I cannot remember if I was seven or eight years old when one of my uncles called me to his room one night. As he chatted with me, he started to touch my private parts and had me touch his. I froze and didn’t know how to react. I recall being quiet and following his instructions. He told me not to tell my mother or anyone else. It was our secret.

This scenario repeated itself every time we visited my grandparents. One year, another uncle of mine did the same with me. Even though what was happening didn’t feel right, there wasn’t anyone whom I thought would believe me or whom felt safe to talk to. As I got older, I felt overwhelmed by guilt and shame, and kept what I thought were confusing experiences to myself. Then adolescence came and I learnt that what I had experienced was sexual abuse.

I stepped into teenhood believing that I was “dirtied” and no longer pure. My relationship with my mother hadn’t been good for a long time and it took an argument with her when I was 14 for me to finally blurt out all that my uncles had done. While the abuse stopped, no one actually addressed what had happened in those years with me. No one apologised. Everything was swept under the carpet. I felt betrayed by my own mother, “de led” by my uncles, and resented almost all my family members for not protecting me better.