Child Abuse Story From Alyria

by Alyria
(Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada)

It started when I was 7. My brother, who is 2 years older than me, my mom, and me had just moved into a new house. It had a storage room type thing beneath the stairs in the basement. The first time my brother asked me to go into the room with him, I didn't question it. Even at only 9, he had a history of extreme violence. My mom and I had built a life around making sure he didn't get upset, to make sure no one ended up in the hospital, including my mom. I remember being cold, and being scared. I remember wanting to leave, but being too afraid of what would happen if I did. He started touching me, and it felt uncomfortable, and then it hurt. I ran out of the room. He didn't say or do anything about it, which I was thankful for. I didn't understand what had happened really, so I tried to forget it. But everyday after, he would try again and again. One day when my mom was out, he handcuffed me to his red bunk bed, and said, "Now try to leave the room." As we got older, he became more violent and harder to control. The smallest thing would set him off, and the sexual abuse continued.

Just after I turned 9, we were living somewhere new. My brother had built a cage under the stairs. He seemed to like being under stairs the most. By this time, my mom worked all the time and was hardly home, and we didn't have a babysitter. My mom said that he was at the age where we could be left alone safely, and she had run out of people who would stay with us due to my brother's violent behavior.

My brother would make me strip down to my underwear and sit in the cage after breaking glass in the bottom. Sometimes he would throw beer bottles through the bars of the cage so they would hit the back wall and shatter near or on me. The bottles shattering against the wall weren't that bad. It was very rarely that I would get cuts from those particular ones. Sometimes he would keep me in the cage all day until about 10 minutes before my mom would get off work. On those days, I wasn't allowed to eat or drink anything till my mom got home. While my mom was at work, I was only allowed out of the cage that he so cautiously had locked, when he wanted to 'have fun.' By this time of course, I was still trying to fight him off, despite my many trips to the hospital and my mom's several visits to the hospital because I had pissed him off.

I remember the first time I successfully fought him off. My mom was already at work. When he came to get me from bed to go downstairs I kicked him in the genitals and ran to my friend's house (which was only a half block away). That night after supper, my mom was watching TV with me while I was trying to color. I looked up from my coloring book, and then all I felt was heat. It was like my head was suddenly overly hot and something was running all over my face, in my eyes and in my hair. My mom was panicking. My brother had attacked me with a hammer. I was taken to the hospital. When I got home, I couldn't tell my mom why it had happened, so I just went with the it-was-probably-an-accident theory for her, but she knew it wasn't. She yelled at my brother the next day. After he had beaten my mom with a metal vacuum cleaner pipe for making him miss his TV show as punishment for the hammer incident, he was sent to live at my grandmother's house (she was the only one he would never hurt or even raise his voice to).

The sexual abuse continued through forced visits to my grandmother's house. Though I loved spending time with my grandma, my brother was still there. He would tell my grandma and mom that we were watching a movie, though it would usually end in one of them coming to the door because they heard crying. The door was always locked, and he would tell them I had fallen off the bed, or that we got to rough play fighting. I felt like I had to go along with it. There was no way I could get the key to two locks and undo the chain lock before he could seriously hurt me, and I knew he would; he had done it before.

When I was 11 or 12 we moved to a small town called Dalmany. To my dismay, my brother came with us. My mom claimed that he had changed and wasn't as violent anymore. This would have been convincing for a while, if he wasn't still sexually abusing me. After we moved, I suffered sprained wrists, broken bones, fractures, and a couple broken ribs. As my mom didn't want to believe he was still violent because he wasn't violent to her anymore and because she never actually saw what happened, she said it was just me being clumsy, that I was a very "accident prone" child.

I met a boy while living in this town. I liked him very much, though he was around 17. Strangely enough, he was my brother's friend. He said he really cared about me. He told me all the time how much he really cared about me and that he wanted to be with me and that he wanted me to date him. I liked the attention. He protected me. He would always yell and make my brother stop beating me up when he was around. When he was the one to stop my brother from hitting me, nothing bad ever happened. It would just stop until the next time I pissed my brother off.

Now that my brother had this friend, (another boy) there were fewer days when he would abuse me. I was happy he was popular. But it wasn't long until he told this boy that I liked this best friend of his. He told him what he was doing to me.

One day, my brother took me out to the playhouse in the backyard. He began trying to take my clothes off. When I tried to leave he hit me and threw me on the bed, which wasn't very difficult for him considering that at 12, I weighed about 85 pounds and he weighed about 190-200 pounds. All I had on were my bra and underwear. As he was trying to take my underwear off, this guy I liked walked in. I was embarrassed, but so happy at the same time. All I could think was that wouldn't let this happen. That he would do something. That he would help me. That he wouldn't let him do this to me ever again. He did something, alright. He grabbed my arms and held me down while my brother took off my underwear and continued to rape me. It became a regular thing with this guy who had always said how much he cared and would never let anything happen to me. He and my brother would do whatever they wanted to me.

My brother claimed the basement. He told my mom he wanted to be more independent. She took it as a good sign. It had its own entrance through the garage, a kitchen, living room, dinning room and bathroom. The bedroom was like four of my bedrooms.

After a while, when I was about 13, my brother started having parties. He would invite his friends over and he would lock me in the room with some of them, always only one at a time. I figured it out pretty fast. I had to. If I wasn't 'nice' enough to them or if I didn't smile enough or if I just wasn't good enough, they would tell my brother. I have to say, it wasn't a big deal while everyone was there. After all, I still got to party with them and stuff. But when the party was over and they went home...well, let's just say I learnt real fast how to use make-up to cover up a bruise and find very believable reasons why I just couldn't go to volleyball practice that day. It finally ended about a week after I turned 15.

I am 19 now and have a 2-year-old son. I tried to tell my mom what happened, but she just said she didn't know, and pretends that she still doesn't know. My brother is now in jail for trying to rob a bank. When he phones my mom, she still expects me to talk to him, to say hi. She expects me to go and visit him. But I don't. I let my mom believe what she needs to in order to cope.

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