How many women has this happened to (maybe triggering?)

[Mad8NR1]

I've just watched Dark Money on BBC1 and it's left me wondering. V different circumstances but it did bring up some stuff.

I started having sex much sooner than I should have, when I was 14. With much older men. Several men over the years between 14 and 18, not loads. Some were 18, some in their late twenties (when I was 14).

At the time I thought I was being very grown up, but I was also very uncomfortable with it at the same time.

I had a mental health crisis a year or so before this started so was quite shakey in the world. I was absent from school due to this for over a year and in that time my parents tried to encourage me to do things I was interested in. That meant theatres and music. I was given more freedom than a child that age should be, I think because my parents were frightened of stopping me doing things I had some enthusiasm for. I don't blame them, though I do think they should have had a tighter grasp of things. They did their best in a tough situation.

The men I was involved with were all theatre/music people. They all knew each other in some way. Some of them were known to my family, though not that well. Others not. None of them have gone on to be famous or anything, but one or two are very succesful in other fields.

Some were more coersive and manipulative than others. One tried to get me to be in a (dodgy) film. Topless. To which I said no.

Over the years I've come to understand that I was quite vulnerable and they probably took more advantage than I realised at the time. And I know what the law would say. But I've always felt iffy about how to label these 'relationships' (if you can call them that).

It led to a lot of problems for me and further mental health issues. I felt shame and guilt and a distorted sense of who I was as a person, where my value and self worth lay. It still does to an extent. Luckilly I am married to a wonderful, gentle, respectful man of integrity who I met over a decade later and is the only person who knows about any of this stuff.

And it just made me wonder, how common is this?

Sorry if I upset anyone. I'm still trying to unpack it all I guess. I've had psychological help for other things over the years and it's touched on this but never fully explored it.

Thanks for reading this far and sorry for the long post.

I think about that time often and how it took me until I was in my 30's to value myself. I resent my mother for not recognising how vulnerable I was and how low I had become. I have sons and am currently pregnant with another child, I will make it my life's mission to make sure my children grow up to respect themselves and their peers and know that I will always be their biggest advocate! It would kill me to see one of my children filled with self hate the way I was!

I and my friends also thought we were cool though. We would have argued til we were blue in the face about how it was OK to have sex with these men. And I enjoyed the actual physical sex, but once it was done I would be haunted by the shame of potentially being found out, the fear of pregnancy, and I found the emotional fall out beyond me. I also remember a distinct feeling of having lost my innocence, not in the old fashioned sense, but just an awareness that I was navigating deep waters when I should have been back in the shallows.

I would love some suggestions on how to teach girls not to fall into this sort of trap. I think I will take a stricter line than my parents, but I don't want to fall over too far in the other direction either

I went to an all girls school. It was quite common. We all thought that we were very grown up. I remember at my saturday job there was a security guard whose friends were going out with my 16 yo friends. I clearly remember him saying that he couldnt believe his friends were going out with 16yos. "Theyre lovely girls, but theyre 16!" I didnt understand what he meant. I do now!

Its not just you. I only started sex at 18 and was exploited all through my early 20s. Men target young women because they arent brave enough to tackle 30+ women who've seen all their bullshit before. They want an easy, compliant shag from a warm, moist doll and nothing more :(

I was a teenager in the seventies. I shudder when I think what was considered normal and the pressure put on underage girls not to be "frigid". I'm in a foreign country atm and it's shocking to see older men openly leering at young girls.

You can't change the experiences but you can change your perception of them. And you certainly don't have to accept blame and responsibility for other people's conduct.

This is one of the saddest things I've ever seen on here. All these women left with shame, guilt and mental health problems because of the actions of predatory males. Please get some counselling if you haven't already so the blame and shame is placed fairly and squarely where it belongs: with the predatory men, and in some cases the poor parenting that led you to have low self esteem in the first place, so you were more vulnerable to them.

I was never in the environment where it could have happened to me at such a young age. But I was vulnerable to it at an older age and it just exacerbated my already low self esteem.

to you all.

It's not just young girls that get taken advantage of; a friend of mine lost his virginity to his (male) school bus driver at the age of 12! The way he tells it, he (my friend) seduced him (the bus driver), but the story makes me feel very uncomfortable

These men know that a lot of teenage girls are so desperate to feel grown up and cool, so they take advantage of that.

There was a girl I was at sixth form college with who lodged in that town during the week and went home to her much more rural village the weekends. In her O level year (this was the mid-80s), she'd started sleeping with one of her teachers and in the end he left his wife and children for her.

Two things, even back then at 16 with the world turning a blind eye to these things far more than would happen now, always struck me as screwed up: firstly, that nothing happened to him professionally - he kept his job in the same school even though everyone knew. Secondly, that so many of my friends at college thought it was acceptable, cool even, that she'd done this. I'm still - in my late 40s - shocked by this.

On the other hand, at 19 I was in a relationship with a man in his early 30s and it was really positive - he was encouraging of my ambitions, not controlling, respectful of my boundaries, all those things. We split up after over a year because I couldn't cope with his job any more (he was in the army, it was the first gulf war etc).

