If you’ve been a victim of sexual abuse, this post could trigger painful thoughts. Read with self-care.
Abuse is scary but do you know what is the scariest part of ‘Abuse’ for the victims? It is the moment when they let others hear their cry for help.
With their wounded soul and their mind full of shame, the victims have to gather a lot of courage to put their story out in the world – to their family, to their parents.
But what if their own family turns a blind eye and chooses not to believe in them? This is the moment that every abuse victims is most scared of. This is the reason why many of them choose to suffer in silence and never take a stand against their abusers.
But, this brave soul was different. When her mother and Nani abandoned her for standing against a family relative who abused her, she turned the pain into a power and rewrote her destiny!
Recalling her troubling childhood, this brave soul shared with HoB,
“I remember being sexually abused by my uncle when I was 5. It began with innocent things like sitting on his lap, cuddling. But I never understood this until much later. My parents separated when I was 5 because my dad had some financial difficulties. So mom left us to stay with her family in Delhi.
I didn’t see her for the next 5 years – I lived with my dad in lodges, and in other people’s homes. But when I was 11, my dad fell ill, and he decided to drop me off at my mom’s place in Delhi. I landed back at the home of my abuser. He would often touch me in wrong places – he would take me to empty rooms and make me feel him.”
But it wasn’t only the child abuse that was suffocating her, it was her dad’ loss too.
“Soon after my dad left me in Delhi, my mom got a call from a friend asking her to help my dad. But she refused and hung up on him. Three weeks later, we got the news that he passed away alone in a government hospital.”
After her dad’s death, her life turned into a living nightmare.
“My mom moved to Mumbai while I stayed with my uncle’s family. So there was no one around to keep an eye on me. And he continued his abuse. Once we were attending a wedding, when after the function, his wife and kids decided to stay back. So I had to drive back with him, and he made me give him a hand job, while saying that I shouldn’t talk about this to anyone, or he would kill himself.”
But what happened next made this brave girl find her unfound courage and strength to stand up against her abuser.
“The final straw was when he flashed himself in front of me and his sons. They were too young to understand anything, but I couldn’t take it anymore. I went and told my nani and mom – neither of them believed me. They said it was all Bollywood nonsense in my head. In fact, my nani told my mom to send me away to live with her friend in Pune.”
She was abandoned when she gathered the courage to open up to her mother against her abuser. But, no one believed her. So, rather than waiting for her hero to rescue her, she turned into her own hero.
“That wasn’t what I was expecting, but that at least put an end to my sexual abuse. I stayed with her for 4 years, but it all got too much. She would make me do the cleaning, and the household chores, even take her son to school. So I decided to run away to Mumbai. I didn’t even have the money for the bus fare, but my friends collected 300 bucks for me.”
And, then finally the day came when she knew she wasn’t a victim of life anymore!
“But my closure finally came when I decided to move out of my mom’s place, into my own. I got a call from the same uncle asking me why I was moving out. And that’s when he said, ‘I know you are like this because I ruined your childhood’, and apologized for it. I never forgave him – how could I?”
When the society tried to break her soul, her own mother let her suffer, she made sure her pain becomes her strength:
“I didn’t deserve what he did to me – no child deserves something like that. He broke me apart when I was just 5 years old, and today, I am what I am because I had the courage to help myself heal. Even when the world told me that I wasn’t hurt. I was a victim, but today I am a survivor.”
“My pain didn’t make me weak, instead, it made me the strongest of the strong.”
Many times, people struggle to believe that someone they know or love could do such a thing to the kids. And, if the abuser is a close friend or a relative, this makes it so hard that parents either ignore the abuse and let their kids suffer in silence. Sometimes it becomes worse when parents lash out at the victim herself.
