writing – PATRICIA DEBNEY

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.*

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.

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.

we’re here, folks, in droves

It’s been a week. My head has been down, to the grindstone. I’ve watched the Maxwell trial spin by. Relief has been followed by distress, and the too-familiar feeling of loss of control: a juror was abused. He helped others to understand the elements of abuse. Along the way another juror realised they’d most likely suffered child sexual abuse as well. All is up in the air.

What does this tell us? For those of us in the Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) world, it reinforces a few hard facts, all of which we know, all too intimately:

CSA is very common. In the UK, the NSPCC can be sure that 1 in 20 children is sexually abused. In the US, the CDC splits this figure by gender: 1 in 4 girls, 1 in 13 boys. These are the surveyed and reported stats.
There is also the hard fact that a third of those abused NEVER disclose or report it. So we can be sure that the figure is higher than either the NSPCC or CDC can report in good faith.
No one likes to think that the person next to them has been a victim of child abuse. See number 1. No choice, folks.
No one likes to think that there’s a chance that the crimes being tried were experienced on some level by a member of the jury. See number 1. No choice, folks.
Nor that anyone in any context knows or has contact with anyone who was sexually abused as a child. See number 1. You, and everyone, are bound to know numerous people who have been abused. No choice, folks.

Here is the thing. As late as 1974, Child Sexual Abuse was considered extremely rare. 1 in 1 million people. My lord. Society and culture could then (incorrectly) be supported by medics’ and lawyers’ claims that CSA is virtually unknown. From there, silences, denials, dismissiveness, deflections…all of that seemed fair enough. Nothing to do with Us. What happens to those children, and those people, is not Us. What happens is strange. Perverted. Deviant. Not Us.

Yes. I’m not going to argue anything other than CSA is awful. Wrong. Deviant.

But it IS Us. It is an everyday occurrence. It deserves to be part of the conversation, even in trials around…CSA. Because who would think of having no differently abled people on a jury in a trial about discrimination against disabled folks? Who would think about requiring there be no people of colour on a jury in a trial which involved a person of colour?

CSA — for this era, and regrettably — is part of the conversation. Part of our lives. Part of your life. We have a voice. We have logic and reason. We can make a judgement. We can hear things out, and weigh things up. But we won’t disregard our abuse.

Juries represent and reflect the Human Experience. Of course the process and the questionnaire all need examining. But let’s not jump to conclusions and state that people who have been abused cannot be part of a jury which must come to a decision about abuse. It’s not gonna happen. And it’s not right if it does.

We all long for CSA never to happen again. But we are nowhere near that yet. As the Maxwell trial, and so much else, amply prove.

[photo: me at age 15, taken by school friend David Larsen. My father was still abusing me.]

from my memoir Learning to Survive, about how very badly we can be betrayed by those who in theory are supposed to protect us, and by an unenforceable law:

Therapy

The spring of my junior year at Blacksburg High School is a particularly gruelling time.

The nerves I see in my father’s eyes become something else, and he appears to take action. He tells me that [my stepmother] ‘knows about us’ and ‘about Suzanne’, giving the impression that he has had to tell her, for my own good. He locates a therapy practice about 15 miles away in Radford which he deems suitable. We are at first booked into a group session; then I start my own sessions, and [my stepmother] and my father start marriage counselling.

This all seems to happen within a couple of weeks. [My stepmother] does not speak to me about what she knows. I do not remember her asking any questions, or expressing any concern. We go back and forth to therapy together, and do not discuss anything said within those walls. From journals of the time, I know that I am deeply, deeply confused and unhappy. About everything. I love Suzanne, but I also like boys. I hate men. I want my father out of my life. And I am utterly miserable.

Things that emerge from therapy:

Every Rorschach ink blot terrifies me. Every single one looks sexual. Looks creepy. Looks scary. Has monsters. I feel I am losing some battle if I admit how terrified they make me feel. I am 17. I lie about all of them, although there is only my therapist and me in the room.

