My story.

I was 12 and only just starting high school, he was 23 and at university training to be a primary school teacher.

He taught gymnastics at a summer camp that I had been to ever since I was a little girl, so I had known him for years.

His mum, the school nurse at my school, the women who hugged me when I cried because a tennis ball had hit me in the head.

Once he had chosen me there was nothing else I could do, I was his and not even a “no” could stop it.

I was young, naive, and honestly flattered by the attention at first, but quickly that stopped as he ripped by childhood innocence from me and replaced it with a numb feeling of disgust.

He text me, called me, stalked me, every single day for months.

The messages consisted of lines and lines of how he was going to have sex with me, a little girl, or how he was going to kidnap me when I was walking home from school one day.

At summer camp he would tell me to stay behind after every lesson, but I was strong and left, and I know to this day if I had stayed I wouldn’t have been as lucky as I was.

His hands would wander over my body but he would tell me “it’s fine, we’re friends aren’t we?”.

He stopped me talking to my friends, boys and girls, and demanded I speak to him all night because I wouldn’t want my parents finding out, would I?

But they did.

They called NSPCC and the police so when I came home from school one day my house looked like a crime scene, littered with police officers and child protection services.

I had to make statements and go to interviews, but not at the police station, at a children’s hospital, because I was too young and too vulnerable to go to the real interview room.

“She was almost 16” “He didn’t touch her” “She never asked him to stop” the words that still haunt me to this day which I heard in a court room.

Nearly 16? 12. I was 12 years old, not even a teenager yet, but that didn’t matter because I’m 4 years it would’ve been okay?

He was spared prison, merely because “I doubt he’d do it again”

But why did it have to happen again for it to matter? Why did I not matter?

My mum wouldn’t let this happened, and appealed the sentence and won. 3 1/2 years in prison. On the sex offenders for life. Taken off his university course. Given a restraining order. But still I heard, “this has ruined my sons life”.

What about mine.

I was put into a psychiatric hospital because I tried to kill myself because I thought it was my fault and I couldn’t live with the fact that I ruined his life. Me. I ruined his life.

Now I’m 18.

I’m the one going to study primary education at university in September.

I’ve found my smile again.

But most importantly I’ve realised that this abuse was never my fault. I was a child, he was an adult. He knew what he was doing and he went out of his way to do it.

I wanted to share my story to show every women (and man) across the world fighting against sexual abuse that you deserve a voice. You deserve to know that what happened to you was never your fault.

We need to stand strong, stand together, and fight against childhood sexual abuse together. I’m

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