Click, Click – Our Fathers Secret

Click, Click  –  Our Fathers Secret 

We are Joyce, June & Paula Kavanagh,

Three sisters from a family of ten, 6 boys and 4 girls. We grew up in the 60s and 70s in a disadvantaged suburb of Dublin called Ballyfermot. Although we were surrounded by poverty there was a strong sense of community. 

It was a different time where people had family secrets and family shame.  Where certain issues were never to be spoken of outside the family home. Things like getting a beating from your husband or your husband drinking or gambling all his wages.  Women had to manage those secrets without ever confiding in anyone for support. Back then, the church held great power over people without boundaries. The church dictated behaviours, morals, and thoughts. They even felt entitled to control people’s sex lives. There was no aspect of people’s lives they didn’t interfere with and attempt to control.  

Women and children were considered property of the husband and there were no safety measures in place to protect either one.  Shame was encouraged strongly when it came to individual sexuality and teachers were incapable of addressing the confusion teenagers had around sexual matters.  It was the norm to have a priest make special visits to the secondary schools and attempt to teach something they, themselves were supposed to know nothing about. So, there was a lot of ignorance, confusion, embarrassment and of course shame surrounding the issue of sex and sexuality.  Children were extremely innocent and taught to respect all adults, whether or not they deserved it. Children were to be seen and not heard. This power imbalance between children and adults created a lot of fear and was a contributing factor preventing disclosure of abuse.

This information is purely to give context and paint a picture of the culture of the times we grew up in. A perfect breeding ground for sexual abuse to occur and thrive in and that’s exactly what we are going to be talking about in this book.

Our Father sexually abused all of his daughters and so many others we cannot speak of for legal reasons. Our eldest sister Pamela ran away to England as a teenager to escape his nightly attempts to sexually abuse her. Because she lived abroad, she felt unable to join us in the telling of our story, but she fully supports us as do our brothers. They are proud of what we are doing and always have been.

Our father was a difficult controlling and highly volatile man to live with even without the sexual abuse. We do not know his past and what may have happened to him to become the man that devastated so many lives, but we do know he died without ever showing remorse or any level of comprehension of the immeasurable pain and suffering he left in his wake.

Our case changed the statute of limitations. The fact we corroborated each other’s stories of abuse meant we were successful in attaining a 7-year prison sentence over thirty years after the abuse began. We are proud of that but we were completely unaware of the existence of this possible barrier until after the case ended.  The legal system has a long way to go in terms of knowing the humane and just way of treating victims of sexual crimes, as indeed do all the systems that badly failed us.

This book took almost twenty years to complete. It was painful at times, almost too painful to write or even think about and often had to be put down for months at a time to allow healing to occur.  It is the telling of our childhood experience, warts and all. We have been brutally honest about the abuse because we want there to be clarity about what a child experiences while being abused. We want to put an end to the irony of the victim taking the blame, guilt, shame and responsibility for a crime they didn’t commit.

We want to encourage open conversations about a subject that can and will never be addressed as long as the current paradigm is held by society.  We share what it looks like in a family home when sexual abuse is rampant and yet no one knows it’s going on. There are levels of knowing that exist in an abusive household. People can’t cope with knowing certain things, so we shut it down. It doesn’t exist.  The not knowing is like the shock of finding out your husband is having an affair for years. Over time, you come to realise you did know. The signs were there but if you’d have allowed yourself to know sooner, you simply couldn’t have coped.

A lot of people wanted to blame our mother when the story of our abuse first broke. We feel that is part of our societies conditioning in relation to the ridiculous expectations on women and in particular Mothers, to be all things to all people.  There are cases where the mother may be the perpetrator of even knowingly allow the abuse to go on, but that was not our story.  In our case we believe our mother to be yet another victim. In fact, she was probably his first or one of them at least.  It was painful to deal with her apparent lack of emotion. We struggled to believe she loved us and felt she didn’t protect us. It felt almost worse than what he did, but we spent a long time discussing our feelings, talking to her and it became clear that her coldness was a protection for not only herself but also for us.

We want people to begin to think differently about this crime. To realise, whether or not you personally have been abused, as a society and in fact globally everyone is impacted by this crime and we all need to be moved to action because only together can we stop sexual abuse.

Our mission we believe is to encourage victims of childhood sexual abuse everywhere to use their voice and speak out. Take back their power and end the suffering that destroys generations of not only victims themselves but their families and all who are in the lives of victims.

Take care

Joyce, June and Paula