Dad hanging round outside bathroom *MNHQ Content warning for abuse*

[Househunter2025]

I was reading a thread that just got deleted and it's really made me think.

When I was a teenager my dad used to hang around outside the bathroom and my bedroom - I always found it really creepy but nothing else ever happened so I didn't really think it was abusive behaviour - but I always found it really creepy and couldn't stand being near him or alone with him. Never mentioned it to anyone before.

In my 40s now and it still bothers me. I'm hyper aware of my kids dad or other males on the family doing anything to them and it feels beyond all proportion. I don't think other parents have this fear.

A couple of posters on the other thread said they had experienced similar and I was about to reply but then it was deleted.

Don't know what I want from this thread really. I wouldn't mention anything to family - parents are elderly. I don't have sisters. Just want to come to terms with it and put it in perspective I guess.

Well there were extenuating circumstances. That's all you 'need' to know.

People don't post about their difficult situations for your entertainment.

You’re boring me now and you’re insulting me. Bye.

I am so very sorry. 💐 1¹1

The OP's right to protect herself trumps your prurient interest.

I didn't when I was young, it is the things I have been through in life at the hands (often literally) of men ranging from sexual and emotional abuse when growing up, through to being groped by a male doctor at age 15, to being sexually assaulted and beaten at 25 and then much more recently seriously sexually assaulted by a stranger who followed me when I was walking home from work. Then flavour this trauma with the endless every day sexism of being groped, cat called, and oh, just forgotten that I had a stalker for a while and while reading this thread suddenly recalled a male teacher at my all girls school who once came into our showers and was also shaggging a girl in my year (we were 15) . And this is just my life! Sit any group of women down in any age group and they will all have stories like this. Hard not to hate men or at least to be very wary of them

Thankfully, old attitudes to marriage and relationships are fading out. When I was a teen, in the 1990s, to be 30+ and single was still shameful. As a woman you were a failure, a loser – you'd been "left on the shelf," as my dad used to put it. So women would settle for the most repulsive, worthless little men because anything was better than being alone. It wasn't just the fear of loneliness. It was the stigma of being single. That seems to be dying. I'm sure a lot of women shamed their daughters, or told them to be quiet, when they complained of abuse by fathers and stepfathers because the mother feared losing her man – even if her man was a worthless sack of sh*t.

@StormingNorman i have already stated what happened, the op made a financial disclosure. Either read the thread fully or b*gger off.
I've interacted with you before and you are usually OK.
No one owes anyone a reply. This poster had said she was chucking the husband out. I also told her he could be charged with voyerism. Two year prison sentence. I hope she told her DDs biogical father and he's on a plane to put the fear of God in this pervert.
These men play a long game. Single woman with a pretty daughter? Be very afraid.

I was s*** abused by my biological father.

Your post is unhelpful.

I stopped reading the thread hours ago. I’m only replying to people quoting me because what I said has been blown ridiculously out of proportion.

I replied to a poster about how I thought it would pan out, she said there’d been an update and that what I thought wasn’t the case. I said that I hadn’t seen the last update because the thread had been taken down. Then made a throwaway comment about how it would make sense to leave threads up so people who had commented could see how it ended.

Cue me being accused of feeling “owed” an update and basically preying on other people’s crises for my own entertainment. I have a right to defend myself against people who are looking for an argument.

I was raped by a friend of my eldest brother when I was 5. It never occurred to me to tell an adult. I never thought I'd be believed. Lots of other shit going on. Mum dying of cancer.

Brother 3 years older than me often trying to push boundaries. By the time I was 14 it had gone too far. I think it probably scared us both how far it went when we were on holiday and sharing a room. I think it was a lot to do with curiosity but thinking about it now I wonder a bit.

Oh and I tried to report the rape to the police historically but they never responded.

Friends dad used to make her give him blow jobs. From about the age of 6.

What the fuck is wrong with these men?

I've read these stories and am shocked and saddened. I can't comprehend how these men can do these things to children. Let alone to their own kids. However, it does show how prevalent this type of behaviour was.

@Hettar I'm afraid you're in denial too. There's absolutely no reason to believe that it's any less prevalent now, but your mind can't accept that because it's too awful and you'd have to look at the men around you, so it sort of makes the 'fact' that this was all the old days up.

I'm not having a go at all, it's very common and hard to spot in your self. I'm sure I do it about other things.

StrongbutTired00

Thank you for your very kind reply. I’ve never told anyone about this.

