My 16-year-old daughter Lucy was sitting up in her bed, her knees pulled up to her chest as she wailed in distress. I desperately wanted to hold her; to say or do something that would stop her crying and make her feel better. But when I moved towards her, she put up a hand and shook her head.
She looked so wretched and broken that I felt something deep inside of me break too. Quietly, interrupted by sobs, she had told me that the year before she had been raped – by a male friend of the same age.
This is surely every mother’s worst nightmare. I stood by her bed, filled with pain and impotent rage.
My instincts told me to let her speak uninterrupted. It wasn’t for me to ask questions; only to listen to what she chose to tell me. Not that she said much that night; she mostly just sobbed.
Even now, all I know is that at 15 she lost her virginity to a boy who felt entitled to take it from her while wilfully ignoring that she absolutely did not consent, a terrifying experience that left her feeling degraded and ashamed.
It was truly horrifying to hear my daughter Lucy reveal eerily similar sentiments to my own experience of being raped decades earlier, Nina writes
It had taken her a year to voice this, she explained, because she hadn’t thought anyone would believe her – even me.
Having sneaked out, she had willingly gone into his house, alone, when she knew his single mother, a midwife, would be at work; she’d drunk vodka with him and had happily let him kiss her. So, she reasoned, she was partly to blame.
A new wave of horror hit me. Old wounds cracked open with her words, bringing to the surface memories I had fought hard to suppress.
Because 34 years before, I had been raped in very similar circumstances – aged 16, by a boy I knew from school. I had never told anyone.
Now certainly wasn’t the time to open up about my own experience, though. I didn’t want to make any of what she’d been through in any way about me. But it was truly horrifying to hear her reveal eerily similar sentiments to my own experience of being raped decades earlier.
It was a warm August evening in 1987 when I went to the party of a boy in the year above at school. His parents were away and he’d invited a group of us to raid their drinks cabinet and listen to music. It was still light outside but cool and dark in his parents’ bedroom, where the curtains had been left closed.
Seeking a momentary retreat from the party, I must have passed out, because the next thing I knew I was in a panic, trying but failing to stop someone from wrestling my underwear off me in the darkness. As this unknown person forced their body between my knees, the sudden sensation of a pair of bare legs against the inside of mine was instantly sobering.
When I cried out ‘Please stop’, I was bewildered to hear my friend Paul’s voice telling me to shut up. ‘Someone will hear you,’ he hissed, as though that was the last thing I should want to happen.
I don’t recall any more about the physicality of the experience, except for how much it hurt – I went quiet, consumed with excruciating embarrassment that this boy, part of the large group of friends I’d hung out with all summer, now knew me in such a horribly intimate way.
Afterwards, he tried to cuddle me. I remember feeling shocked by how easily he let me push him away when moments earlier he’d made me feel so pathetically weak.
‘Don’t worry,’ he told me as he pulled on his jeans while I scrambled to cover myself with his mum’s candlewick bedspread. ‘I won’t tell anyone.’ And just like that, he left the room.
Until that night, I’d been a virgin who had only ever kissed a couple of boys. I didn’t tell a soul and prayed that Paul – confident with his mates, but who I’d always thought seemed shy around girls – wouldn’t either.
I felt relieved that he had already left school, meaning I could return for the new term the following week without the constant fear of bumping into him.
Despite Paul’s attempt at fake chivalry, I knew I’d been raped, but it didn’t feel like that counted for much. It never crossed my mind to tell my parents or go to the police.
Like so many victims – including, heartbreakingly, my own daughter – I blamed myself. I told myself I’d been drinking, I’d placed myself ‘invitingly’ on a bed. I didn’t fight him off hard enough or say no loudly enough.
The fact that I’d lied to my parents about where I would be that night (I’d said I’d be watching telly all evening at a sleepover with a girlfriend) only added to the sense that I wasn’t totally innocent in all this.
It seemed to me that the best thing – the only thing – to do was to push this horrible experience to the back of my mind and pretend it never happened.
But 34 years later, in 2021, I listened to Lucy reveal that she had been through the same brutal ordeal – and it all came rushing back.
As well as feeling distressed, I was angry at the lack of progress in society.
Though many more women now feel able to report being assaulted – in 1987, just 2,500 cases of rape were recorded by police in England and Wales, compared with 69,973 offences in 2021-22 – convictions remain woefully low.
Of those 2,500 cases reported in 1987, just 26 per cent went to court, and a third were acquitted. In 2021, it was revealed that just 1.6 per cent of reported rape cases resulted in a suspect being charged.
In the 70s and 80s, programmes such as The Benny Hill Show objectified women and girls
I had always felt like I was a victim of the pervasive culture of the 1970s and 1980s, which dismissed forcing yourself on women as ‘a bit of slap and tickle’.
Back then, family viewing included programmes such as The Benny Hill Show and Carry On films, which objectified women and girls, portraying us as fair game for men who wanted to ogle or grope us.
