Given the traumatic nature of the experience why didn’t I simply go to my Mum and tell her what had happened?

There’s one very shallow and unconvincing answer which is that I was afraid of being punished myself.

Anyone of my generation will know how naughty boys were customarily dealt with and that would certainly have happened but I was hardly a stranger to this sort of treatment by the age of 10 and a sore bottom doesn’t stay sore for very long.

A slightly more realistic answer is that I was scared of K, the teenager who committed the offense. He was a great deal bigger than me, physically a full adult and tough, with a reputation for violent behaviour when crossed.

An even more convincing answer is the sense of shame I felt after that morning. I knew that everything I’d allowed, sometimes encouraged to happen was wrong not so much in the legal sense but in the moral and religious sense.

I had a pretty strict Christian upbringing and had been given a fairly strong set of moral values, most of which I appreciated and tried to live by. I wasn’t a cruel boy and never joined in when another child was picked on at school, I was far more likely to offer comfort to the victim.

It may seem facile to some but there was a trust issue as well. Every time I’d been with K he would extract my promise that I wouldn’t tell anybody what we’d been doing.

I’d learned some very painful lessons in my short life about the importance of keeping promises but didn’t have the analytical tools to understand that a promise of secrecy under those circumstances was meaningless.

Thus when K made me actually say the words “I promise not to tell anybody” after each meeting I believed that I had to keep that promise.

Intellectually, and I use the word advisedly, I knew that these clandestine meetings with K were wrong, that being naked around him was wrong and that letting him touch me (and touching him in return) was very wrong.

So why did I allow it to happen again and again? Taking my courage in both hands and admitting to Mum what had been going on would have changed history, well mine anyway.

Every time that K went too far and either hurt or frightened me his apologies were contrite and seemed utterly genuine. He would invest a great deal of time comforting me and would then scale back his actions while slowly building towards the next major event.

Like countless abuse victims before and after me, I accepted his apologies and allowed myself to remain in his power. That is the key word when discussing the successful perpetration of child abuse.

It’s all about power.

Love