The Little Prisoner_ A Memoir - Jane Elliott [66]
One of the books I read was A Child Called It by Dave Peltzer and I was inspired by the way in which he had got his life together after his abused childhood. I knew a lot of people who had read it and said they couldn’t believe that everything he had written about his mother was true, but I believed it because I had been there too. I could imagine every single scene that he described.
‘You have to read this book,’ I told my psychologist on my next visit. ‘You absolutely have to read it. There must be a school somewhere turning out these people, because they’re all the same.’
‘What people?’ He took the book from me, looking puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’
‘People who do these things to children. They must all come from the same place. They do all the same things. Everything his mother did I can imagine my stepdad doing.’
It took a year of psychotherapy before I felt able to seriously think of going to the police. You can’t overcome a lifetime of fear overnight and I changed my mind a hundred times, but I finally decided I felt strong enough to do what I had always known I should.
‘I think I might be able to go to the police about Silly Git,’ I told Steve one day.
It was just what he had been hoping to hear. He believed with all his heart that no man should be allowed to get away with those sorts of crimes against a child and he had wanted me to speak out for years. He and his parents had kept saying things like ‘How will you feel if he does it to someone else and you could have stopped him?’
Now Steve went straight to the local police station on my behalf. There they told him that he had to lodge the complaint at the station in the area where the crimes had been committed. He drove straight there. I think he wanted to make sure he got the ball rolling before I had a chance to change my mind. He was right. I changed my mind at hourly intervals from then on, but it was too late to go back now and most of the time I knew I was doing the right thing, even if sometimes the fear became almost too much to bear.
An officer called Marie from the Child Protection Unit came to visit me first. I could see that she was more or less going through the motions and I felt guilty for bothering her. I kept apologizing and saying I was sure there must be better things she could be doing with her time, rescuing children who were in danger now rather than listening to a grown up complaining about something that happened years ago. I always felt guilty when I watched news programmes about children starving in Africa or losing limbs to landmines, thinking that I really didn’t have that much to complain about. Now I kept saying that it wasn’t that bad and that kids were probably going through worse all the time. I must have been undermining Marie’s confidence in the case with every new thing I said.
Marie asked me if my stepfather had ever been arrested and I said he’d been arrested hundreds of times but he never ended up going to prison because he always intimidated the witnesses and anyone who brought charges against him always withdrew them again under pressure. I could see that she was becoming exasperated and I realized that it did sound like a far-fetched story.
‘Pull his file,’ I said. ‘Then you’ll be able to see for yourself.’
By the time she left I think Marie was thinking about just putting my complaint on file and leaving it at that. She had explained very patiently how hard it was for the Crown Prosecution Service to actually prosecute in a case like mine. I wasn’t surprised, sure that I must be one of millions who had had terrible things done to them in their childhood, but pleased that I had at least spoken up. As long as my complaint was on record somewhere, I reasoned, Richard would be less likely to get away with the same thing again.
To my surprise Marie came back the very next day, having checked Richard’s record.