My story
- Sophie Ramsdale
- Sep 3, 2021
- 13 min read
Updated: Jun 6, 2023
This blog is going to talk about my experience growing up through my teens facing what I now know was sexual harassment and assault by my Mum's boyfriend, Steve.
As a disclaimer, this post goes into a lot of detail of behaviour that I have experienced. It may be distressing to read for some.
I never thought I'd have to write something as hard as this, but I feel it is necessary to share my story. Staying silent is hard, and sharing your experience is hard, but I know that the latter is always better when you know it could help someone.
For those of you who don't know me, my name is Sophie. I grew up in a small village in the South West of England and lived with my Mum and my three siblings. My Mum and Dad got divorced when I was under 10 years old, I don't remember my age when this happened exactly, but the majority of my childhood I've been raised by my Mum.
We first met Steve around 10 years ago at our stable yard. His partner at the time owned a horse and he regularly came to help out. He was always joking around with the kids at the yard and seemed like he spent more time around us than he did with the adults. Soon after meeting him I noticed he was very strange and that he wasn’t ‘normal’. I know that other adults and even children my age thought he was a weird man too. I remember once someone asking my Mum early on if she was okay with my sister being with him alone and others being concerned that my sister sat on his lap a couple of times.
Over 1 to 2 years of him knowing us, he and his partner broke up and he started seeing my Mum and slowly moved in. Mum has never openly admitted that they became a couple, he sort of just became a part of our lives.
I remember when I was 11 a friend's older brothers would make jokes about him being a paedophile - I didn’t really understand it at the time, I just found him really uncomfortable and embarrassing.
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Steve always made edgy and inappropriate comments but this escalated once he moved in and as a result of this, I became increasingly uncomfortable around our home. My gut knew it was wrong, but most of the time I shrugged it off because he was just known by everyone as “a weirdo”. When I did raise concerns about this behaviour I was told "that’s just Steve". His behaviour just became a part of our homelife as he had completely normalised us to it, which I later realised is a child grooming strategy after speaking to the NSPCC.
He would constantly make comments about me, my sister‘s and my friend's breasts and buttocks and say things like "come and sit on my lap and tell me what’s up" or "is that your sex face?" and disguise it as "banter" or a "joke". As far as I can remember, everyday I was subjected to references of his penis. He regularly suggested we could have a look if we wanted, which was always masked as a joke. I remember distinctly joking around with Mum about my Dad having ginger genes and Mum's boyfriend said “if you play your cards right you can have more ginger in you."(He's ginger.)
When we had boyfriends he always made dirty comments and constantly spoke about what we were up to; once I remember him asking me if the skirts I was wearing were for "easy access" when I was 14. He even went to the lengths of viewing my private messages with my high school boyfriend. He also took an obsessive interest in period cycles and bra sizes, so much so that he posted about my sister's first period on the internet and openly talked about my sister's breast size to my boyfriend and I.
He liked to talk about the appearance of my Mum’s genitalia and their sex life deliberately in our company to embarrass both her and us. If he could make a conversation dirty, he would. If he could talk sexually about any of us, he would.
If my sister or I would move in a way that made our breasts wiggle he would say "oo do that again" or if we bent over in his view he would compliment our bum. I remember when my elder sister was early to mid teens she was part of an orchestra and once fainted playing her clarinet and he said, without hesitation "well she was blowing and she's good at that". Something else that would make my skin crawl was him constantly comparing my appearance and figure to someone he fancied in his younger years. I also remember my sister sitting on his lap when she was very young (This was mentioned as a cause of concern by other people too). These are some examples of the many comments myself and my sisters had to deal with and because of it, I became increasingly conscious of what I wore and what I said because I knew he would easily be able to turn my words into something dirty or comment on my figure.
Overtime, the behaviour became considerably worse with him starting to physically intimately hug and kiss one of my sisters on the neck. It would be from behind or facing her and he hugged her by putting his hands around her waist and ribs, frequently under her top. I made him aware that I found it gross by scoffing or turning around and walking the opposite way, but again, the situation was addressed with comments like "I just love her a lot", "she's like a daughter to me" and so on.
It wasn't just in person that he was like this. Since he had known us he was friends with us on Facebook and would make suggestive comments on our photos and posts. He would join conversations with me and my friends and, like in person, make something inappropriate about what we were saying. Most of the time one of his friends would join in too, once commenting about Steve being a 'creepy sneaky voyeur of young women'. I have since discovered that he has deleted a significant amount of photos from his Facebook and Flickr but I do have copies of them as I sent them to the NSPCC.
Pretty much everybody who knew him thought he was at the very least, "a weirdo", but as I spoke out about his behaviour, more people have said that they did in fact notice signs of deviancy too.
