Child Abuse Story From Bethany For Damien

by Bethany
(United Kingdom)

Guilty: 
I was never abused. I have a good family and good friends and I always have. However, I still feel a horrible guilt about something that happened when I was 10.

I was always smart and maturer than the other children in my year, so I didn't fit in. I was bullied by a lot of kids in my class, for being different. But my best friend Melissa had so many friends that were popular, and I wanted to be like her. I was pretty, but I couldn't straighten my hair and do my makeup like her and her other friends, so in a bid to win their friendship, I started to become just like them.

One of the things the girls did all the time was degrade everyone they classed as beneath them. They were bullies.
One boy they bullied was Damien.

Damien and me had been friends for a very long time, and it was no secret between us that we liked each other, but his clothes weren't label and he came to school looking scruffy so the girls hated him, even more so because he too was intelligent, so I made him keep our friendship secret. (I can only imagine how that must have made him feel.)

Weeks passed. I became more and more like those girls. I was still smarter, but I used the sharpness of my mind to cut through anyone I didn't like. I was so nasty, and I didn't even realise it. Me and Damien grew apart for a while, and the girls started to make fun of the strange bruises that were appearing more and more on him. I was too involved in my own selfish try for popularity that I didn't read the signs.

When it was almost the end of year 4, he asked me out, quietly. But Jenny (one of the girls) had heard it, so I, desperate to make sure the next year wouldn't begin like the last, laughed in his face and called him pathetic and a loser. I still remember the look on his face. I remember the words he said to me in my nightmares: "You're right. I wish I wasn't so worthless."

He didn't come to school the next week. Our teacher informed us he had been taken away by social services because his father had been abusing him.

I hate myself for what I did. I had been his best friend and I let him down and made things worse.

I've stared cutting myself to feel better and I intentionally provoke people so they will hit me. I even like to be dominated by my boyfriends just so I could have some control in my life. I know where Damien is and I want to go see him, but I don't know if I can face him...

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