But I'm still horrfied by my college friend's teacher. She went on to have an affair with one of our married lecturers.

It was horribly common when I was a teenager in the early 90s, unfortunately.
At 15, I was ‘dating’ a man in his 20s who used to drop me to school in his flash car with nobody saying a word about it.

My best friend was seeing a man in his 30s. We went to nightclubs every weekend, took drugs, met older men. It was totally normalised.

My mum was a single parent who worked full time in a demanding job and also cared for my younger sibling with SN and gran with dementia, so there was very little supervision of me and it was easy, in retrospect, for men to prey on me.

I think this was fairly common in the 70s and 80s when I was coming up. Most of my friends had had sex by the time they were 15. And none of us really understood consent.

Man/boy wants to have sex - we have sex even if we didn't want to - defo not rape, as he wasn't a stranger. That was the attitude back then. And I could not even count the number of "relationships" I knew of between teaching staff and pupils.

When I was 16 I dated two much older men, 24 and 26. I actually didn’t want to have sex but they really tried to persuade me, they both dumped me. I used to walk past the 24 year olds workplace to get to school and I remember his mates cheering at me when they were all outside once. I look back and I shudder.

The 26 year old was an absolute disgrace because he was a lecturer at the local further education college.

Me and the other girls in my street. We thought we were grown up and were flattered by the interest of older men. It’s only with hindsight that you realise the age gap was huge and you were a child. One neighbour was 12 when she had sex with a 23yo man, afterwards he told her she was a slut and drove her home. It didn’t occur to anyone that a crime had been committed. Two girls got pregnant at 13 and 15 to the same 20yo neighbour, again nobody (even parents) thought to report it. I think it was just a different time where that sort of stuff was accepted and normalised because you saw it happening repeatedly around you. Nowadays both girls and parents are more aware.

I'm no social historian and certainly not taking the culpability away from the men involved but I was initially thinking what a PP expressed well.

Going on the dates of a lot of PPs' experiences- late 70s, 80s, 90s, in my case 00s but my parents were older- it would make sense that our parents were part of quite a pioneering generation who became sexually active in the liberal 60s and 70s. After previous generations where I understand teenage sex was frowned upon (not saying it didnt happen), it seems as though they struggled reconciling this liberal attitude of 'sex isn't shameful and better that it is practised safely than in a field somewhere', with establishing safe boundaries for teenagers. Obv I don't include the abusive or fully neglectful parents in this, just those like mine who gave too much freedom.

I hope to have children and at least one daughter in future and can say with some certainty that I intend to have a different approach to their teenage years. Haven't fully worked out what this will be yet though!

I had similar experiences too, but the men involved weren't part of any particular industry or scene. It was very common amongst my friends and schoolmates too. My best friend's Mum let her 22 year old boyfriend move in with them when my friend was 14! Ostensibly to stay in the sofa, but that only lasted a week. His dad kicked him out for sleeping with a 13/14 year old and the mum felt sorry for him as it was her daughter's fault for leading him astray in her mind! As long as they were under her roof she could keep an eye on it, she said (suspect she needed the rent money as he was earning good wages more than anything). If his workmates saw us out, we had to pretend we were 16 to them so they didn't kick his arse. That should've been a sign it wasn't acceptable...

Safeguarding just wasn't a thing then. Our form tutor overheard one of us talking about a pregnancy scare at 14 and had a chat with the girl involved. She did actually phone home and tell the parents that their daughter was at risk. Her dad told the teacher to 'stop being a nosy bitch' and yelled at my classmate for being 'a slag' then that was it. Her 'boyfriend' was in his late 20s

Many of my friends were given far too much freedom. In contrast, I wasn't allowed much freedom at all, my parents were very strict. So that made it worse in a way - if I wasn't misbehaving or doing something outrageous in the little time I was allowed out, I'd see it as a wasted opportunity! I felt uncomfortable with some of it, and my parents would have been appalled at things I did. But they'd be just as appalled if I had sex at 35 if I wasn't married (and were!) , so I didn't heed that as a warning that if they'd have been upset maybe I shouldn't be doing it, if that makes sense. Going to uni actually made me far more sensible and stable as I was with friends who just hadn't grown up in areas like that.

One of my friends had sex with over 20 youths whilst she was 13. She used to have sex with one after another in bushes etc.Luckily she never got pregnant.She had a terrible home life so was desperate for attention.

One of the sixth form teachers had an affair with a pupil who was in the 5th year then 6th form and she got pregnant and moved in with him.He kept his job.

At college one of my friends told me that one of her Dads friends raped her whilst she was a schoolgirl. What makes this even worse was that he was a very senior policeman for that area.

I think this its rife and that children of both sexes need to be told about predatory relationships early on really.

Same here too.

It happened a lot (including to my older D half-sister - the "half" is relevant because that meant she had a pretty mixed up upbringing with her parents squabbling over her, which left her very vulberable) when I was younger. I remember youth activities I was involved in (early 80s) where the male staff had "relationships" with the teen girls in their care (for "had relationships" read behaved like predatory abusive fuckers).