Someone that did see it early on was a close friend of mine. On multiple occasions he made her uncomfortable, for example, when we were 11 and 12, I invited her to come riding with me and he was there with us. He insisted on giving her a leg-up onto my pony despite her having said multiple times she could mount on her own. He was so insistent that she felt the need to tell her Mum about what happened. When we went out riding, he took lots of photos of us and I recently discovered a picture of my bottom from that afternoon on an old SD card of his. On another occasion he came to pick me up from hers after a sleepover and when he came to the door he said to her "I can tell you're not wearing a bra." We were 14. When I confronted him about it he said “well I always notice when you don’t”.
When we had gotten older (around 15/16) he also told me that she was “a funny looking child but has blossomed into a pretty little thing”.
I always confided with this close friend about his behaviour and my frequent arguments with him because she was the only person who I felt I could speak to at the time.
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My relationship at home with him was volatile. I think my opinion of him was lessened greatly because of what he put us all through. I used to have heated arguments with him on a daily basis, sometimes to the point where he got aggressive. On one occasion I left the dinner table due to his behaviour and walked out of the kitchen leaving the baby gate open. He shouted after me, and when I ran upstairs without a response he grabbed the baby gate off the wall, ran up the stairs after me, opened my bedroom door and threw the metal gate onto my bed.
This type of situation happened a lot, he even once threw my brother up the stairs. The older I grew, the more and more arguments I had with him. A lot of the arguments kicked off because him and my Mum were arguing and I would chime in to defend my Mum but usually he'd tell me to "shut up", “go away” or "fuck off". The arguments he had with Mum happened a lot and were horrible to listen to. He even once said to her “no wonder [your husband] left you”.
Other times I would defend my brother, who used to be a verbal punching bag for Steve on a daily basis. He'd frequently call him an "idiot", "retard" and make other derogatory comments about him and generally make fun of him. The rest of the arguing usually occurred because he was either saying something disgusting or touching my sister the way he did.
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He always carried around his DSLR camera anywhere we went, taking constant photos of everyone without asking and usually posting them on Facebook or Flickr without getting permission. It didn't matter if we were in the pool in our bikinis, he would still be taking photos. If I didn't like a photo he posted online he wouldn't delete it, he would just tell me to untag myself. To this day there are still photos of me on his Facebook and Flickr. He was always extremely trigger happy with his camera and coupled with everything I know now it just added to his grooming behaviour. What's really worrying is that we only saw a fraction of the photos he took.
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I consistently suppressed my gut-feeling about him because none of my family acknowledged his deviant behaviour so for a while I felt like an anomaly. It felt like it was just my word against everybody else's.
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At the end of summer in 2018 I moved in with my boyfriend Tyler but still visited home every week. I know that moving out was a massive turning point for me. Spending time away from my abusive household was the final thing I needed to come to terms with what was going on. Steve's behaviour wasn't part of my everyday life anymore so whenever I visited it allowed me to see his grooming behaviour with a fresh set of eyes. Because of this, I became more and more reluctant to go back to my family house with him there which in turn created conflict between my Mum, my siblings and I. It was at this point that I reached out to the NSPCC.
Reaching out to the NSPCC
In 2019 I made the leap to reach out to the NSPCC and told them a bit about the situation asking for advice. After a few back-and-forth emails they told me that they wanted to make a referral to child services for their consideration. It took a lot for me to get to this point. I was reluctant to acknowledge that the situation was bad enough for authorities to get involved and especially reluctant to label the behaviour. I stopped emailing them after that as I was worried about the consequences of pursuing it.
It wasn't until I found his years of online comments and posts that my gut feelings felt completely justified. On Reddit especially, there were countless comments that showed his true character. A good percentage of Steve's comments were defending people having an attraction to underage girls.
There were dozens more comments just like this talking about ages of consent, paedophilia, sexual assault and other sensitive topics. There were more on top of that talking casually about our breasts and figures and explicit comments regarding my Mum and their sex life.
He also frequently mentioned the book called 'Lolita' a handful of times and specifically labelled it as one of his favourite books, even having it listed on his Facebook profile. 'Lolita' is a story of a man's possessive, pedophilic obsession with a 12 year old girl which eventually leads to having sex with her. The story is based in a village in New England called 'Ramsdale' which also happens to be our surname. A few times Steve mentions on Reddit that he cannot help but sympathize with the main character, Humbert. Steve also has the same view as Humbert where he says it is natural and that in the America's, girls become mature in their twelfth year. You can read a summary of the chapters here: https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/lolita/section7/
Making the report 2020
Last September, a report was finally made, which was a decision supported by a few members of the family. Without family support I don't think I would ever have had the confidence to report it. The NSPCC forwarded the report to the police and child services for their consideration and there was some back and forth communication between us. The police confirmed his behaviour was "sexually deviant" and what happened to my sibling was indeed "sexual assault". However, they needed proof of intent or for the victim of physical abuse to make the report on their own without influence which is why I have not pushed for this.
