There was an article in the Sunday Times that I can’t get out of my head. It was a report on sexual abuse between siblings. Apparently it’s far more common than we realise, it’s just that people never talk about it. (Campaigners refer to it as the ‘ick factor’.) Do you think that’s true? I mean that it’s far more common than we realise?
The article was several pages long and involved interviews with numerous survivors. What struck me was how ordinary the families were. You’d expect something like that to occur only in violent, abusive families - where the abusive child has been traumatised or damaged. But many of them seemed to be happy, loving families. Made me wonder it’s internet porn. Or is it that this has always gone on, but people never spoke about it? Several of the survivors had kept quiet for decades because they didn’t want to hurt their parents. Then they read something online and it opened the floodgates. It’s easy to forget what life was like pre-internet. Someone who’d been abused by her brother when she was a child would never have met a fellow survivor. And she’d never have found any information on such a subject, unless she searched the bookshops. Now at the flick of a switch you can talk to survivors from all over the world, and find limitless information.