I had fantastic training with The AIM project this week, with the very epic Karen Martin. You can read more about The AIM Project and what they do here, but as an overview, The Aim Project
looks at models, frameworks, and practice guidance for children and young people impacted by harmful sexual behavior (HSB). Aim stands for Assessment, intervention, and moving on. Some people will be very aware of Aim; for some, this will be a new world.

Part of the training day involved conversations about HSB in various capacities, and participants were encouraged to be as open or as… as they wanted. The environment was very safe the whole time, and I really learned a lot from the others who attended.

But it also brought up a few things.

So, trigger warning moving forward …

This may sound mad to some, but I never viewed myself as being a victim of HSB by other children and young people. I don’t know why; I guess for me personally, there was a clear distinction between this- sexual abuse by adults, sexual abuse by children and young people, sexual abuse within exploitation.

So, if you had asked me, say, two years ago where I see myself in this, I would have said I was a survivor of sexual abuse by adults and sexual abuse within exploitation, But that’s not the truth by far. I think it’s just how I have held it in my head for a long time,
I would say that HSB has been around me from a very young age, I often say six but maybe younger. I can clearly remember things from the age of 6, but there is also this part of me that wants to look at a part of my mind from before that. But when I try, it’s all hazy and distorted, like a TV screen with running water in front of it. But I know. Maybe I will never get to see what is behind the running water. Perhaps that would be too much.

What I can say is that I wish many of the other memories were distorted in the same way. Or do I? Maybe that would add more confusion. It is such a difficult thing to break down.
I was the victim of harmful sexual behavior from around six years of age, by adolescents. I would say the main two were aged between 13 and 15 at the time. Brothers. In a trusted position. I have thought hard about what I write next, which is unusual for me, But I believe that when abuse happens by someone you know, and it has never been addressed, it is a difficult one, so let’s see what happens as I always write in one take.

And anyone reading this who grew up with me will know exactly what I am speaking about because it was not just me.

I was not the only child they abused.

Several different people abused me as a child. Most of them were under 18, and to be honest, most were under 16. Some of the children that it also happened to were also abused by adults who were connected to the adolescents, but I can only remember 2 or 3 of the adolescents in that group hurting me. In terms of physical abuse.

There were always comments….conversations…gossip, if you will. How certain men in the area were ‘nonces’, that is the term that would be used often. I knew that you must stay away from these men. But they didn’t stay away from me. It always confused me how these grown men would come and stand with us, and we were all much younger than they were, and they would openly say very sexualized things to the girls there, and no one said anything…to their faces. But when they were gone, people would make comments like ‘Everyone knows what he is like.’ And they did. But why didn’t people do anything about it? I wonder now.

I have seen things that I may never speak of in my lifetime. I have experienced things that haunt me most nights. But there is something that impacted me so hard that it has never left me, and I can be back there in an instant in my mind’s eye.

I have had some of the most crude and degrading things said to me between the ages of 10-13 by big grown men in front of many people. And I would cringe and go red and not understand the laughter.

Once, I was around 11, I think it was the summer before you started secondary school, but it may have been the summer before that. It was a summer day, and one of these men came to the group I was with. This was not unusual, but my stomach would always drop when certain people would turn up, and he was one of them. To be fair, he spent most of the time on his balcony calling out to the young girls, no…children, and shouting smarmy comments, but sometimes he would come down. On this day, I guess there were conversations taking place that I didn’t pick up on, and then one of my peers told me to put my arms out like a scarecrow. I laughed and asked why, and one of them said it was so they could look at the logo on my t-shirt correctly. I put my arms out, and there was laughter; I said, “Why are you laughing?” and put my arms down. The man in this group told me to do it again. I said no, flashing red and not understanding the ‘game.’ He said they were being silly, but if I put my arms out, he would tell me the joke. So, I did, and he and some of the boys fell about laughing, and he said….

“We can see your tits down your sleeves when you put your arms up, except your a flat-chested little bitch and not worth a wank”.

I can honestly say right now that I would easily bet my own life that I have repeated the above word for word how he said it that day . Trust me, I have replayed that a million times since that day.

