It never stops shaping you: the legacy of child sexual abuse and how to survive it

Kaiser remembers clearly the bedroom where it all started; at the top of the four-storey house she shared with her mother and five siblings (her father died when she was a toddler). After an older sister ran away from home, the room was left empty and supposedly out of bounds but she would sneak up. In the room, there was a glass cabinet that had two shelves in probably 4ft high and books behind the glass. One on the train robbery, and a book about Tutankhamun. Id sit crosslegged and just stare at my fathers books never touch. She was seven years old, she says, when a male visitor to the house first abused her there. Over the next six years, she told the Truth Project, she was assaulted by three other men, both in Britain and when visiting Pakistan. She always felt that to tell would put her mother in danger.

On the surface, Kaisers was a strict upbringing; if anyone kissed in a film, an adult would instantly switch off the TV. There were no relationships outside marriage, no boyfriends and girlfriends of any kind, no untoward touching. Those lines were not blurred at any time. That act of touching, theres so much onus on it literally, the respect of the household is put on it, she explains. There were lines that were drawn, and then there were areas that were just … no-go areas, and it was able to breed and occur as it did because there were no repercussions. Nobody saying stop.

Years ago, in Pakistan, she heard a story that she didnt understand at the time about a man caught abusing his toddler granddaughter. When the childs mother confronted him, she was beaten to a pulp. That was a no-go area. It was you didnt have the authority or the right, how dare you have the audacity to bring that up with me. It was as if there was a place for men, and those men have their reasons.

Initially, she interpreted the abuse as some kind of punishment, like I was a bad child, that I was doing something wrong. As she got older, she drew on her experience as a British Asian straddling two cultures to separate herself from what was happening. The girl at home enduring unspeakable things withdrawn and always frowning became separate from the popular, more assertive girl at school. When Im in my own home, the colours, the smells, the sounds are completely different. But once I step out of my door into the street, Im in England, and everything looks and smells and sounds different. It was about being one person inside the house and, as soon as I stepped outside, Im not that person.

It was a school sex education lesson at 13 that finally provided words for what was happening. She walked out in the middle of it, and not long afterwards summoned the courage to tell her mother. The only time her voice quavers is when she describes her mothers reaction.

My mother was a seamstress, she sewed Asian womens clothes. At any point of the day or night you would find her at her sewing machine in her bedroom and thats where I went. I sat down on this little cushion by the gas fire and started to tell her. I didnt quite know how to explain. The words I used were: What a man and wife does in their bedroom to have children, is what hes doing to me.

Her mother did confront the man, Kaiser says, asking if he had touched her. He went into this tirade about how if I was raised in Pakistan, I wouldnt be saying these things; how living in England ruins girls. She realised that her mother was not going to back her up, and that in effect the subject was closed.

So she started fighting at school, skipping lessons, waiting for someone to notice. Someone did, but she says the teacher appointed to counsel her then abused her all over again; she was eventually taken into care aged 15, after months of shuttling between foster families and home. If new acquaintances asked about her parents, she would say she was an orphan. At 19, Kaiser found herself pregnant by an older boyfriend who had no idea of her history.

She struggles to forgive the social worker who, on learning of her pregnancy, told her to get counselling or she might abuse her own child. (Perpetrators are disproportionately likely to have been abused as children, but the idea of the cycle repeating itself is a sensitive one, says Farrant: The research doesnt support that abused people are highly likely to go on to abuse other people. Often its such a harmful narrative, and it intensifies the sense of shame and guilt.)

With that warning ringing in her ears, Kaiser suffered postnatal depression after her son was born. I could barely touch him; I couldnt breastfeed him because I felt that every time I did, I was abusing him. I loved him so much, there was this fear that I was going to hurt him because there was something wrong with me.

But she went on to have a second son, and this time it was easier, because she had learned that there were places not to go in her head. If I didnt close those doors, Im not sure who would be talking to you today, it would be a completely different story. Thats what tends to happen to children like me. We become damaged goods, broken beyond repair.

And yet she did not break. Kaiser now works as a translator, and volunteers for a survivors charity; she is proud of her two grown sons and is on good terms with their father, from whom she later separated. However, she has had another relationship that she describes as highly abusive, but realised during counselling that she was unconsciously mirroring her childhood experience. Adult survivors are, she says, vulnerable to predators because of their desperation to be loved: I dont think it ever stops shaping you. Just the impact is different.