Testimonials: They experienced sexual abuse during their childhood

Audrey, 34 years old, three children, 9 years old, 6 years old and 3 years old: “It was my children who helped me to heal”

“Julie, tell me that nothing happened to you?” He never tried anything with you? When I asked this question to my friend who worked with me in an equestrian center, and she started to cry, I understood that she had gone through the same hell. I’m 34 years old. She’s ten years younger than me. Jwas raped by this trainer whom I trusted completely. Julie suffered touching, advances, caresses, from the same trainer. This is where I made the decision to file a complaint to get rid of a hold that had lasted all my life.

A relationship of control

I had met this trainer when I was 9 years old and dreamed of competing. He was 60 at the time and he was very well known in the equestrian world. My parents were very proud, because with him, I had a series of victories: eleven times champion of France, I also competed in the European and World Championships, where I finished 58th out of more than 900 candidates. He meant everything to me. He would congratulate me, send me sweet little words on my very first phone, and when I wasn’t good at competing, he would go into black anger that terrified me. He had such a hold that I listened to everything he said to me and I was training until exhaustion.

This is where he started his touching, presenting it to me as normal… it was then the start of a great nightmare. After that, I tried to escape him in various ways, pretending to be asleep for example, but then he would get so angry that it was best to give in to him. He also blackmailed me “à la Calimero”, to manipulate me and so that I reassure him by telling him that I would always love him.

I made my future husband swear not to talk about it

I tried to talk to my parents about it when I was 19, but it was difficult. Until that age, this trainer managed to keep all possible boyfriends away by creating a vacuum around me. At university, I had the chance to meet my husband who was finishing his training as a police officer. I told him everything, and I made him swear not to talk about it, because I was afraid of losing my horses. I then managed to buy them back by setting up my own equestrian center. After two years, we decided to have a child. The pregnancy came quickly, but at that point I felt the need to see a psychologist. The shrink helped me realize the hold this man had had on my life. The delivery ended with a cesarean section because the cervix did not open (which is common in victims of sexual violence). Driven by my desire to prove to my coach that I could be a mother and a competitor, I returned to competition soon after, won the title, but reopened my scar. I realized afterwards that I could have died of an eventration.

My daughter brought back my past

And it wasn’t until I had a third child, a little girl, that my past resurfaced. I needed to overprotect her. I saw myself in her. I didn’t let anyone keep her other than my mother or my husband. Even now, while legal proceedings are underway, I don’t want to talk about it in front of my children to preserve them. I also forbid them to go to a colony or simply to sleep with friends. If they play sports, my husband or I, we stay during the whole session. I became a wolf mother. I know that many victims of sexual assault find it difficult to be in a relationship or to get pregnant. It is terrible. Me, it is my children who helped me to heal. “

Céline, 43 years old, two children, 16 and 13 years old: “When my children were of the age of my assault, I collapsed. “

“I had my first child at 27 years old. When my eldest daughter was 9 years old, I had a big slump: overnight, I began to have long insomnia, with the inability to get up, go to work, go shopping or to eat. I am a kindergarten teacher. I was arrested for two months. It was my “first” depression, in any case the first really identified. I went up the slope and went back to work, after trying to find a way out with alternative medicine and the help of a psychologist. Then when my son was 9, again, I collapsed. It was then that I met a psychiatrist, whom I trusted, and who prescribed me antidepressants. With her, I started therapy. We then made the link with this sexual abuse of which I had been the victim in childhood. I couldn’t say exactly how old, but I was between 6 and 10 years old.

Sadistic and manipulative

On the other hand, I remember my attacker very well. He was my nanny’s eldest son. He must have been 16 and I was 5, anyway, when I started being babysat. I remember him as a sadistic and manipulative person. He was blackmailing me or playing tricks on me.

He had found my loophole: if I wanted to be able to play with his dog, I had to accompany him to his room, and especially not to say anything to anyone. There, he would lay me down on the floor, ask me to undress and touch me. I can’t define how often it happened, but I clearly remember saying to myself: “Oh no, not yet”Each time, and to be deeply disgusted. I only told my parents about it last year, one day when I was on the phone with my mom. My daughter’s private math teacher had just been suspected of raping a minor. I immediately questioned my daughter to make sure she hadn’t suffered anything. And it was while talking about all this with my mother that I told her that I too was a victim of sexual assault. I know that for my parents it was a big blow.

“I minimized the aggression”

Looking back, I understand that for years I played down what had happened. To protect myself, certainly, in adolescence, I even joked about it with my friends or my girlfriends. I only became aware of the seriousness of this abuse very recently, following my therapy. I also realized how deeply it had marked my life as a woman and as a mother. For example, not having the reflex to protect myself, I had a tendency to “let myself be assaulted”, in the broad sense of the term, not especially sexually. I have often said “better to be attacked than aggressor”.

Also, during the birth of my children, and despite enormous contractions, my cervix did not open or with great difficulty. The first delivery was very long, and the second ended in an emergency cesarean. I have always chosen women for gynecological examinations. On the other hand, I have never been overprotective towards my children. I easily let them go to sleep with their friends, and I never worried them too much. But I think there was an element of denial (too), as if I didn’t realize that I had to protect them from this danger.

Does he remember me?

