She was sexually assaulted by her stepfather for a decade — from age nine to 19.
Through all those years, she never told anyone about what was going on at the Alberta farm while her mother was away working and her stepfather was homeschooling her.
“There were many reasons — including the shame factor,” said “Jane.”
Jane is not her real name. She cannot be identified because of a court-ordered ban on publication of her name.
The now 26-year-old married mom of two kids, who teaches martial arts in Calgary. She told her story during the Central Alberta Sexual Assault Support Centre luncheon at the Black Knight Inn on Tuesday, in the hope it would prompt other abused people to speak out and seek help.
“First of all, you’re convinced as a child that, somehow, it’s your fault,” she said, in an interview before her talk.
“Then he’d tell me that my mom was not strong enough to handle it, that she’d probably kill herself if the family broke up.”
She added her stepfather also made threats of violence. “He’d tell me where he was going to bury my body.”
As she grew older, she thought the sex assaults would stop, “but they only got worse.”
She took some pills in a teenage suicide attempt (her stepfather rushed her to the hospital claiming she had food poisoning), but no one else seemed to twig to what was going on.
She doesn’t blame her mother, saying there were few outward signs of the abuse she managed to compartmentalize. “I was a provincial champion at horse events. I three-day evented in high school,” she said. “No one saw anything was wrong.”
All the same, “it was a big burden,” she admitted.
“I began feeling a little threadbare, like I was falling apart, because it took a lot of work to keep my lives separate.”
Finally, after moving out of the house at age 19 and feeling more in control of her life, she told her mother about the years of abuse.
“When my little brother turned nine, I was worried my stepfather would try the same thing with him.”
Jane’s mother never doubted her story, and immediately encouraged her to call the police and report the assaults.
Had Jane known then about the Central Alberta Sexual Assault Support Centre, she said she would have called there first.
Having to reveal details of what happened to police for what turned out to be a three-hour question-and-answer session was extremely difficult. She believes the process would have been easier had she first told her story to counsellors at the centre, “and I could have had somebody there as a support.”
The centre “is an incredible resource that’s helped me get my life together.”
She wants to spread the word about the non-profit counselling, support and education organization, which she found out about through a police referral.
Centre staff later accompanied her to court during her stepfather’s trial. She said he was found guilty, sent to jail and was recently released.
She credits three years of counselling at the Red Deer-based centre — first weekly sessions, then ones a couple of times a year — for helping her evolve from a sexual assault survivor to a “thriver.”
Jane advises anyone going through the same kind of abuse to “tell someone, and if they don’t believe you, tell someone else,” until someone pays attention.
She believes society has to stop blaming victims of sexual assault — especially date rape. “People say ‘Well, she shouldn’t have been wearing that,’ or ‘She shouldn’t have been that drunk,’ but this is a crime.
“At any point when somebody says ‘No,’ everything after that is rape.”
If lack of clothing was a provocation for sexual abuse, she added women wearing head-to-toe burkas would never be sexually assaulted — “but that is not the case.”
lmichelin@www.reddeeradvocate.com