‘Elizabeth’ tells her sad story

Press, 20 June 1984, Page 17

‘Elizabeth’ tells her sad story

The ordeal which blighted "Elizabeth’s” childhood, and from which she may never recover, began when she was 11 years old. She was still a child in physical development, and indeed was still at primary school and enjoyed playing with dolls.

Her father had taken her to the man’s house to visit the family. The two men were friends. She became friendly with the man’s daughter who was about the same age and attended the same school. She was staying the week-end at his house when it first happened. Everyone else was outside in the swimming pool, but she was inside. As she sat on the staircase her friend’s father came down and started touching her and kissing her. The touching was indecent — “mostly around the chest, what there was of it at the time.”

“I was angry,” she says, “but thinking that I shouldn’t be and that perhaps it was all right for him to do that. He’d been so generous and it would have looked rude. I’d stayed there a lot and been included in the family. I crossed by arms and legs and tried to ignore it, and waited for him to go away.”

She cannot remember now whether he said anything at the time.

“After a while he stopped,” she says. “I think he knew I wouldn’t tell because I’d be embarrassed. I didn't tell anyone.”

About a week later she went back to stay again, and he touched her again in the same way. “It progressed to where he would pick me up to go and stay for weekends. I hated going. It was his daughter’s idea. “We’d go back via his office. There’d be a pep talk about how I wouldn’t want to be ignorant when I had my first boyfriend, and I how I owed it to him.

“I would be reluctant to get out of the car, but I would relent because he was generous to me, and I thought I was being rude and puritanical.”

The first time he took her to his office was on a Friday after work. The place was deserted. “I was a bit nervous. He started feeling and kissing me, and reassuring me.” She says he was never violent, but he forced her down on the floor and had intercourse.

She says she hated him for what he did to her, but “I felt it was my fault, and that anyone better would have told him ‘No’ and to go away.” By anyone “better” she explains that she means anyone with more character. Another reason she did not tell anyone was that she felt “dirty.” Now, seven years after the first incident, she feels sure that if she had told her parents he would not have continued. Frequently, he warned her that she would get into trouble if she told, and he would go

to prison. She was taken to stay with the family quite a lot, and each weekend that she stayed the man would take her to his office, unless his daughter, her schoolfriend, insisted on coming along for the ride. Afterwards he would behave as if nothing had happened.

“Sometimes I’d sit in the car stubbornly and not go in,” she recalls. “Other times I’d feel ‘Get it over with’. I hated it.”

Whenever he rang to say his daughter wanted her to come over and stay, she would tell her mother that she did not want to go. But her mother, knowing nothing of what was going on, and suspecting nothing, insisted that she go. “She thought I was being rude.” When she got to high school she saw less of the man’s daughter, and felt less pressure to visit the house. After three years she was 14 and had grown to a size where she also felt more confident about saying no to him.

Once it had stopped she felt it was best to forget it — because it was finished, and because she still did not want to get her father’s friend into trouble.

He persisted, but she rebuffed him. “He said it was good for me, all this petting,” she says, “and that I should sleep with him now that I was bigger. I said that was rubbish and that I didn’t-want to do it. I said he didn’t love me as he claimed.”

She has no evidence that his wife knew what he was up to, but she feels sure that she must have known. The family’s social life centred on the spa pool, in which everyone was naked. She wanted to wear her swimsuit, but “they would laugh and say I was puritanical.” There was a lot of hugging and touching in the pool, she says — “so his wife knew.”

When she was 13, Elizabeth was convinced that the man had made her pregnant and tried to take her own life. “I took an overdose of drugs,” she says, “to sort of destroy the evidence. They just put me to sleep.”

It was not until two or three months ago, when she saw an advertisement about child molestation, that she first told any adult about the man’s interference with her.

“It said that one girl in every five under the age of 15 had been molested,” she says, “and I realised then that it was happening to the other little girls who are running around his place. It hadn’t dawned on me before.”

She particularly suspected that he had interfered with one other girl. “I asked her, and she said ‘Yes.’ I had wondered why she never liked to be alone in the house and I guessed. “I told Mum, sort of hoping that she’d not go to the police. It was a relief to tell someone. She almost

drove off the road — it was bad timing.” She says her mother was never a friend of the man. “She hated him because he was always making passes at her, too,” she says. Her mother consulted a solicitor, and then went to the police. A policewoman took her statement. She feels that the police believed what she told them, but she has learned that they decided there

was not enough evidence to prosecute.

The effect of being molested by her friend’s father — and her father’s friend — throughout three years of her childhood and early adolescence is that she now feels “a general hatred of the male species.” Up to a few months ago, she says, her stepfather was the only man she feels she ever trusted. “But I’ve now started to see that they are not all like—.” She has had some counselling since revealing what had happened to her. She was taken to a psychiatrist, but says she was simply given some anti-depressant pills. She was also taken to the Family Planning Association.

“That was quite good,” she says, “Talking about it put it all in

perspective and they showed me that it happened to others, and that they were prepared to help.” She feels now that the experience blighted her childhood. “It made me more withdrawn, and rather muddled.” She has had no boyfriends — except one, “ages ago, for one day” — and she does not go to dances. She says she feels resentful at not having got to know boys. In the longer term “I think I will be affected by it, but I won’t know till I get a boyfriend. I'm not keen on the idea of marriage.” She is also “untrusting of justice and the way the law can’t really get at him.” She was planning to do a law degree at university, but now she feels it is not worth while. “The law is not what I thought it was. It’s not fair.” Even now, she says, she does not want to see her molester imprisoned. “I want him to be stopped, but not go to jail. Just something that would stop him doing it.” Sometimes Elizabeth accidentally runs into her molester in the supermarket. “When I see him I feel hate for him, but I also feel

sorry for him. I’m surprised that I could so suddenly feel hate.”

Tomorrow: “survivors” unite to help each other; and a Justice Department psychologist explains why some men sexually abuse children.