Please note that the names and identifying details have been changed to protect the young person.
A young woman from the West Country – who was sexually abused throughout her childhood – is urging primary schools to introduce sex education lessons, so children understand when something is wrong, and can speak up to get help.
18-year-old 'Rose' was sexually abused by a close family relative from the age of five until her early teens, and only realised what was happening because of RSE (Relationships and Sex Education) lessons in secondary school.
‘Because there’s no education (in primary school) you just don’t know. You think it’s normal, 'cos you grew up with it (…) I think it really hit me in Year Eight, that’s when you start talking about it … and that’s when I was like, OK yeah, this is wrong, this isn’t right’.
She says she wants to stop abuse ‘going on for long periods of time. I want the children to actually know it’s wrong so that they can actually come forward’.
She describes the long-term effect:
‘I became really withdrawn, I pushed everyone away. I did self-harm, I’m not gonna lie, I think that’s when the trauma hit’.
Lucy Emmerson, Chief Executive of charitable advocacy group The Sex Education Forum, says new statutory relationships teaching in primary schools is ‘strong and well intentioned’ but that sex education is not mandatory and ‘schools are feeling nervous about what to decide’.
She says she knows other young people who’ve experienced years of abuse; ‘it’s heart-breaking to realise that there was an opportunity earlier, but that adults were too afraid to say something quite simple’.
Nesdi Jones (28), a well-known singer in the South Asian music scene, recently went public with her own abuse by a close family friend, who has been jailed.
‘It was the typical thing of being too young to know better.’
She works in psychiatric care and thinks young children need help quickly. ‘I see what happens when trauma doesn’t get fixed.’
Rose says introducing sex education in primary schools, ‘needs to be done now (…) it’s not talked about, it’s not … and it needs to be’. She says she feels ‘passionately’ about the issue and that ‘I just really want to help other people.’
The Crime Survey for England and Wales (Office of National Statistics Report 2019) found that one in thirteen adults, mainly women, were abused before the age of eleven. However, most did not report it at the time.