To anyone reading this who is worried if the police will take this seriously or believe you, I have a friend who has just gone through a similar situation and because the victim reported it, it has been dealt with quickly and the abuser is no longer in the home.
Talking to the authorities was one of the hardest things I've done, but I don't regret doing it. Initially I was devastated to know that Steve would be able to continue living in the same house as my siblings and continuing his behaviour. But with time, I've come to realise that although he is still very much involved in my family's lives, the situation has been highlighted within the family so we are able to safeguard and support my siblings as much as we are able to.
If I had any advice for anybody like me, it would be to collect as much evidence as you can and document everything. In my case, filming or recording him could have made a huge difference.
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I know there will be someone reading this blog that has gone through a similar situation which is why I wanted to talk more about the issue of grooming and how to recognise it.
Grooming is 'when someone tries to build trusting relationships with children or families with the aim of child sexual abuse'.
After reading about it, there's no doubt that this is grooming. Steve has groomed our whole family to a point where we completely accepted it as our normality. When I think back, the behaviour became worse the closer he got to us and our family. It started off as odd, edgy behaviour, but the more time he spent with us the more deviant the behaviour became.
Steve ticks many boxes of the behaviour that perpetrators of child grooming show. For example:
Seeking to form relationships with children. They usually spend their spare time with children and tend to be more interested in forming relationships with children than adults. At the stable yard especially, he would befriend the children (including myself and my siblings) and would cater his jokes and conversation towards them. Even very recently, I have heard that he'd distanced himself from a child at the yard because they were "drawn to him".
They will single out one child as “special” and give him or her extra attention and gifts as a way to form a bond between them. My sister especially would get a lot of attention. Whenever they went anywhere alone, he called it "Steve and [name] time" and he would bond with her over interests. My brother and I recognised this.
Pushes physical boundaries with a child including hugging, touching, kissing, tickling etc. On a daily basis, he would walk up to my sister, hug her from behind or infront and passionately kiss her neck and put his hands under her top. He also made a point of winding me up trying to hug me when he knew I didn't want to.
Shares inappropriate, adult-geared personal or private information with children. Our dinner table chatter would usually consist of Steve talking about intimate details of past relationships or making dirty jokes or seuxalising one of us one way or another. Talking about my Mum explicitly to make us cringe was a regular occurrence for him. He was especially bad if he'd had a drink.
Sometimes they will tell off-colored or sexualized jokes to see how the child will respond.
They Become Useful to the Family. My Mum and Steve's relationship started out with him helping her out; taking us to dance lessons/clubs and he babysat for Mum a few times. During my teenage years, if I had any occasion I needed to get to, it was usually him that was taking me and picking me up.
Taking a special interest in a child’s sexual development, or expressing interest in their relationships. He had an interest in our sexual development, to the point that he actually wrote about my sister's period on Reddit. He would also be interested in our romantic relationships, making inappropriate comments and suggestions which usually led to me personally feeling very embarrassed and violated. He even went as far as reading through my personal messages with a boyfriend when I left my Facebook open on the family computer.
A lot of what I learnt about grooming I found online. There's a lot of help and advice out there for those who need it. I have included some helpful links at the bottom of this page on grooming, how to recognise it and how to protect your children and others against it.
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I feel that I also need to address my family's reactions briefly as this is something that anyone with abuse within their family will experience. I want to note that I do not blame my siblings in any way for their reactions, feelings or decisions. Sometimes people are too close to the abuse to clearly see it, it is only when they move away from it that they can look back and see clearly. The grooming behaviour also inhibits your ability to see the situation for what it really is. A way to describe the situation is the analogy called 'the missing stair'. Having spoken to the NSPCC and having read stories from victims of abuse, families reacting this way to this type of behaviour is extremely common.
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I'm going to be completely transparent, it has been a rocky road, and it still is. It made my relationship with my family extremely rocky, my relationship with Tyler rocky at times and has had a significant impact on my mental health. I have nightmares about it still to this day.
If I had any advice for anyone, it would be to trust your gut instinct. If something doesn't feel right, it probably isn't. Talk to someone you trust, whether that's a friend, a family member or a romantic partner. And if you don't have someone you feel you can talk to in your immediate circle, look to your school, college or university or an organisation such as the NSPCC. When I talked to their support workers they were extremely understanding, patient and supportive about my case.
However, I know how daunting it is to go to the authorities so if you need anyone to talk to about something you have gone through, please reach out. Email me or message me on Instagram.
Thank you for your time.
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Information on Grooming & Sexual Abuse
NSPCC & Childline
Email: sophieiramsdale@gmail.com
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