The Grip of Childhood Sexual Abuse

‘The Grip of Childhood Sexual Abuse’ is a 10 hour long – non-fiction audio book, containing over thirty years of what we did to recover from the impacts of our abuse. 

Because we are sisters, abused by the same man throughout our childhood and into our teenage years, our different personalities along with our individual relationship to our father, our account is somewhat unique and provides a broader vision of what a victim experiences. Add to this, the time spent seeking understanding of all ways we had been changed and harmed from our experience, we believe best places us to help others who suffer as we have.

The story follows our journey in making the decision to prosecute our father, and the various professionals and government systems that failed us along the way.  We talk about how the courts can only continue to hand down inappropriate sentences to sexual predators as long as they remain ignorant to the lifelong impacts on its victims.  

We each spent a portion of our lives believing we were the only one he was abusing. Exploring and learning to understand the levels of awareness that exists in a household where abuse is taking place, and the unconscious role we all played in protecting our abuser, was shocking to us. We came to realise how trauma of being sexually abused so young caused our unconscious minds to take over to ensure we could push down our feelings shut ourselves off from what was happening and block off certain memories in order to survive.

Later in life these coping mechanisms that helped us survive needed to be turned off, but how? This is part of what we have been navigating and what we want to share with other victims.

For us, some of the psychological ways we were impacted included thoughts, leading to beliefs and feelings of responsibility for the abuse, fear, confusion, self-hatred, self-doubt, lack of trust and lots more. And the older we got the stronger these thoughts and feelings were, because there was no intervention, no knowledge and no understanding. 

We believe the psychological impacts in particular, are not given the recognition they deserve in terms of potency, and the deep invisible ways they harm victims.  We uncovered the many ways sexual abuse psychologically impacted us. Still today all these years later, we are still unpacking the residue of abuse. We have many discussions about these impacts.  We talk about how the coping mechanisms we each used to protect ourselves as children played a role in ensuring we remained in a downward spiral of negativity long after our abuse had ended.

In the chapter ‘Don’t Turn Away’ we each write in graphic detail about a single incident of abuse, not to shock but rather to ensure that there is clarity around exactly what a child experiences when being abused. Writing in detail provided us with the opportunity to see our innocence which sadly, victims of crimes of a sexual nature fail to see.  Victims wrongly take full responsibility for something that is done to them. This explains why sexual abuse remains to be the most under reported crimes across the globe.

The conversations pieces at the end of each chapter are, we believe, one of the most valuable features to the book, as we speak openly and honestly of our own experiences.  These conversations coupled with our sense of humour, and along with the inclusion of 24 family and friends performing the voices of the various characters, are all contributing factors towards making this topic easier to hear.

We wish to offer a sense of hope for victims helping them identify the impacts of their abuse which allows them to move out of the pain and suffering hopefully much sooner than we were able to and begin living a life rather than merely existing.

Take care

Joyce, June and Paula Kavanagh