Between the age of seven and nine, I was groomed and sexually abused by a family friend. I didn’t comprehend what had happened to me until basic sex education in my final year of primary school started to expose the truth. I was 11 when, in a tiny classroom, my male headteacher explained the human life cycle, topping off the final lesson with a graphic video of childbirth .
For the first time since the abuse ended, I felt a glimmer of understanding – but it didn’t feel right. My experiences didn’t match the sexual contact my teacher described – he said it only happened between consenting adults. That wasn’t what happened to me.
While the pieces didn’t align immediately, these lessons cracked open the door – letting a chink of light fall over the darkness and confusion that poisoned my childhood. It’s why I think that the government’s plans to further tighten restrictions on sex ed is abhorrent. See, if I’d been taught about what was happening to me from a young age, without shame or judgement, maybe things could have been different.
Thanks to (very basic) sex ed, I started asking questions and reading more books about puberty, the life cycle, and what sex was. Looking back now, I understand that these were attempts to contextualise my experience of childhood sexual abuse into something my pre-teen brain could compute. The final cogs clicked in two stages.
The first came when my peers started to talk about sex, and their naivety and innocence shone throug.
