Year of birth: 1967
Type of care facility: Rangitīkei College in Marton
Ethnicity: Pākehā

I started this journey about six years ago. I made one sculpture to portray what I couldn’t say to my psychiatrist and psychologist, so I thought that I would try and sculpt an emotion. Emotions that I could never say out loud. That’s where The Secret Keeper started. It took me about 18 months to get brave enough just to make a whole body. At first all I could make were arms and legs. I made her out of many different materials because I didn’t want her to be easily broken. She’d already been broken enough. I wanted her to be very solid, so she would never ever break or crack again.

She’s the Secret Keeper because she’s kept all the secrets that I was unable to say.

I am telling my story because I have realised that secrets make you sick. I always felt it was my fault. The shame and stigma keep me silent, alone and isolated. Now after speaking out I know I’m not alone anymore.

When I went to College I loved drawing, I’d spent my whole life drawing, and I wanted to be an architect.

The Tech Drawing class wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. I loved the tech drawing but what should’ve been a supportive environment to get a student to reach their potential, dreams and aspirations, turned out to be more of a nightmare. With everything else that had happened and intertwined in my life, it was just another person doing another thing. It was like you get this neon sign saying, “Pick me, pick me”.

The teacher that we had, used to push himself up against me and jam me into the tech drawing tables, He used to put his hand down my shirt and pin me up against the desk.

“We have no hands. Hands do bad things. Powerless, we breathe every breath as if it is our last. We can’t protect ourselves or ask for help. It feels like a plaster cast is wrapped around our mouths. No one can hear our voices through the layers of cloth sodden with tears. So, I hated hands. When I was little, hands did bad things, so I still hate my hands to this day.”

He used to obviously get off on it because he would be hard, and he would push himself into me and push himself into my back. I would feel him being erect and stuff, and it was every tech drawing class, it wasn’t just once. He would corner me or he would call me out into the back office. It just wasn’t the environment that it should’ve been for being in a public school. It was just a given thing. So many students knew it was happening, but nobody said anything. I was too petrified to say anything.

There were very few girls that did tech drawing. There was only ever one or two of us in the class. But it just was something that happened, and I didn’t really realise but it happened to a lot of girls over a long period of time. I think most people our age had a teacher that was either known as creepy or handsy or touchy-feely and they just seem to stay in those positions.

Because of what he did to me I never got a chance to go to university or to get a degree. It impacts my life still to this day because I feel worthless, and I feel like I haven’t got that piece of paper that says that I achieved something from school. I left school really early and became unwell and my mental health deteriorated.

“I became someone else the first time I was touched, trapped in a body that doesn’t belong to me. I look upwards, asking for help. My eyes are trying to tell but no one sees. Tears fall as my innocence is taken. I have lost who I am and fear who I’ve become.”

I’m unable to sleep with my husband because of the nightmares. If I travel, most of the time I have someone supporting me. I am a child in an adult’s body. I look like an adult and I sound like an adult but I’m not an adult.

I’ve had more non-consensual sexual partners than I have had consensual partners in my life and I had nobody to tell because I was terrified that if I told, I would die. I had been sexually abused from a young age so, as far as I was concerned, it was just what was happening to me. It was just another thing to happen.

“My thoughts slow, voices fade into the background, sensations dull. Everything gets further and further away. Numbness drifts across my body. I gradually lose myself as my body disconnects. You get a numbness as you get touched, you change, you become somebody else. There’s a numbness just goes across your body and you just lose all feelings, you lose – it’s like you enter into a tunnel and you just slowly disappear as it’s being done to you, and you just slowly disconnect.”

I am unable to do so much. I’ve never tasted tea or coffee because of past abuse. I can’t drink alcohol because if I smell alcohol I vomit.

“The pungent smell of his alcohol-fuelled breath penetrates my lungs. When he inhales and exhales, I feel every drop of the stale air. As I’m taken over, venom has been injected into my veins. Everything is slow motion, voices dim, pain subsides. As I dissociate, we drift to another place, a world high above us where we float, watching it as if it’s not us. So, you go from here to here in a very short space of time. It can be seconds, and then you just feel like you’re floating high above and watching from a distance.”

It takes away so much of your social life that everyday people take for granted. My ability to do so much has been impeded. My mental health has been really impacted. I got put on medication which put on 40 kilos of weight. That has its own effects. I still see a psychologist every week, a psychiatrist every three months.

I’m 53 years old and I have three or four nightmares every night reliving that event that happened more than 40 years ago.

“I would lay terrified in bed and I would be terrified of the monsters, but my monsters were real. I would watch from above, high above, and I just – I couldn’t stay in my body so I would dissociate, and I would climb up to a safe place.”

“I lay terrified, curled in a tiny ball. I tried to make myself invisible from the monsters hiding in my bedroom, prowling shadows that are ready to pounce when the light is turned off. They snatch pieces of me and come back night after night to haunt me as horror-filled nightmares. They live in my past, present and future, feeding off my anxiety.”

I relive that every night to the point where I’m sick, sometimes I even vomit. I get petrified of going to sleep and closing my eyes, to the point where if I’m with somebody that’s supporting me, I look to them, and one of the last words that I often say, I’ve been told, which often I don’t remember, is, “Please promise I’m not going to die tonight because I’ve told. I’ve told my secrets.”

That’s why so many people don’t come forward, because they’ve been blackmailed, they’ve been sworn to secrecy, they’re told they’re going to die if they say anything. It’s just horrendous, the long-term effects that this has on people. My journey I will take with me to the day I die.

People that live with sexual abuse – it’s a really dark place and people often don’t know how dark that place is unless you’ve been there. Three o’clock in the morning, I’ve spent many hours rocking in the foetal position, holding myself that tight that I’ve left bruises on my arms because that’s the only person I had, was me inside to hold on to myself. I spent years and years like that, unable to tell anybody, unable to do anything. So, it’s just shining a light on this new generation that we need to make changes for.

The ramifications are huge. What it does is ongoing.

It needs to change. It’s broken. You have a whole generation of broken people like myself. There are thousands of us, and if things aren’t changed it’s just going to carry on and their children and their grandchildren are all going to be broken just like us.

Source

Witness statement of Catherine Daniels (7 June 2022).