They save lives, it's that simple: abuse survivors make case for charity funding
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Version 0 of 1. John Lennon, 45, still suffers post-traumatic stress disorder after he was brutally beaten and raped in an attack at his flat in Manchester in August 2010. “He left me for dead. I was in and out of consciousness for about three and a half hours but I was unconscious while he was raping me. When I started to come round I pretended to play dead,” he says. Related: Sex abuse charity funding crisis sees up to 10,000 in UK wait a year for help What happened next remains as vivid in Lennon’s memory as the second it took place. “I noticed my dog, Indy, she was under the bed. He very casually walked back into the room, very proud of what he had done. The dog started to come towards me and he started kicking seven shades out of it. I couldn’t do anything – I was frozen. Before he came back in again I hid behind the door with a hammer. As he came in I hit him over the head with it and I ran and I ran and I ran and I ran.” The days after the attack were a traumatic blur. Lennon, who has waived his right to lifelong anonymity, wrote a suicide note to his parents and tried to take an overdose. Then he decided to seek help. He remembers sitting in the waiting room of the sexual assault referral centre in St Mary’s hospital, Manchester, when two women walked in. One had been beaten black and blue. “They had to wait in the same waiting area as me but that lady – the look of fear in her eyes when she had to sit beside a man, me, that was overwhelming and I thought, no, I can’t do this. I’ve got to go to a service where people aren’t afraid of me.” That’s when he called Survivors Manchester, one of the few groups for male rape victims in the UK. Like scores of other sexual abuse charities across the UK, Survivor’s Manchester has no funding secured beyond next March – meaning it is impossible to plan long-term care for the 165 men currently on its books or the 20 on its waiting list. Lennon says the group helped him through impossible struggles, like the lengthy judicial process that resulted in his attacker being jailed for four years and three months. His attacker has since been released, but Lennon’s recovery is ongoing. He is sure there will be a grave human cost if survivors are not offered support soon after coming forward. “The suicide rate among men will go through the roof, self-harming will be a massive issue, the NHS will be overloaded with mental health problems with men who have been abused and raped,” he said. “Alcohol and drugs services will thrive because that’s where people will have to turn, because they won’t be able to turn to the organisations that should be there to help them with their very specific need. Those places are absolutely essential – it’s as simple as that.” Caroline, 55, from Brighton The first time Caroline went to a therapy session with other survivors, she cried the whole weekend. One-on-one sessions with counsellors had helped her cope with the painful aftermath of being sexually abused by her father from the age of seven to 15, but it was only when she met other survivors that the healing began. “The emotions were so deeply locked away, I’d never really touched them,” she says. Her path to recovery began after contacting CIS’ters, a Hampshire support group specifically for women who were abused by family members in childhood. The 20-year-old organisation, which supports 400 women, faces closure within months having burnt through most of its £15,500 reserves when it missed out on a “lifeline” Home Office fund distributed by the Norfolk police and crime commissioners’ office. Some counselling services make you feel like a patient or a case study, Caroline says, and can only scratch the surface of rehabilitation. Painful flashbacks are triggered every time child abuse hits the headlines – a near daily occurrence since the Jimmy Savile scandal in 2012. “It reminds you all the time. This is exactly when charities like this need support and help to grow, not have their funding cut.” Related: Save the Children CEO: It's time for better charity fundraising regulation Lynne, 64, from Hampshire With a happy marriage and a successful career, Lynne appeared to have an idyllic life when she was 44. But out of nowhere her world came crashing down when she discovered that her father, who had sexually abused her from a young age, had other victims – her siblings. “My world had gone bang,” she said. “I had a massive breakdown. A few weeks later I tried to kill myself three times because I couldn’t live with the knowledge that I left home and not protected my younger sister.” Like many survivors, Lynne blamed herself. The shame and guilt became intolerable. And when the flashbacks started, it almost became too much. “I’d be driving down the motorway from my counselling session and I’d see pictures on the windscreen of this child that was me being raped. I used to point the car at the corner of bridges because there was no respite for what I was experiencing in my head.” Like Caroline, Lynne was introduced to CIS’ters and, slowly, her recovery began. She described the group therapy sessions as a place “where I can drop the mask” and where she didn’t have to summon some insincere explanation to her work colleagues when they asked how she spent Father’s Day. “I was able to let go of that burden of ‘there was something that I did wrong that made this happen to me’,” she said. “Being able to hear the difficulty that other survivors had in disclosing meant that I was able to forgive myself for not telling anybody, because it’s not normal to tell. I was able to stop beating myself up. It saved my life, meeting other survivors.” |