now to have my own healthy family, my separate family traditions — which I created alongside my husband and children and extended family. I am lucky that I no longer feel in danger, or have to pretend for days at a time. I cannot and will not pretend about anything anymore.

So. Please remember that at this time of year there are children for whom Christmas is an ordeal. There are children who have to work extra hard to maintain the pretence, or who are afraid in their beds at night — doubly so, because there is nowhere else to go. Some children — like me — are happier at school, or at friends’ houses. For some children being with family is the last place they would choose to be.

Please remember too that as upsetting as it is to grasp: all of us — you, and you, and you — will know people who are perpetrating sexual abuse. At least 10% of the population is sexually abused before the age of 16. The vast majority of this abuse is perpetrated by family men. They do not appear to be ‘monsters’. They do not appear to be ‘sick’ or ‘unusual’. They make sure that they cultivate looking like a ‘normal’ family. Yet they commit abhorrent crimes. These are the facts.

Due to Gisele Pelicot’s courage, over 50 families (who no doubt consider themselves ‘normal’) must come face to face this Christmas with what lies beneath the surface of their ‘ordinary’ lives. It’s the tip of a huge iceberg, the excavation of which is long overdue. These families are not the exceptions — they are in fact now experiencing what is for large portions of society the hidden norm. Although the road ahead is long and distressing, I join with so many in hoping that this uncovering now has some momentum. Children — and victim survivor women and men — deserve a life free from shame and blame. Shame Must Change Sides.