Yes. But not talking therapies, counselling, CBT etc, and certainly not mindfulness.

I unravelled completely in my 30s to a very, very dark place, triggered by something that was totally unrelated to my childhood but that made me feel the same terrified way I did as a child. I attended a local mental health charity while I waited for NHS referral and had psychodynamic counselling. And that’s where everything really unravelled, and if anything I was in an even worse place.

My GP referred me to the NHS psychological services and I attended their trauma clinic. Those people saved my life, and gave me an adult life to live. I was diagnosed with a complex PTSD. We talked to some extent, but when you have no words talking therapies are pointless. I had EMDR treatments instead which focus more on your physiological, emotional, physical responses, pretty much every two weeks, and it’s the best (& hardest) thing I ever did. We cannot erase these terrible memories of what happened to us, but they CAN be processed, repackaged and filed away.

If someone had told me then about how different life would be now, I’d have never believed them. But here I am, living proof, that release and recovery from those atrocities is possible.

ETA: diagnosis and EMDR detail

Did it just happen the once? Your brother was also very little at age 8. I am wondering if perhaps he accidentally saw people, possibly your parents having sex and was trying to process what he saw himself. Idk.

Thank you for sharing your stories everyone. Some of them are so difficult to read. Big hugs to you all.

Name changed for this. Dad wasn't a paedophile but an ephebophile - one who is attracted to mid-to-late adolescents (15-19 according to Wiki). Dad met my future stepmother, who was 16 at the time, when she came to collect her younger sister, my 12 year old friend, from my birthday party.

When I was 17 he got me drunk and gave me cocaine and made me give him a hand job. I still remember this over 40 years later and I didn't give a fuck when my father died.

Before that, there were the two boys at the boys school who held me down aged 14 in the park, and fingered me, jeering.

Oh, and then there were the three 24 year old men who groomed me age 15, and all of them fucked me.

I have several friends with similar experiences. Don't forget 'godfathers' in the mix of predatory men. It really was almost normal in the 80s.

It brings to tears to my eyes, how awful this is. Speechless at the horror of what men do to little girls. I feel lucky in comparison, that I wasn't abused until around 14.

I agree. Off the back of this thread I've wondered what can we, collectively, do to enforce change? Mumsnet is a huge platform and whilst I'm sure speaking openly and frankly about these things may make some women think twice about their partners around their children I feel we could make a bigger impact.

I actually considered an idea that if we make enough noise and encourage enough people to all report their abusers on the same day each year we could clog up police phonelines on that specific day to highlight just how much of an issue this is but I wouldn't want to do that because it could proven someone in danger accessing the police at a time of immediate danger.

There must be something we can do though? If not to bring these men to justice now then to try and make sure this doesn't keep happening on the scale it has been (I'm not naive enough to think we can ever eradicate it completely) 😞

My abuser was my biological dad...

Do you think - as a society, we are stopping this kind of behaviour? Is it less likely to happen in 2025 than 20/30 years ago?

I think the power women get from sharing our stories is greater than their pleasure at reading them.

I do think that a site like this where women can speak so freely in large numbers can be a real catalyst for change. I think that is powerful and important.

It's only in silence that they keep us down. They are afraid of our power, that's why so many abusers tell us to stay silent.

I've been thinking A LOT about what can we do. I have few ideas, but I keep probing and thinking.

This behaviour is cultural, and culture can change. I do not believe men are biologically destined to be abusive in the numbers that are. I think it happens so much because they have power to do it and society mostly ignores it. By ignores it, I mean all the myths about women and girls lying, making it all up, low prosecution and conviction rates.

I think the 4B movement could be one way this could seriously reduce. Now that women have financial independence from men, could we end the patriarchy by simply... stepping away from it? Could it be that simple?

If women have strong boundaries and simply step away from these men who are abusive, only ever having relationships with decent men? idk

What if, instead of putting our future happiness in a romantic relationship, we looked for that happiness in relationships with other women? What if we searched for good women friends, even put our $ together to buy homes together and support each other? Raising our children in female dominated homes? That could be the beginning of a new matriarchy.

IMO until men as a collective step up, stop with the not-all-men responses and face the depth and breadth of male violence against women and children with real solidarity and action, then women would be better off to step away from them.

But the other piece of the puzzle is online porn, IMO it's a massive danger to women and children and so many men (and a few women) will fight to keep their access to it. For things to really change, it simply has to go. So I will always join any movement to fight to get it gone.