In the end, the toll was too much for Virginia Giuffre. “She lost her life to suicide, after being a lifelong victim of sexual abuse,” her family noted in their mourning statement.
The fact that her abuse happened a quarter of a century ago, when she was in her teens, was no bar to misery today. Time, after some experiences, is no healer.
James* also suffered sexual abuse as a youngster. Waking up to the news of Giuffre’s death brought his own struggles vividly to mind again. Including thoughts of suicide.
“For any survivor of abuse, as soon as someone succumbs to it and decides that they can’t carry on with it, you kind of think ‘OK’,” he says.
“You go through the strategies on how you need to survive yourself and keep pushing through, because it is something that stays with you forever. It never lets go.”
In her later years, Virginia Giuffre revealed that she had suffered abuse from her early teens while living as a runaway in Florida. James was also abused at the age of 13 by the Reverend David Barnes, a prolific abuser who served as chaplain at Sutton Valence School in Kent from the mid-1970s to 1987.
Subsequently he found that the trauma permeated every part of the life he wanted to lead. “When it happened to me I was so traumatised by it I started drinking heavily and smoking. And it was a constant battle. I started setting goals: I’ve got to live until 18, maybe then I’ll sort my head out. Then it was 21, then it was 30, then I got married and thought: ‘If I can just make it to 35 and have my first child.’ You’re constantly battling in your own head with survival. It never goes away, it affects everything.”
One of the particularly insidious effects of sexual abuse on young people, he says, is that somehow it is often the victim who feels to blame.
“There’s a huge amount of shame that comes with sexual abuse,” explains James. “You’re constantly questioning it, reliving the past and revisiting how it happened and what you could have done to change things, the effect that it’s had on you since then. It’s constant from every part of your life, from when you’re being intimate with your wife to when you’re just in the quiet of night,” says James.
According to Debi Roberts, CEO of The Ollie Foundation, a suicide prevention and well-being charity, the overwhelming majority of people who end their lives don’t actually want to die. “What they want is for the pain to end,” she says.
The charity believes suicide intervention and prevention knowledge should be widely distributed, to support those in moments of despair.
In particular, she says, it is important to support survivors of sexual assault, for whom seeking help can be more difficult as they don’t necessarily meet the criteria to be diagnosed with mental illness.
“They often find the pathway of support ending abruptly because there isn’t a mental illness. But the irony is that when left with the caustic and constant drip of your pain, you can end up in a mental health crisis,” she adds.
The toxic effect of abuse, she says, can mean living for decades with “the spectre of suicide”. For years many victims don’t act on those thoughts. “Then there are days when the hope evaporates.”
It is a vigilance that James is acutely aware of. In spite of seven years of therapy, his own method of coping has been “to keep pushing forward” with his life, both in his career and in his home life.
“I never allow myself to stand still and rest because it means that the memories come back and it’s hard to live with.”
He has found that talking about it, sometimes in articles like this, can help: “Then I know that other survivors feel like they’re not alone. And you’re basically raising awareness and scaring off other predators.”
But he has chosen to retain his anonymity. He cannot imagine the ordeal of Giuffre, who gave hers up.
“She decided to give up her anonymity and because of that she was constantly going to be reading about herself and people are going to be judging and trolling. And it’s bad enough being anonymous. With such a high profile, [and] with such high profile people involved, it is unimaginable. I should imagine she just thought she couldn’t carry on with this.”
Roberts explains that moral injury, which refers to the psychological distress that arises from experiencing events that violate a person’s moral or ethical code, falls into two areas.
“On the one hand moral injury can be experienced when you perpetuate or witness or fail to prevent something that goes against your moral values. The second area of moral injury is where you were not protected by an individual or an organisation, or a country, a government that should have protected you. That is very much what we’re talking about here.”
Roberts says the trauma of sexual assault – even if that abuse was decades ago and the abuser is nowhere near you now – can leave the foundation of your life totally unstable, because you were not protected.
“You were vulnerable and maybe an institution didn’t protect you, or people close to you didn’t protect you or believe you. The issue here is that you were not kept safe then or now and that makes the world a very challenging place to be in,” explains Roberts.
“It’s awful to have been a victim and have to defend yourself. It breaks people. It is absolutely horrific.”
James knows that all too well: “The important thing to remember that no matter how much someone is compensated, if they’ve been offered however many millions, it never erases what sexual abuse does.”
*Name has been changed.
When life is difficult, Samaritans are here – day or night, 365 days a year. You can call them for free on 116 123, email them at jo@samaritans.org, or visit www.samaritans.org to find your nearest branch.
