Impact of abuse - Effects on the child

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'I have never had a childhood, I feel like I've never been a child. At 15 I felt like an old man.'

The participants shared the hopes and fears they experienced as children. Feeling bad about themselves, lacking self-confidence and a strong sense of isolation from other children, were common childhood experiences.

Often they felt that the abuse had robbed them of their childhoods and they talked about the ways they developed to try to cope with the abuse.

This included wanting to hide away, withdrawing from the real world through daydreaming and cutting off emotionally. Adults need to be perceptive to changes in their child's behaviour and recognise the messages that may lay behind this.

'I would read and I would isolate myself from everyone. I was reading like a book a day, I would exhaust myself so I would sleep. I would physically just do lots of things during the day and then read until midnight and I certainly isolated myself through books all my life.'

'I didn't have any hopes at the time. I was surviving. I was too caught up in this need to survive.'

'I would go off and hide in my own little world. We had hedges, I have lots of memories of being in the hedges in my own little hide-away living in my own fantasy world or up the bush building my own hide-away.'

'I thought that I was going to die, so overwhelmed that my very existence was threatened.'

'I was very, very isolated and I didn't have any skills as to how to deal with other kids and I didn't have any school friends. I developed in high school a friendship with another boy who was isolated as well, no one spoke to him so we both sat behind the library, it was a lovely spot, and we built up a good friendship but it was out of two victims. We got strength from each other, so that was how I got through.'

'I was a high achiever at school but undervalued my achievements; I accepted that I was not important, that I was not significant.'

'I think that's probably the biggest effect in my life, there's something wrong in my life but it's a secret. I really had this very strong feeling right through my school life that no one else feels like I do, that I feel something that no one else does.'

'I learnt to deal with it by separating mind and body. Take the mind off on its own little journey and the body was being abused.'

'As a child I loved my father quite intensely despite the fact of what he was doing. I was very isolated and lonely as a child but that was because of how my father manipulated me anyway. The adult is the one with all the control and power and the child is totally vulnerable.'

Many of the participants felt raw, vulnerable and exposed. Physical exposure or physical contact with other boys was frequently a source of great stress and anxiety.

'I remember the trauma of knowing that I had to go away to a school camp and being really traumatised, having to use urinals in public, having to use the change rooms at school.'

'As far as the exposure, physical education was an effort for me, there was no way I wanted to go into the showers and expose myself in front of all the boys, I always felt strange and old and different.'

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