A girl who disappeared from a Co Westmeath school in 1971, aged 11, spent most of the next five years confined in a room of her home and in a cowshed and was raped by her brothers, she has told The Irish Times.
School registers confirm her story that she was taken out of school under false pretences.
Her allegations have been the subject of a Garda investigation which lasted for more than two years. A file was sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions, but she says gardai have recently informed her that the DPP does not intend to bring charges due to the lapse of time.
Although the girl was removed from a national school when she was in third class, no attempt was made at the time to establish what had happened to her.
The school accepted her mother's word that she had been sent to another named school. However, a recent Garda investigation has established that she never appeared at that school.
The woman says that during her incarceration she was raped by her brothers when her mother was absent. She also claims that her mother threatened to hang her on several occasions.
Asked about the case, the Department of Education and Science, with which the woman's legal representatives have been in contact, said that in most counties concerns about attendance at school could only be followed up if they were raised with the Garda, as most parts of the State did not have school attendance officers.
Legislation currently going through the Oireachtas will mean a school will be unable to remove a child from its register until it has been confirmed that he or she has been entered on the register of another school. A spokesman said that the legislation would "hopefully prevent this kind of thing from happening again".
The woman, from a rural family, was not sent to school until she was six years old and was removed after the summer holidays in 1971. A note on the school register states that she had transferred to another named school in the county. The other school has no record of her ever having been there.
She did not make her confirmation until shortly before her marriage in the early 1990s.
The woman says neighbours were told that she had gone to a school in another county. Instead, she was kept in a room in the family home, where her presence was concealed from relatives and neighbours. She was sometimes locked into a cowshed for the day. She was let out of the room to do housework for the family.
During the summers, neighbours were told she was home from school, but she was still largely kept out of sight, working in the fields. She says that her brothers started taking turns to rape her when she was 12 and that this went on until she was 16.
After five years, when the pretence that she was away at school could no longer be kept up, she was released. Shortly afterwards, she went to live with her father, who had left the family home.
She has suffered from depression and pain which she attributes to her experiences as a child.
Her mother and brothers declined to comment on the case.