'You don't look like the abused kind'

When I was 14 my teacher considered it necessary to spend a month’s worth of English language lessons preparing for our upcoming examination. Each lesson we were given a stimuli or a question and then had 45 minutes to create some kind of response. English had always been one of my favourite subjects and one in which I had always been successful so I was always aiming for a top grade and knew that this was achievable.                                    

‘What can you see when you look out of your bedroom window?’ I was asked. As always I was quick to react and busied myself for the rest of the lesson scribbling away with a response. I wrote, in fairly graphic detail, about watching a young girl, whose bedroom window was directly opposite mine, being sexually abused. I can’t remember everything that I wrote and unfortunately I never got to see my work again.

 Ididn’t really think about my answer on a conscious level and wrote about the first thing that popped into my head. Knowing what I know now, about the use of art therapies and creative writing techniques in psychological interventions with children and adolescents who have been abused, I can fully appreciate why my essay alarmed the teacher and caused her concern. At the time it was written, I didn’t feel as though there was anything shocking, disturbing or suggestive about it. When I handed it into my teacher and skipped off merrily to lunch (or, more likely, to the toilet cubicle where I spent most of my ‘playtimes’ crying and relentlessly slashing at my flesh), I never anticipated that it would cause the reaction that it did.

 First thing Monday morning my tutor informed me that Mrs Fury wanted to see me as a matter of urgency. My heart began to pound and my stomach churned. Mrs Fury had the reputation of being as utterly terrifying as her name; nobody had ever been beckoned to her office for anything good and it had been known for students to enter her office never to be seen or heard of again. I had only ever encountered Mrs Fury on two occasions; the first when I had been involved in a food fight in the school canteen and the second in an assembly where she was addressing an incident of racism and violence. From this second encounter I suspected that Mrs Fury was the only person in history to see the top of 750 children’s heads simultaneously as they all carefully inspected their shoes. Mrs Fury was the kind of woman who demands respect and she is certainly not a force to be reckoned with. Unbeknown to me at this point, Mrs Fury was also the school’s allocated Child Protection Officer.

 I asked my tutor if he knew what this was regarding. He didn’t but I had to go immediately. I felt like I was going to jail, I did not have the opportunity to pass go, I could not collect £200.

The look on Mrs Fury’s face as I entered her office confused me; she did not look angry but she didn’t look as though she was pleased that I was there either. She gestured for me to take a seat. I thought I was going to vomit.

‘A matter has been bought to my attention’… Fuck, I thought. Those dreaded words always lead me to believe I have one hell of a lot of explaining to do. She continued by producing my work from a file and asking if it was I who had written it. I didn’t deny it and slowly became more confused. ‘The content worries me’, she stated, ‘a child of your age shouldn’t be able to write about topics of this nature with such coherence.’ As a 14 year old I didn’t understand the point that she was trying to make, was she accusing me of plagiarism? Did she believe that the work was not my own and I had asked somebody else to write it? ‘I wrote it in the lesson, I wrote it all by myself.’ I was stumbling over my words by this point and didn’t quite know the direction in which this conversation was heading. ‘Good’, she retorted, ‘and what made you choose to write about watching somebody being sexually abused?’

Shit! The realisation of why this meeting had been called washed over me. She knew. She knew that I was being abused and wanted me to confirm her suspicions. The desperate desire to tell her echoed in my soul. Maybe, just maybe, this woman could be my saviour, she might be able to get me out of the hell that I was living. I could just blurt it all out and that would be it, the shit would almost instantly stop. But I just couldn’t, I couldn’t bring myself to say it so instead I whimpered, ‘I don’t know, I just wrote it.’

An almost bemused look spread across her face as she retorted, ‘I thought as much, you don’t look like the abused type. That will be all.’ And just like that I was ushered out of her office with a slight huff over the inconvenience my writing had caused.

I was completely bewildered and mortified and shocked and angry and sad, I felt all of the emotions at once. I had become so close to telling her everything and letting her be my hero but now all of that had shattered. By saying that I didn’t look like the abused sort Mrs Fury had reiterated what my abuser had always told me; that there is no point telling anybody what’s happening because they won’t believe you anyway. I had never felt less protected, I had never felt more alone.

The creak of the footsteps in the hallway heading towards my room that night reinforced that my abuse was far from over and Mrs Fury’s words resounding in my head ensured that I would never utter a word to anyone.

Thinking about it now, it makes me wonder how many other children have fallen through the net at the hands of that woman. I was intelligent, I smiled, I chose to wear trousers and vans to school as opposed to the miniskirts and heels that my peers wore, I was crude, I faked confidence – maybe these were all reasons why I didn’t look like the abused sort. Maybe it was because I didn’t have ‘molested adolescent’ tattooed across my forehead. Maybe child protection officers need better training to dispel myths, not talk complete crap and protect children in the way that their title suggests that they should.

The next lesson we read a poem about a family living in poverty and we were then asked to write a creative piece in relation to it. I wrote a monologue which said that my family were so poor that we had to use a hollowed out cow as a bathtub and whilst we were bathing we had to lick the sides of Daisy to stop us from getting scurvy. The child protection officer never got to read that piece.