My dad abused me from age 2 but nobody noticed the red flags – his chilling police interview revealed his warped mind | The Sun
THUMBING through old primary school reports, Emily Victoria notes a string of dates where 'absent' has been put beside her name and tells her tearful mum: "That was the year I felt like I died."
But Emily, from the South of England, wasn't suffering from a serious illness. She was the victim of relentless abuse by her dad from the age of two to 18 and was kept off school so he could subject her to sickening sexual assaults.
He even gave up his job to become a foster parent while her mum was forced to work long hours to put food on the table – leaving him alone to abuse his daughter without his wife’s knowledge.
"Being so young and having that level of betrayal from the person who is meant to love you and protect you in life, will never leave me," Emily tells The Sun. "It's the most profound heartbreak you can ever feel, and it goes down to your soul."
Dad Paul was finally jailed for 14 years after Emily, now 32, plucked up the courage to speak out.
Still, his recent release has reopened old wounds and made her question how 16 years of horrific sexual abuse remained hidden from those around her – including teachers, family friends and her own unsuspecting mum.
Red flags missed
She searches for those answers in the powerful new documentary A Paedophile In My Family: Surviving Dad, which airs on Channel 4 tonight.
In the film, which is raw with emotion, the brave survivor reaches out to a headmaster who missed the red flags, a school friend's mum who admits she felt "uncomfortable" around Emily's dad and the police who handled her case.
She is left "feeling sick" after one officer reveals her dad's twisted statement, which reads: "Emily was a very sexual child", adding that they had a "brilliant father-daughter relationship. I didn't do anything she didn't want. I didn't have to force her or tell her not to tell."
The film also sees Emily attempt to face her demons by arranging a meet with her dad through the restorative justice system and, in the most emotional scenes, she and her mum break down together after finally addressing the events that have haunted them both.
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6"That was really helpful for me because I could let go of the guilt and anxiety I felt, and I think that also released mum from some of that worry and those anxieties as well," says Emily.
"I decided to do this documentary because I wanted to start a conversation to help people communicate.
"But I didn't realise that, before doing this, I hadn't had those conversations with family, going directly to the issues, myself.
"This taught me those conversations are brilliant and so helpful because they release you from all the fears, worries and guilt you carry."
Relentless abuse
Today Emily is a successful businesswoman with a thriving career in the media and a seven-year-old son she adores.
But underneath her bright, welcoming smile and warm, friendly personality she carries the trauma of being relentlessly abused by her father throughout her entire childhood.
"What my dad did to me still has an effect on my life," she says.
"Most of the time, all I felt was anger towards him, but of course, there was some level of him that loved me and cared for me. It's confusing because he still was my dad 50 per cent of the time and 50 per cent of the time, he was a monster.”
Growing up in the South of England, with her parents and two younger brothers, she says her dad was popular with everyone. But he was a Jekyll and Hyde character, prone to drunken violence.
Emily believes her abuse may have started when she was a baby and she says her earliest memories of her dad involved violence as well as sexual abuse.
“I have very young childhood memories, some of violence, some sexual assault, some are emotionally manipulative,” she says.
“I remember being about two, at my great grandmother's house, and my dad kicking me so I bounced across the stone floor.
“Another memory is him shouting at me for not using my knife and fork in the right way to the point where a family member stepped in and said: ‘She's three years old. What on earth are you doing?'
"I think that was the moment he learned to put on a mask and keep it all behind closed doors."
"I remember being sexually abused from two.
"When I was five or six, he used to say he was reading me a bedtime story. We had Matilda by Roald Dahl and I really wanted to be read the story but I hated it because he would put the book down and I knew what was next."
'Fooled everyone'
Initially an estate agent, then a tarmacer, Emily’s dad gave up work when she was eight to become a foster carer and "fooled everyone".
As the only breadwinner, Emily’s mum had to work long hours to make ends meet and explains to her daughter she felt “pushed out" when she came home, thinking “my little girl had become daddy’s girl".
For her part, Emily saw her mum as "distant" because a wedge was driven between them by her controlling, manipulative abuser.
Perhaps the most tragic aspect of the story is that Emily's survival mechanism – which was to present an outwardly cheerful nature – was so convincing that no one suspected the daily trauma she was experiencing.
"As I got older the abuse was frequent and prominent," she says. "I had to replace my own thoughts with his thoughts as a way to survive.
"I had to be happy and smiley to him in those awful moments, to make him happy, and that happiness and smileyness was always on my face, wherever I went, just completely masking it.”
She adds: "At the age of 12, the real me had gone. I was like a zombie going through the motions."
As well as the constant abuse, Emily's dad was controlling, keeping her from making friends and stopping her from attending parties and social events.
She excelled at school and at her chosen sport of swimming – the only area of her life where she felt in control – but says that by the age of 18 she had the "social skills of a two-year-old."
When her school proms approached, her dad took her off to New York so she would miss it. Instead of an 18th birthday party, she was again taken away by her dad, with her mum unable to join them because she had to work.
Contact the Samaritans
If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this article, contact The Samaritans on 116 123.
They are available for free at anytime.
Or email https://www.samaritans.org/
With younger brothers and foster siblings at home, Emily resigned herself to the constant abuse, even putting herself into situations such as dog walks, when she knew he would assault her, to protect the other children.
