In 1997 my husband and I were called into the office of a man that my family trusted, he was a well known man in the community and one that many went to for personal advice and counselling. We had no idea what the meeting was about but knew that one of our daughters had been hanging around with kids we felt were a bad influence on her and were concerned. The meeting was about this daughter in question. When we arrived we found that the daughter’s boyfriend was there and also his parents, as was her natural mother. We wondered what the kids had been up to and what was wrong? We were told that our daughter had been sexually abused by her mother’s father and we were stunned and immediately concerned – what can we do to help, how do we handle this situation? Then the bombshell was dropped – the man speaking meant my father, not the other woman’s father. I am her stepmother and my immediate thoughts that she had made up a story to get back at me. We felt the kids she’d been hanging around had serious issues and she’d adopted some of those issues for herself. She’d also been struggling with wanting to go live with her mum rather than her dad and me and we hadn’t wanted to make that decision for her, she’d had to make it herself. She did in the end but after she’d run away a couple of times, tried cutting her wrists, tried setting fires in her bedroom. Unknown to us at the time this was standard behaviour for a sexually abused child but how were we to know? We’d not had any experience of this before in our lives. And we couldn’t understand why her boyfriend and his parents were in the room when this shock announcement was made to us.

We were advised that she was being taken to a counsellor but we were not to ask her any questions for fear of traumatising her, and to leave things alone. I later spoke with a Pastor and his wife in our church relating to them what had been told us and they said that since my father had never done anything like that before, perhaps it was a misunderstanding based on something that had been said to her by some of these kids. We lived with that thought for many years. I also tracked down the counsellor a couple of years later who advised me she couldn’t tell me anything of the sessions because of confidentiality but that she had noted in her files that the ‘body language and what was being said’ didn’t align. Again, I had to content myself with the thought that it was all a mistake and perhaps one day, the truth, and the lies, would come out. It was over 9 years later that we finally did find out the truth and we didn’t like what we heard.

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