If I had to put an age on him at that time, I would say he was between 20 and 25. He was a man to me. He went to work. He had a son. All of his ‘friends’ were 16 or under. I never once saw him with anyone older, male or female.

I used to wear very oversized T-shirts. Spliffy ones, if people remember, or ones with Super Mario. And Gravity jeans…now I am showing my age. And at that age, I can assure you that I had no idea that I should wear a bra, and I most definitely did not have anything to put inside said bra,
That moment and that comment changed me for life. I don’t even know why. I think because it was the first time that a “man” was doing the abuse. And I felt confused as to why I felt like this. He had not touched me.

Yet, I felt…dirty.

This felt so much more….painful. I felt embarrassed and humiliated, and I felt scared. I wanted to walk away but didn’t know how or if I could. I didn’t know what he actually meant at the time. I just stood there as a group of boys I grew up with made fun of the fact that I was flat-chested. I was aged 11/12.

I used to play football often with this group. I never played again after that day. I wonder if any of them even noticed. I no longer felt safe with them. None of them.
That man I am referring to disgusted me so much that I didn’t know what to do with my thoughts, So I told my mum.

I don’t really remember what happened, but it resulted in my mum kicking this man’s door in.

I was not there, people told me afterward. My mum was tiny—she weighed the same as a wet teabag—but I remember telling her that this man……had said something.
She asked me what he had said, and she looked very serious. I said it was not bad, bad….I just didn’t like it. And then I burst into tears. She hugged me, soothed me, and said…” Just tell me.”

Then I felt silly. Because I could tell her much worse stuff, And I didn’t ever tell her that. Should I ? Nope,,,,too much drama. But this was different to me. Because I knew that this man got blow jobs from other girls in the stairwell of his flats and now maybe I had to… because he was looking at me like that…And I didn’t want to do anything like that … so I told my mum.

She went very still. She got up and said for me to wait there. So, I did. Sitting on my sofa in my living room. I could hear her talking to our next-door neighbor, Eric, a Jamaican man who was like an uncle to me. He came in, drew the curtains, and asked if I wanted jerk chicken at his, I asked where Mum was, and he said that was big people’s business…now did I want jerk chicken?
“OK,” I said…but only if he made carrot cake; he smiled, and his gold tooth sparkled, and he said …come den Blondy. And I went. Eric’s flat was one of the few places where I was truly safe from all the madness. I spent so many times in his little flat and now realise just how important he was to my mum. To me. A godsend.

What I was told after by many different people was that my mum went to the house and confronted him. People were there. But he would not open the door and just leaned out his front window, telling my mum to go away,

So, she kicked his door in.

In her flip flops.

And whatever went down in that house, I don’t know …what I can tell you is that my mum got home a few hours later and that was that.

The man who said it to me appeared a week or so later with two black eyes and a cast on his foot. He came hobbling along, and I think he said he had crashed his bike or fallen. I didn’t listen as he stopped to chat with some of the others sitting at the bottom of his stairs. He never came down again when I was there, and he never shouted at me from the balcony again. And he wouldn’t let his son play with me.

Maybe he did crash his bike. Or perhaps he did fall.

Maybe

Either way, his comment stole the last bit of childhood I had left in me.

The only people I ever saw him with after that were the brothers I spoke about at the start of this blog and one other boy. My peers never joined in, as they did that day, asking me to lift my arms like a scarecrow.

My point to all this….

The AIM project training was so powerful that it raised many lost memories in me that need to be addressed.
The AIM project training helped me to start putting context around what was actually taking place when I was growing up. It also provides context to some of my own actions as a child and young person. It has helped me to start breaking down HSB on a different level. And I personally needed that. The training helped me look at what I went through with a different lens and also look at some of the people involved in harming me with a different lens. Somthing I didn’t think I ever could.

This has been a very hard blog to write. I will go over it for spell check and then post, or I will lose my nerve.

Harmful sexual behavior is not something people want to talk about. But we have to so we can assess the situation, put in an intervention, and then hopefully move on. Do you see what I did there? Lol)

But we should talk about it. We must. To allow us to get out of the shadows and into the sunshine.