HOW HOPE TRIUMPHED OVER ABUSE
VICTIM WAIVES ANONYMITY TO TELL OF PATH TO RECOVERY SINCE ABUSE BY MAN AT CHURCH FROM THE AGE OF 12
ABRISTOL woman struggled to eat for years and spent 12 months in a mental health hospital after being groomed and abused by a man from church.
Hope Virgo has bravely waived her anonymity to open up about how a young man at her church earned her trust and started touching her when she was just 12. The abuse lasted for months.
It is the first time Hope, now 28 and a mental health campaigner, has talked about the incidents that caused her to stop eating to the extent she needed to spend a year in the Riverside Unit, a mental health inpatient unit for young people in Bristol.
“He’d ask me to touch him and play with him. I hated it. He’d touch me too,” Hope said.
She started self harming, and he took advantage of the situation to draw her closer.
Hope, who grew up in Stoke Bishop, explained how she “looked up” to him in the big church.
“When I was younger, we used to go to church a lot. There was this guy who was in church, everyone liked him and I really looked up to him. I was 12,” Hope said.
“We started talking by email and that went on for six months. We’d see each other at church and be normal with each other, but then privately we were sending each other these incredibly long, emotional emails.
“Sometimes he’d badmouth my parents and turn me against my mum, but she didn’t have a clue what was going on.
“We’d pour our hearts out to each other. Having re-read the emails as an adult, I can see how I was sucked in. It was a long grooming process.”
They got close, but after six months Hope’s mother stopped her from seeing him. They continued meeting secretly.
“We’d go for day trips together, and as time went on, it got more physical.
“He’d ask me to touch him and play with him. I hated it. He’d touch me too.
“And then we’d go to church in the evening and it would just be normal between us.”
Keeping things secret and being touched caused Hope to start selfharming, leaving painful scars.
She said: “He saw the cuts and asked me about it, but he just said ‘don’t worry, I’ll look after you’.
“I guess I wanted someone to know something was up, but I didn’t know how to say it.
“I didn’t want to tell on him, but I also didn’t want to be in this situation. I thought it was my fault this whole thing had started happening.”
Eight months after they started, things came to a head. During a trip away, Hope decided to end things.
“I just said to him that I didn’t want anything to do with him anymore.
“He went home that night and was really upset.
“He emailed me constantly for the next month. I never replied. Then he started sending letters, but I didn’t respond.”
He gave up and stopped, but for Hope, the ordeal caused her mental health to crumble.
Shortly after breaking contact, Hope started controlling what she ate. She battled anorexia for four years until she was 17, and was admitted to Riverside mental health ward where she spent a year.
“I felt so guilty and ashamed about what happened and I couldn’t switch off from that emotion,” she explained.
“By not eating I could switch off from the horrible feeling. It numbed all that pain.
“When I was unwell and dating, I could not feel things because I was nervous that people might abuse it.
“The psychologist in charge of me asked my mum to write down all the reasons she thought I was unwell, and one of those reasons might have been what happened with the guy from church.
“In one of our sessions, she asked a leading question about it and that’s when I made my first disclosure.
“She told me to go back to my room and write everything I remembered happening. That’s when it all came out.
“I started getting loads of nightmares about it. I’d wake up in the night and be scared that he’d come back,” Hope said.
The bishop and police got involved, but she was not well enough to pursue it – Hope was still really ill in hospital.
“Looking back, I wish I’d gone ahead with it,” she said.
“I remember when I started putting on weight and started feeling things again. It made talking about what happened with the guy much easier.
“I enjoyed not feeling anything. I could switch off. Riverside was really helpful. I learned to eat again and exercise.
“It was an opportunity to process the trauma about what happened when I was younger.”
Hope held on to what happened to her for years after, not wanting to let people know what happened to her.
When she was 20 – two years after she was discharged – the man got in contact to apologise for what happened, but she ignored him.
“It’s affected my relationships. I have to explain why I might just clam up and get really nervous. I’ve been really lucky I’ve had all the therapy and made a good recovery.”
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By not eating I could switch off from the horrible feeling. It numbed all that pain
Hope Virgo
There are ups and downs in her recovery.
“I do think about it sometimes, and I still have good and bad days. I struggle with dating because of that abuse of trust when I was younger,” she said.
“For me, now, I know how to manage my recovery. I do a lot of exercise – when I’m having a very bad day, I go for a run. I know what my triggers are and I know what I need to do to get well. I relapsed once when my grandma died.
“But I referred myself for help and got back on track, which I’m really proud of. Coming through that relapse made me believe I can stay well. I’ve got to the point that I can really enjoy life and eat when I want.”
Hope now works to change the stigma around mental health. A full-time campaigner, she has written her book Stand Tall Little Girl and spends every day going into schools and companies to talk about mental health.
“I love the feeling that I can inspire other people to seek help, or to contribute to breaking the stigma,” she said.