My father requests that I no longer call him ‘Daddy’. You need to grow up, he says, and I need to move on.

Suzanne is a bad influence. I am no longer allowed to see her, at least for a little while.

None of this can be mentioned to [my siblings].

Things that do not happen from therapy:

My father is not reported.

It takes me a long time to accept – years, and many therapists later – that in this, my first encounter with therapy, I am fundamentally betrayed: my father does not take responsibility for his actions, and, as it turns out, never does, as if that one chance missed lets him off scot-free. As a consequence I am not protected, and nor, for that matter, is [my sister], who is 13 at the time. As a consequence I am completely flattened. If [my stepmother] in theory ‘knows’ now, if the therapists ‘know’, why does everything not fall apart? Is the abuse, after all, okay?

My own unproven and unsubstantiated theory is that my father probably locates this practice precisely because he feels he can influence its members. After all, he has been able to manage every aspect of the story so far. He prevents any explosion, or any impact on any other part of our lives. We carry on. I speak of the abuse – lightly – in therapy, almost paralysed with dread. But it is not discussed much. Of more importance it seems is my relationship with Suzanne: is it real, am I really gay? The therapist seems fixated upon how I become involved with Suzanne, and I do not recall a single direct conversation about the abuse. I wonder if, after all that, she ever really believes me.

I know now that my father almost certainly mis-directed and orchestrated the whole thing, such that [my stepmother] and I never have an honest conversation, and most vitally, [my siblings] are told nothing. I know now too that the therapists at the practice actually break the law: in 1981 in Virginia, therapists are legally obliged to report sexual abuse to the Child Protective Services — which these don’t, because I am never interviewed, and anyway, nothing changes. I know now that this requirement to report to services is in place precisely because perpetrators are generally expert manipulators, and otherwise control the dynamics. Which is precisely what my father does.

even the ‘good’ goes away

For many years I tried to ‘reconcile’ the parts of my father who was my abuser with the parts that weren’t. I tried to hold onto the ‘good’ parts. I tried to look past the ‘bad’. Because without doubt, he had much to offer to the world.

Like probably all survivors of sexual abuse, I am hugely relieved to hear of Ghislaine Maxwell’s conviction for sex trafficking girls. Regardless of her no doubt manifold ‘good’ qualities, her ‘bad’ qualities, her crimes, have taken priority. She has been held accountable.

Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) can ruin victims’ lives. Sexual abuse is an extraordinarily damaging crime. Its effects bleed into everything. There is no way to look past it, either in your life or in the life of someone you love. The blame lies squarely with the perpetrator, and absolutely nowhere else. Sexual abuse is so heinous that it negates whatever else a perpetrator might have done in their lives. This may feel ‘unfair’ or ‘out of proportion’ to those who love or respect the perpetrators. But dealing with being a victim of sexual abuse is a lifelong sentence. Being sexually abused doesn’t ‘clear up’. It is never ‘out of sight’. There are ways to tackle its effects which are helpful, and which develop good tools for living. But trauma changes the wiring in the body; it changes us physiologically. As survivors, we are forever altered.

Perpetrators’ lives — no matter how much ‘good’ they do in the world — deserve likewise to be forever changed. The decisions they made, and the damage from them, are irreparable.

From Learning to Survive, writing about the loss of anything good to do with my father.

***

Good Things

After the age of about 11, I cannot remember a single decent time with him. That is, one that isn’t inflected with fear, or repulsion, wondering what his next move will be. Wondering how he will use any moment to bring me closer to him, to be with him, later. As I look back, I think I may experience some moments of joy, in theory – like listening to music with him, peering through a telescope, arriving at the correct answer to a maths problem together – but none of them exist separately for long. I cannot tease them apart from everything else; I cannot make them stand up strong. They are never far from everything else I want to forget. They become meaningless.

So I forget them all. I forget any possibility of good in him, and it never comes back. That room, like so many, is entirely empty.

[photo Martin Muir]

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