We were sexualised from a young age, with naughty schoolgirls being a completely normalised sexual trope. Mandy Smith dating a Rolling Stone at just 13 was seen as rock’n’roll.
Today, we look back on all this with our collective heads in our hands. But nowadays there are fresh problems.
We are clearly not doing enough to limit children’s access to violent online pornography that tells boys and girls that, when it comes to sex, women mean yes no matter how desperately they try to say no. Or that it doesn’t matter even if they do mean no.
The only question I asked Lucy that night was whether she wanted to report it to the police.
I told her I would support her choice, while knowing that reporting her rape would mean her reliving the hell of what had happened in a way that could make her feel even more violated. Without a shred of forensic evidence to back her, it would be her word against this boy’s. In the end, Lucy decided she did not want to involve the police.
The only thing I could do to help, I realised, was to tell her that nothing she had done made the terrible crime that had been committed against her in any way her fault.
But as a year had passed since the rape, the damage had already been done.
Though I hadn’t then known the cause, I had noticed during this time that she had changed from being confident, happy and outgoing to being anxious and withdrawn, reluctant to spend time with family or even her friends.
We had always been close. But now, any suggestion that the two of us might do something together was met with a blank stare and shake of her head. Increasingly, she was eating alone, taking food up to her room that often came back down again uneaten.
She had lost weight and had a worryingly emotionless expression set permanently on her face.
But this was mid-pandemic, a strange time for us all. Life was still far from normal, especially for young girls like Lucy.
The school closures and national lockdowns of the past year had had an enormous impact on children her age. I reasoned that this must be what was behind her behaviour. Adding to my confusion, Lucy was raped just as I contracted Covid myself, and was really poorly, spending ten days in bed.
She had snuck out one night while her father and I slept, and in the following days I’d been too sick to realise something had gone terribly wrong.
The fact that Lucy was going through all this alone will haunt me for the rest of my life.
Her year, due to take their GCSEs that summer, was the first to return to school during the phased reopening that started in June. By now, she seemed to operate like a robot. She got up, went to school, came home, shut herself in her bedroom, did her homework and went to bed.
This pattern continued after she went into sixth form. We told ourselves it was just a phase she would grow out of.
Then, that evening, I went into her bedroom without knocking and found her swigging from a wine bottle she had taken out of our store in the garage.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ I demanded.
That’s when she broke down and told me she was drinking because she hoped it would help her to sleep.
Sobbing, she said that in the darkness she could not distract herself from the memories.
I still haven’t told Lucy that I experienced something similar at her age (file image)
At first, Lucy said she didn’t want me to tell her dad. I felt like I was betraying my husband’s rights as a father to know what his child had endured.
But I also knew it was important to respect her wishes, and that having agency over who knows you have been raped is an important right for any victim.
We never talked about what happened in any detail. But at least now when she’d come to me upset or I’d find her crying in her room, I knew why.
I’d always ask her ‘Do you want to talk?’ but she never did. ‘It helps you knowing why I’m sad and that you don’t think I’m to blame,’ she told me.
Whenever I suggested speaking to a therapist, she’d reply: ‘Maybe one day, but not yet.’
I was also sad and withdrawn, but when my husband tried to get me to talk about why, I’d just push him away. It didn’t feel right to tell friends either.
Eventually, though, a few months after Lucy confided in me, she said I was allowed to tell her dad that a boy had done something bad to her, but not to elaborate. ‘Is it as terrible as I’m thinking?’ he asked, his face ashen. I nodded.
He went up to her room, took her into his arms and told her that he loved her, that he was sorry this bad thing had happened, and that none of it was her fault. And that, eventually, things would get better.
And, over time, they have. Verbalising the awful thoughts that had previously been trapped inside her head seems to have lifted her out of a very dark place. Gradually, she started spending more time with her friends.
She has since told those closest to her what happened, hopefully sharing details with them that she hasn’t felt comfortable telling me.
Lucy is 19 now, about to start university. She has a boyfriend, and recently confided in me that it was a relief when she realised she wanted to be intimate with him. It means her most recent sexual experiences have been loving and consensual, which is helping her to heal.
I still haven’t told Lucy that I experienced something similar at her age. One day, I’m sure I will – it just still doesn’t feel the right time yet.
I don’t think sexual assault is ever easy to talk about. And it’s made all the harder by the crushing fear that even if we do find ways to communicate what rapists have done to us, it’s not going to banish sexual brutality in the long run.
I’ve finally started opening up about my experience with my friends and that has helped me to process the feelings I pushed down for decades.
Sadly, many of them nod in recognition, saying something similar happened to them when they were younger.
And afterwards, they too made a conscious decision to try to forget all about it. I think it’s terrible that it felt like our only option – that for so many women, and girls like my daughter, it still feels like the only option. Things will never get better while society still makes women feel unsafe to come forward.
Change didn’t come in time for Lucy. I just pray that, if she ever goes on to have a daughter of her own, it will happen in time for hers.
- Nina Youd is a pseudonym. All names have been changed.