Ten reasons I didn't tell I was being abused

83a High Street

HUNTINGDON

Cambridgeshire

PE29 3DP

01480 878409

0800 181 4420

07746 799221

info@pods-online.org.uk

office:

helpline:

text:

email:

Please click the button below to support us when you shop at Amazon:

Please support us via Paypal:

PODS Website

Please support us by searching the web via everyclick:

Ten Reasons I Didn’t Tell

By Carolyn Spring

1. No-one asked.

Maybe if someone had asked me a direct question, I would have given them a direct answer. But no-one ever did. I sidled up to a teacher once in my PE kit and stretched out my hands, but she didn't see. Or at least, she didn't ask. I looked deep into the wonderings of the Avon lady but she never wondered out loud, and never to me. I tried sitting next to my friend's Mum on the coach on the school trip to London, but she only talked about the traffic. It wouldn't have mattered if the Doctor had asked, because my Mum was always sitting right next to me and I could only semaphore nakedly with my eyes. It wasn't worth the risk anyway. Never mind.

2. I didn't know it was happening.

It's difficult to talk about something that you don't know is happening. The day child, the night-time child; the indoor child, the outdoor child; the happy child, the unhappy child. If only they could have met: there would have been so much to say. The necessity of dissociation at the time makes it difficult to communicate apart from the dysfunction of fragmented emotion. My communication with a world that didn't listen was through illness, pain, sleepwalking and the occasional outburst of bizarrely inappropriate behaviour such as chasing down an old couple who got it wrong at a T-junction and nearly pranged me in my mother's car; I didn't understand why I suddenly wanted to kill them for just an innocent mistake, and they certainly didn't. After they pulled in terror into a police station car park to evade me, I returned home hot-faced and confused. I didn't know I was reacting out of transference because I didn't know what had been happening the night before (and I certainly didn't know what transference was).

3. They told me not to tell and I wanted to be good.

It might seem odd to want to be good by not telling, but adults had told me not to tell and being a child I had no rational powers to determine if they could be disobeyed. I wanted to be good. Good in order to be safe – yes; but good to be good. I didn't want to be like them. I wanted to be good. And I had been told not to tell. So telling would have been disobedient, naughty, and bad. And I wasn't going to do that if I could help it.

4. They told me not to tell and said they would kill me if I did.

It might seem reasonable to believe their threat but as adults I suppose we would tend to dismiss it as just that – a threat – and rationalise that a child could know no better than to believe it. But it wasn't just a threat. When you have seen them kill another child your age – perhaps your age, perhaps even younger – you believe them utterly when they say that they will kill you. You believe without questioning that they will know if you gulp too loudly in assembly at school. And you live every day with the knowledge that it will be your turn next and there is no point – ever – in planning too far ahead. Telling would only quicken the suicide.

5. There was no-one to tell.

When you look around the playground, you can't be sure if you have seen those faces elsewhere, in the terror of crackling candle-light; you wouldn't want to tell someone who might tell that you've told. And the adults in your life – the teachers, the nit nurse, the friends of your parents – were they there, are their faces fire-flickering familiar? There was no-one, afterwards, to help clean up the blood; there is certainly no-one – no-one – to tell.

6. I deserved what was happening.

It never occurred to me that this might not be so. It has always happened, as long as memory has stretched backwards; it will always happen, as long as anticipation stretches forward. Its genesis is in my soul-intrinsic evil; good things happen to good girls and there's no experimental parallel universe in which to test out alternative hypotheses: this is reality. Words that form the wallpaper of my mind, whispered or commanded or bellowed by my abusers, tell me it is so, and it is so. I deserve it; I have caused it; I am it.

7. No-one would believe me.

They said no-one would believe me. An itchy cloth against my mouth, eye-stinging smells, rushing head ... I can't remember what happened next, so who will believe me? At school I write stories, paint pictures: fantastical, allegorical, metaphorical, but never (assume the teachers) true. They don't believe I'm not hungry (have another potato), don't believe I don't want to play out (out you go anyway), don't believe I'm feeling poorly (there's nothing wrong with you), so why should they believe about knives and sticks and ropes and ditches and water and dead? Of course it's not true. Those things don't happen to anyone we might know. And certainly not in England.

8. No-one would have done anything about it.

If a group of adults can stand and watch while you are raped and not intervene, what makes you think that anyone else will help? And if, having tried once, maybe twice, to tell one, maybe both, of your parents, and having been shouted at, and smacked, then tortured, for doing so – what makes you think that anyone else will do anything to stop it?

9. I didn't want anyone to know.

I am Bad, Unspeakable, Filthy and Vile. I do things that only adults do, I have murdered, I am shit. I don't want people to hate me. I don't want to go to prison. I don't want to be rejected. I don't want to be so naughty. Why would I want anyone to know about the things that I can't even bear to know myself?

10. I didn't have the words to tell.

Just once or twice I saw some kind eyes, eyes that seemed to lean right into me and offer peace, safety, warmth. And I tried to lean back into them, to tell, to speak, to say. But I didn't have the words. I didn't know what the problem was, I didn't have a lexicon. And back, back in time – reaching through the cot with pleading eyes of terror – I didn't have any words then and I couldn't even point. By the time the first brave crude words started to come, the kind eyes had leaned away and the moment was gone and the moment would not return.