Today, since I have been able to protect the little girl that I was, I can talk to them about it, and I know exactly how to protect them from any form of aggression. I still have a question about this man, who used me as if I were a simple sexual object. Does he remember it? How does he see it now that he’s an adult? Is he aware of the harm he has done to this little girl and (suddenly) to the woman I have become? “

Stéphane, 49, father of an 8-year-old girl: “I can’t say ‘stepfather’. He was just a bad guy. “

“I didn’t want children. For years I have said it. I got married young, at 24, to a woman I had met when I was 17. His family had totally adopted me, I loved his parents, who brought me a lot in my life. I was a photographer, a trader, living in a small town. And then, around 27, when my partner wanted a child, I fell into alcoholism. I was having enormous anger, I was going crazy for nothing. I started therapy, but I couldn’t talk about what had shattered my childhood at that time.

I divorced, started to demolish what I had built and… me with it. And I ended up telling my brothers and my mother what had happened to me. His answer was fatal: for my mother, there was no point in “stirring up the shit from the past”! I threw away the keys to my store, abandoned all addresses, my life… with a new woman who offered me a different life, far from them! For fifteen years, I fled my past. In summer, I would come back to Europe to do festivals, in winter, I would go to Asia. These years of travel allowed me to rebuild myself… without ever really asking myself the question of paternity, except that the years passed and that one day… my partner got pregnant. I was happy and scared. I said to him: promise me one thing if we keep this child, it is not to abandon me.

“I was more and more tense”

To prepare for the baby’s arrival, we decided to settle in the South. She wanted to give birth at home, but on D-Day, it didn’t turn out the way we wanted. The baby was not coming out. We went to the hospital. They decided to have a cesarean and left me alone in a hallway. I was crying in terror, I was sure I would lose my companion. Finally, the obstetrician released the baby vaginally, but I was not allowed to be there. When we got home, we had no close family to accompany us.

My partner was not doing very well at first, and I took on a job, the baby… I was more and more anxious and tense. We started arguing more and more often and I went into a spin. The arrival of my daughter made everything go back up. I became hyper violent, I broke everything, I said horrible things to my partner. I was talking to myself, I was getting paranoid. I ended up leaving them, seeing that I did not get out of this whirlwind of madness and the damage I was doing.

“Tell my daughter hell”

I had started therapy before I separated, which lasted over four years. I felt confident enough and was able to tell it all. From when I was 6 to 13, I had been raped by my mother’s partner. She had joined him shortly after my father’s suicide. I have three older brothers, and I later learned that he had tried with each of us, and also managed to abuse the one right above me. On a daily basis, he made us live a psychological hell. He devalued us and terrified me. He had used the need for love I was looking for to rape me. He wasn’t a stepfather, I hate that word. He was just a bad guy. Today my daughter is 8 years old. I am installed near where she lives with her mother. His mother has a new companion, whom I trust 100%. We have shared custody. And I’m doing fine. My mother died without seeing me again. She knew the truth because I had written to her, but she could not protect us because this monster was also abusing her psychologically and physically. At the moment, my daughter does not know my story. I know we’ll have to tell him someday. All I’m doing for now is telling him that his body belongs to him, that no one has any rights over it. “

Halya, mother of a 4 year old girl: “When I was 5, when my grandfather died, I said: ‘well done’. “

“I do not testify with my face uncovered because in the family I have left, no one is aware of the incest I suffered from my grandfather, a former soldier, despotic patriarch, that I didn’t like… and my father. I want to protect my family. My parents separated when my mother was pregnant. I used to go to my father’s house every other weekend. He was a hypersensitive and completely out of line man. It was he who was the first to touch me when I was 3, maybe 3 and a half years old. Around the same time I think, even if it remains very vague in my memory, his father, my grandfather therefore, did the same thing, but in addition asking me to touch him. I was never able to talk about it, because my mother, a psychiatric nurse, was in total denial. I grew up somehow with this double abuse. They stopped for one when my grandfather died when I was 5 years old. I remember I said to my mother: “Well done for him”. She didn’t try to find out more. My father’s assaults stopped around the fifth grade.

A desire for a late child

I tried once, when I was around 14, to talk to my mother about it. We had just found my father unconscious at home, he had had a stroke. During his hospitalization, my mother, while cleaning her house, came across signs that should have alerted her, lots of porn and a sex photo album of my dad with his then friend, which also had pictures of me. She winced and asked if this friend had touched me. I said “no”… but I felt I couldn’t go any further. In fact, she preferred me to lie, so I lied a lot, from my teenage years to adulthood.

“I told whoever wanted to hear it that I would never have children”

I entered therapy when I was 16 until I was 20, then I followed other short therapies. I became an actress and had a lot of great roles. I told whoever wanted to hear it that I would never have children, because I had too many pans, too many problems to deal with. Then my two parents died, eleven months apart.

I wanted to leave the theater, and I was prevented from expressing my ill-being. I then made a suicide attempt which was a cry for help. It was after therapy with a psychiatrist that I came back up. Then I found a love of youth, the only man in whom I trusted and whom I saw to be the future father of my children. I also changed my professional path and trained in massage.

“I know I have to tell my daughter about it”

At 33, when I had my daughter, I had flashes again, like at the beginning of my sex life. It happened when I saw her naked. Fortunately, I was familiar with these psychic mechanisms, so I was just waiting for it to pass. When we separated by mutual agreement with the dad, I started to worry when she slept with her parents. I think I am one of the mothers who has told their child the most that their body is theirs and that no one should touch it. Today she is 4 years old. I know I’m going to have to take a new step: tell her my story. Because the problem with incest is not just the act. We always recover from an assault. But the worst is the silence imposed on the victims, which rots everything, and in particular the following generations. I haven’t had the courage to do it yet, but I know that my daughter will help me too, so it will be soon, even if it means having me help to tell her my story, which is also hers. “