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Australian author, academic and child sexual abuse survivor Gemma Carey. Photograph: Allen & Unwin
When I was growing up in the 1990s and early 2000s, we didn’t have the word “grooming” to describe what sexual predators do to capture their young victims. We have the word now but as our 2021 Australian of the Year, Grace Tame, said yesterday, grooming and its impact are still not widely understood.
In late 2020 my memoir on child sexual grooming, No Matter Our Wreckage
, was released. Yes, I am a survivor of child sexual grooming and abuse. I’m also a professor, an author, a friend and a colleague. Survivors like me are all around you, but we’ve learned that people don’t want to hear our stories. We learned it when people changed the subject. We learned it when people dismissed or minimised our experience of abuse. We learned it when people told us we brought it on ourselves. And so, we keep silent.