UNITED KINGDOM
Telegram
Polly Dunbar
19 JUNE 2016
For more than 60 years, Sylvia Woosley kept a terrible secret. When she finally spoke publicly last week about the sexual abuse she suffered from the age of 10 at the hands of the late Sir Clement Freud, her words hinted at the corrosive guilt and shame she had carried with her all that time: “I want to die clean.”
Now in her late seventies, Sylvia decided to break her silence in an ITV Exposure programme, aired last Wednesday. She watched it at the home of David Henshaw, its executive producer. “Afterwards, I asked her how she felt, and she said, ‘I just feel very happy’,” he says. “She looked 10 years younger. She was very eloquent, talking about how it was the child in her who wanted to be heard and believed, and when that finally happened, she felt a huge sense of relief and peace.”
Many watching may have wondered, why now? But strikingly sad as Sylvia’s story is, it is not uncommon for abuse victims appear to wait until their twilight years to reveal their experiences – the thought of taking their suffering to their grave finally outweighing the pain incumbent in unburdening themselves.
“We get calls from people as old as 90, some of whom have never told anybody about what they went through as children – not even their closest family members,” says Pete Saunders, chief executive of the National Association for People Abused in Childhood (NAPAC). “The average time for a victim to speak out is 22 years after the last incidence of abuse, but it can be much, much longer.
“Towards the end of people’s lives, they often reflect back and feel a need to address unresolved issues. Victims can realise what happened to them was an absolute disaster which clouded everything in their lives.”
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