But, when she saw one of the foster children comforting him in a certain way he had always expected her to, she suspected she was not his only victim – and "something snapped."
"I was trying to throw myself in harm's way to protect my brothers and the foster children but it wasn't enough," she says.
"I thought that I was protecting others but that wasn't the truth. I couldn't see or prove what he was doing to other people because he was that manipulative, but something snapped inside me, everything changed.
"I thought, why the hell have I been trying to protect everybody else and put myself in the line of fire? A few weeks later I spoke out.”
Crimes exposed
As soon as she was told of the abuse, Emily's mum moved quickly to protect her, reporting her husband to the police and filing for divorce.
In the documentary, Emily meets the two police officers who handled her case, with one telling her she was a "ray of sunshine" and Emily replying: "I hate that because it was that trait which meant I was abused for so long."
They also read the statement from her dad which claims she was a "sexual kid" who straddled him and moved on him because she was "turned on" adding he felt "sexually aroused, guilty.”
"I was a toddler," says Emily. "You can't physically be sexual at that age because you don't have the hormones.
"When I heard that I thought I was going to have to run out of the room and be sick in the loo.
"I heard a lot more than is included in the documentary and it brought up all of those feelings I had as a child of blaming myself for everything, which the adult me doesn't do any more.
"But I wanted to show people that hearing the words of the abuser isn't something that we need to be afraid of.
"It was difficult for me to hear but on the other hand I now feel totally different. I now know there was no love there and I learned a lot from it."
While her dad was handed a sentence of 14 years for his horrific crimes, Emily and her mum struggled to deal with the trauma he left behind.
"When I first told mum she went into 'let's sort this out'' mode but it was only after he was in prison that all the emotional stuff came for her because she was in shock,” says Emily.
"I saw her struggle, she lost weight but there wasn't a second that she wasn't trying to support and be there for me.
"He left her with an insurmountable amount of financial debt which she had no idea about, because she trusted him completely, and he just took in every way possible.”
Emily also says she felt guilty during the abuse, adding: "I couldn't have done anything to stop it but I ruined her life as well.
"Imagine if your dad wanted to be with you instead of your mum, how horrible that makes you feel?
"I felt sorry for her all the time and I resented her as well on one level and thought’ ‘why weren't you able to see?”
Lasting damage
Escaping from the control her abuser had exerted wasn't as simple as seeing him jailed.
"At 18, I could not make a decision," she says. "I had never been allowed to make friends and I couldn't even decide what to eat because he had that level of control over me.
How you can get help
Women’s Aid has this advice for victims and their families:
- Always keep your phone nearby.
- Get in touch with charities for help, including the Women’s Aid live chat helpline and services such as SupportLine.
- If you are in danger, call 999.
- Familiarise yourself with the Silent Solution, reporting abuse without speaking down the phone, instead dialing “55”.
- Always keep some money on you, including change for a pay phone or bus fare.
- If you suspect your partner is about to attack you, try to go to a lower-risk area of the house – for example, where there is a way out and access to a telephone.
- Avoid the kitchen and garage, where there are likely to be knives or other weapons. Avoid rooms where you might become trapped, such as the bathroom, or where you might be shut into a cupboard or other small space.
If you are a victim of domestic abuse, SupportLine is open Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from 6pm to 8pm on 01708 765200. The charity’s email support service is open weekdays and weekends during the crisis – [email protected].
Women’s Aid provides a live chat service – available weekdays from 8am-6pm and weekends 10am-6pm.
You can also call the freephone 24-hour National Domestic Abuse Helpline on 0808 2000 247.
"I was told what to eat, when to wash my hair and what to do at all times. My brain and body had grown under fear and immense control so to step out of that was like retraining myself.
"Suddenly I've got all these choices and I was overwhelmed. I had to learn to find me again because I had vanished.
"But then I had my first love and I learned to trust people, which I didn't think was possible.
"I tried really hard to learn how to socialise and went to work in an upmarket bar, where I had no idea how to have a conversation, but I learned over time by pushing myself out of my comfort zone.
"I did some modelling, I presented on radio, I got a master's degree, I worked in fashion, went travelling and pushed myself.
"But part of it was also trying to avoid my feelings."
When she fell pregnant with her son, now seven, she was "forced to be still" and suffered from PTSD and anxiety.
She went on to build a successful career in media and says her dad's release from prison prompted her to put her story out there, in documentary form.
In the film, she meets a restorative justice liaison who approaches her dad about a possible meeting before telling her he refused, saying he had been through “a lot of therapy" and was worried seeing her would set HIS progress back.
"I wasn't surprised," says Emily. "He's been a coward his whole life. But I think there's potential to have that conversation with him in future."
Although making the documentary awakened some raw emotions, brave Emily says it has also "freed" her and let her see things from a different perspective.
"It's a journey. I'm just like Bridget Jones, a normal woman who's fun-loving, career driven, family orientated. But beneath that, I have had to really struggle," she says.
"I have bad days, like everybody, and I'll always be impacted by this but not in an all-consuming way.
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"I have lost that feeling of shame which was implanted in my brain at a young age, and that you carry with you, even if your adult brain knows you are not at fault. I now feel free of the past."
Paedophile in My Family: Surviving Dad airs on Channel 4 tonight at 9pm.
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