‘There is life beyond sexual abuse,’ says survivor

Gail, a 38-year-old woman from Northern Ireland and married with two young children, said a key lesson for victims of sexual abuse is that while they can go through hell they can come out the far side. "There is a life beyond abuse," she asserted.

Gail, who asked not to disclose her surname, was a speaker at the Nexus NI conference in Newtownabbey on the outskirts of north Belfast yesterday.

Similar to the rape crisis centres in the South, Nexus, which is 30 years in existence, provides counselling and support to survivors of sexual abuse. Every year in the North it helps some 1,000 victims and survivors, with another 200 or more on its waiting list.

Pam Hunter, chief executive of Nexus, said it was essential there would be no cuts to funding. She provided some statistics to paint a broad picture of sexual abuse in Northern Ireland. "Sixty-eight per cent of clients are abused by somebody they know," she said. "Twenty per cent of our clients are male; the majority of our clients are abused between the ages of five and 10, but don't come to us for support until they are aged between 25 and 49."

Years of abuse

Gail fell into the late-reporting category. She suffered different episodes of abuse between four and 21. “I was abused when I was four by a 21-year-old visiting cousin,” she recalled. “Between the ages of 11 and 14 I was abused by a teacher who was a family friend and also by his father, also a family friend. I think they’d been grooming me from a young age. I was also raped by my boyfriend when I was 14.”

When she was a 21-year-old student at Queen’s a man came into her bedroom and sexually abused her.

“I never spoke about it until I was 27, when I went to my GP,” she added. Gail said that doctor was very helpful but some others in the medical and support services were not.

“For a lot of time I received a lot of judgment, from doctors and professionals. They made me feel as if I was the guilty party.”

Gail said she finally found the support and help she needed through Nexus, and that was when she began to get her life together. She made the personal decision not to go down the legal route. “I chose to put my energy into sorting myself out and my family rather than going through a judicial system that I thought would retraumatise me, and drag my life through the courts.”

Gail said she admired the courage of Maíria Cahill to speak about her abuse.

She wasn't hugely surprised by this week's BBC Spotlight about Northern Ireland schoolgirls having their photographs, innocently taken, loaded on to a pornographic site. "Those girls are as vulnerable as anybody that uses the internet."