A woman in Northumberland has written a book about her past to try and help spot the signs of abuse
A woman from Northumberland has written a book about her past with the aim to help children and parents spot the signs of abuse at a young age. There will be sensitive subjects discussed in this piece that may not be suitable for some audiences.
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00:00 So, the story that the book is telling is my childhood. I was sexually abused from a
00:09 young age and I didn't tell anybody about it. So, it went on for a long time and even
00:17 when the abuse stopped, it manifested in a lot of mental health problems for myself.
00:24 And there was a lot in the aftermath of the abuse that could have been prevented had I
00:32 spoken out sooner. So, the book tells the story of how Laura, it's aimed at young children,
00:40 and it's telling the story of how she's unhappy and it isn't until she's able to tell somebody
00:46 that she trusts the secret that she's able to start and move on and get some kind of
00:52 recovery from the trauma. I feel like it's the type of book, if it had been available
00:58 when I was a child, I would have then been able to take that to my mum and ask to read
01:04 it time and time again. It would have made her wonder, you know, why is she so interested
01:09 in this book? It would have given me a conversation starter, a point where I could have said,
01:16 you know, something like that has happened to me, or just given me the vocabulary and
01:21 the knowledge to say what I needed to say, and letting me know from a younger age that
01:26 what was happening to me wasn't acceptable, because at the time I was so young that it
01:32 was just a regular part of my routine. And by the time I was old enough to realise that
01:39 it was something wrong, I then felt too involved in the abuse, I felt like I was playing just
01:46 as big a part in it as my stepdad. So that's the type of thing that really has a lasting
01:53 effect on someone. There's parent pages in the book, so at the beginning it explains
01:58 to the parent how to go about reading the book, and then at the end there's questions
02:03 that you can ask with the child to try and make sure they've fully understood it. But
02:07 it's obviously got to be age appropriate, so that's why the parent would read the book
02:11 with them, so they can tell them at a level that's suitable for their child. So I think
02:18 it is suitable for like from ages three and up, and even older kids it's still a conversation
02:25 starter, which is the whole object of the book. Had I known straight away, I'm uncomfortable
02:32 with what this person's doing to me, this doesn't feel right, I can talk to my mum about
02:35 this, my path could have been totally different. But because I was born in the 80s and 90s,
02:45 people didn't talk about sex or sexual abuse, especially not with children, it was a totally
02:51 taboo subject. And that's what the book's trying to get away from, trying to open up
02:56 a dialogue for parents with younger children, so they're informed from a much younger age
03:00 to protect themselves.