Thank you.

My Father didn’t just physically abuse me when I was young. He spent years emotionally abusing me for having Asperger’s, ADHD and OCD and he would call me names like a retard, spastic and a ****up and it ****ed with my head for a long time and when he wasn’t abusing me he would expose himself to my sister and touch her inappropriately at night and it wasn’t until my sister was older that we got away from him and that was one of the best days of my life. Child abuse is one of many offences that are often swept under the rug here in Australia because most people rather not talk about it and like to pretend that it doesn’t happen even when they see the bruises on the kids’ bodies and I know the attitude only too well and I sadly don’t see it changing any time soon.

It has been the same way here for the past thirty years and I know many other victims of child abuse that were subjected to regular beatings from their parents and some of them suffered from very low self-esteem while others were so traumatised it made it very difficult for them to trust anybody later in their lives which lead to them being alone most of the time. I still have trust issues and I can’t trust anybody unless I have known them for a while but thankfully I had a very kind and caring older sister that was like a Mum to me and she helped me through a lot over the years and I trust her more than anybody in the world with the exception of my Wife and daughters. Not everybody that has suffered from child abuse was as lucky as me though and I think a lot of people judge them without really understanding them.