Sadly I think it still goes on, and many adults still victim blame. I was talking to a friend about mutual friends of ours, and she started telling me how the teen daughter had "gone off the rails". It was blindingly obvious to me that this was the sort of "acting out" you see after sexual abuse, so I asked directly, and was told "well, yes, she was assaulted when she was about 12, but that's nothing to do with how difficult she's being as a 14 year old"! Many people are just utterly dense about the aftermath of child sexual abuse.

To all the women on this thread who've suffered similar to my DSis . It does have a lasting impact, right into adulthood.

It wasn’t just you. I was only “saved”
from it because of my parents cultural and religious background which meant sex before marriage was totally forbidden and I was terrified of being made homeless or being outcast from my family.

In the Arts, from my experience, this is VERY common. Young, vulnerable women with poor boundaries are targets. I was groomed and totally had my head fucked up by two lecturers at different drama schools, both in their mid-40s. One messed me up so badly, by playing into the negative beliefs I had about myself, that I didn’t believe any boy my own age would like me. The other had been sacked from several drama schools for having sex with many students. Whilst I was at drama school he was having sex with at least 5 students that I knew of.

My friend at 13 was having sex with her 19 year old “boyfriend” from youth theatre. I went to a theatre school where the lads who were over 18 but under 25 were not interested in young women their own age - they were literally ploughing through the 13 - 15 year olds, picking them off one at a time. I bumped into the Principal recently and he said “it’s a good job #MeToo wasn’t around then!” and laughed. I felt sick. While he himself wasn’t pervy, he also totally ignored the sexual exploitation of a 13 year old who’d had pictures taken of her in her underwear by a 15 year boy and he allowed a man in his 30s who was stalking me to harass me at the school for years and refused to ban him from the premises even though he had no reason at all to be there. He also turned a blind eye to a “pervy” teacher who was frightening a 15 year old girl with his constant sexual harassment of her. This man at this time (early 2000s) had 4 daughters between 10 and 15. He blamed the fact the girls were messed up, seeing his daughters as different.

In the Arts you are brainwashed and not seen as a human but another performing little doll that anyone can use and play with and then cast aside when she’s broken or another prettier, shinier doll comes around. You having feelings is a mere inconvenience...you need to get rid of those if you want to succeed, fit in, get ahead. Extreme sexual behaviour is normalised and if you voice any fears and concerns you are labelled as frigid or a prude - you aren’t liberal enough for those circles. I found it a very sick and toxic industry.

I’m so sorry for all you went through and hope you realise it wasn’t you, it was the sick men around you.

Ok. I'll bite. I lost my virginity at 14 and a half - with a man 2 years older but mostly under peer pressure from my friends (yes I know!).

Then I had sex a couple more times but dated men who were journalists one when I was 18 - these were men approx 40. Had sex with one man.

My parents had no idea what I was up to and friends didn't either. When I was 21 I met someone who was about 3-4 years older and this was more 'normal' and I then had more age relevant to me relationships and sex.

I do think older men who target younger women are predators.

I was only thinking about this the other day.

At 13 I was going out with various 18+ year olds
At 15 I was going out with various 22+ year olds.
There was no sex, because I refused but, that made them more keen.
At 19 my first proper boyfriend was 40.
I think now, with a 12 year old how disgusting that was and wonder what the hell I was thinking and why my parents were not going mental.

Oh another example - had a very pretty friend from approx age 2 onwards who had lots of boyfriends growing up. Then she went to uni (I didn't) and we lost touch due to distance etc. Then we reconnected and she mentioned she was living with someone older (I think she met at or through uni, friend of her lecturer) who taught singing etc. She was with him for years but felt fine with him until a few years later they broke up and she felt she'd been used/groomed etc and now she's 46/47 like me, but whereas I have kids and got married she didn't. Left it too late. They broke up when I think she was mid to late 30s.

I too think the arts are particularly prone to this sort of thing. Relationships are intensified by the nature of the work, boundaries can be blurry because they're so different to those in real life.

One man in particular used to think it was hilarious to grab a boob or slap your arse as you walked past, flash from offstage where some people could see but not others. Pheobe Waller Bridge told a story of something similar on a chat show not long ago (alhough they were all adults) and it was all "hahaha! Soooo funny!". It immediately seemed wrong to me.

I often think of the other supposedly responsible adults around who knew exactly what was going on and did nothing, or labelled me as one of 'those girls' and blamed me.

These men are criminals. The parents are ignorant and perhaps ineffectual but once the child has been groomed and thinks that this guy is her boyfriend, can the parents stop it from happening?

Presumably they skip school and see these men during the day so grounding wouldn't work.

The responsibility lies with the perpetrators.

Not dissimilar, in my early/mid teens I would speak with much older men on the phone and the nature of the calls was extremely dark. I thought I was fully in control of the situation. I met with a man in his 30s in the middle of nowhere. Thankfully no sex but I was putting myself in such a dangerous situation.