South Africa: Sulanche Booysen

My name is Sulanche Booysen (alias Octavia Swartz) from Knysna in the Western Cape.
I am 35 years old. I am married and a mother of 2 children; my son is 17 years old and my girl is 12 years old.

When I was 10 years old, I was raped by my neighbour. He raped me every time he came to our house and had the change to do so. That time our whole family stayed in one house, and on weekends everyone will drink except for my mom.

When my father is drunk, he used to fight with my uncle, and if my mom stopped them, he would beat my mom.

I was scared to tell my mom and father what our neighbour was doing to me because I don’t like trouble or when people fight.

So as I grew older, I used to hide when I saw our neighbour come to our house.
His name was Alfonzo, and he was much older than me. He was already finished with matric, and I was still in primary school.

One Friday night, someone stabbed him, and he died on the spot. When I heard that, I didn’t feel sad. I felt so relieved, and I didn’t even cry because I just thought he couldn’t hurt me anymore.

A few years ago, when I was 15 years old, my aunt’s husband, whose name was Leon, who came from jail, used to come to me when I played alone behind our house and say I must touch his penis, then he would give me money if I did it. I still remember to this day how his penis looked, and it had tattoos on it. I never touched it until he grabbed my hand one day and forced me to touch it.

My aunt’s husband passed away from cancer when I was 20 years old.
I never even told anyone about it until now.

After all this happened to me, I always blamed myself and felt like I was attracting these people to me.

I hated myself, I hated my body, and I never felt beautiful. I was even scared and didn’t like it when boys looked at me.

All the things I went through when I was younger affected me a lot in my adult life.
I have trust issues; it’s hard for me to trust people.

It affected myself so much that I had no confidence and didn’t love myself. I tried to commit suicide a lot of times, and I used to cut myself with a blade because I was so depressed.

Now that I am married and I am the mother of a daughter, I am scared that what happened to me will happen to her also, and that stresses me out a lot. But what I learned from myself and what happened to me is that I want us to have a good relationship so that she won’t be afraid to tell me if someone is hurting or touching her in the wrong way.