The babysitter was a trusted teenager. He let 7-year-old Patricia stay up later than her brothers and told her she was getting special treatment because she was special.
He let her watch television – if she sat on his lap.
“He put his finger in my vagina,” Patricia said. “I didn’t know I even had a vagina.
“It went on for a long time.”
Patricia’s story illustrates the high cost exacted from young victims of sexual assault. The Denver Post isn’t publishing her full name.
“These are lifelong effects,” she said. At the apex of her struggle, she said, some days were “crawling on your belly to get to therapy” ordeals.
Patricia is now nearing 50 – and she is herself a professional counselor of sexual-assault victims – but emotional triggers from that night, and from additional abuse as a teenager, haunt her still.
She has been in and out of therapy since her early 20s, when she very nearly lost all control. She was bulimic. She had dropped out of graduate school and lost contact with her family. She was a black-out drunk, did drugs and fought suicidal urges.
“I was one sick cookie,” she said.
It took two years of intensive counseling and treatment with antidepressants to get her back on her feet. She didn’t return to school for years.
Back in the 1960s, when she was first molested, the issue of childhood sexual abuse was hidden. Patricia didn’t tell her mother about the babysitter.
Later, when she was 16, a family friend also abused Patricia. What started as forced fondling off and on for two years turned to rape one night.
With her mother and then his own wife in the house, the man paid a visit to Patricia’s bedroom as if to say good night.
“He pulled up my nightgown and pulled down his pants and he raped me,” she said.
The man manipulated her for sex for two more years. Patricia says her mother refused to listen, and she never felt strong enough to report him to police. As a counselor, she learned that many victims fall prey to others, and often don’t tell, because they feel they no longer have the right to resist.
“This is a very insidious process,” she said.
Patricia described a childhood filled with tremendous problems. She was anorexic at 7, drinking at 10.
“To this day I can’t wear makeup,” she said. “I just feel dirty.”
When she hit bottom after quitting school, Patricia found a therapist at Denver Health Medical Center.
Though the process was painful, it brought results.
“He saved my life,” she said. “He told me that it was not my fault. That was huge news.
“I didn’t know until then that others were being abused. I thought it was just me.”
But the breakthrough hasn’t been complete. When her first child reached the age of 7, it triggered all those emotions from long ago.
And then her peace shattered again when her child reached 16, triggering emotions from the rapes.
Recently, when Patricia thought of that trusted family friend who raped her, she drew in breath so fast it sounded like something tearing apart.
“I could kill that man,” she said.
Staff writer Chuck Plunkett can be reached at 303-954-1333 or cplunkett@denverpost.com.
