aureliusraeCasual Contributor
TW: Abuse. I don't know how to talk about it
I never speak about it but I have decided to try my best
Last year I was working in child protection when I found out one of the children I was case managing was being sexually abused by her father.
My Team Leader did not agree. She and I had been very close but she was very defensive to the idea that she had been supporting unsupervised visits between a father who was sexually abusing his daughter. She gave me a lot of reasons as to why we could not make the visits supervised, and why it was not enough evidence to prove he was sexually abusing her.
The little one was only seven, and had the most upside down trauma presentation I have ever seen.
For about three months I worked non-stop, I could not sleep or eat properly because all I would do is try and find more evidence of the sexual abuse so the visits could be supervised. Or other evidence to make the visits supervised. It was my entire responsibility to stop the sexual abuse from happening.
My Team Leader began CCing my Manager into my emails indicating I was not doing my work properly. She was bullying me and intimidating me in front of the families I worked with. I would have been able to deal with this but I was on a continuous cycle of burn out from working non-stop.
I had nightmares all the time. About the sexual abuse. And I still have some, of dreams of little girls begging me to come get them. My Team Leader took me off the case as part of her bullying of me. She had actually previously been kind of a maternal figure to me. I was also very afraid of making her angry because I knew what she would do to me.
I was so suicidal by this point that I quit. I would never have quit if I still had the case. None of the higher up management were listening to me because my Team Leader was obstructing me, telling them the evidence wasn't good enough. But the other case workers and the lawyers agreed with me.
I can't explain how it traumatised me so much. I felt so responsible. I feel like the worst person in the world for having left all the kids I case managed. My Team Leader would not let me say goodbye to any of them, so what will they think happened? Now I am just another person who left them.
I always have nightmares now and flashbacks. I can't eat the food I used to eat when I lived in that house. I can't go back to that town without panicking. I worry about my kids all the time and I struggle with self-loathing. I feel like no one would forgive me if they knew what I had done, even though when I look at it logically I can see I couldn't have done things much differently.
I'm so sorry and I wish I could apologise to my kids all the time.
In the end, the visits did become supervised and the little girl is not allowed to return home to her father. I knew I was right the whole time so it was not that much validation, but a huge relief. That happened a year after I left, so it has been a long one. I wonder if my Team Leader thinks it was worth facilitating the abuse of this little girl (and I guess traumatising me, who she had been so close to) just to protect herself.
This is the first time I have been able to speak about this so if you got all the way through, thank you for listening ❤️
