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also felt strange to have so many people suddenly paying me attention: however good Riverside had been for me, it was still a care home and I was only one of a number of young people living there. Now I found that I was being represented by a barrister and a solicitor, and a specialist gynaecologist had been retained to give evidence about the damage to my insides caused by the sexual abuse as well as by the knife that Dad liked to push inside me. On top of that, I had a child protection officer looking out for my interests and Mum, my brother and my sister were all there to support me. Even my step-mum was there, ready to speak out about what she had heard that night on the stairs.
    The case lasted four days. To prevent me having to face Dad across the courtroom I gave evidence via a video link, from a little room off to the side. Of course this completely shattered my fantasies of standing in the witness box and pointing an accusing finger at the man who had ruined my childhood, but I’m glad I did it that way. Dad denied everything – of course he did – and it would have been terrible to answer all the questions his barrister wanted to ask me with my abuser sitting just a few feet away, his eyes glaring at me. Even so, it was a real ordeal. Don’t let anyone tell you that it’s easy to give evidence about being abused: it’s an incredibly painful, gut-wrenching experience.
    Because of the video link I never saw the inside of the court until the last day. It was smaller and less formal than I’d thought it would be. I’d imagined something much more imposing and Victorian. I sat at the back and managed to get a good look at the jury as the verdict was read out by the judge. I was astonished to see that quite a few of them were crying openly – it had never occurred to me that a stranger could care about me enough to cry like that. And then they found my dad guilty.
    The judge was Sir Angus Stroyan. He’d been a top QC before being promoted to the Bench and would later go on to be the top judge for the whole of Newcastle. He looked at Dad and told him that this was one of the worst cases he’d ever heard, and he sentenced him to eight years in prison.
    Some people might think that doesn’t sound very much – one year inside for every year that he’d abused me and made my life hell. But compared to what most men get for molesting their kids it was a big sentence. Often – too often – courts impose less than four years in jail: four years is a magic number because anything less and the man doesn’t get considered for the sex offender programmes inside prison. Those programmes are the best way of getting through to paedophiles: they strip away the layers of self-deceit and self-justification with which these men surround themselves and force them to confront the reality of what sexual abuse did to their victim.
    And what of Dad’s victim? What was I feeling, as they led him away – flanked by two prisoner officers – to face years of degradation and danger inside the prison system? (Even I knew that paedophiles – ‘nonces’ in jail slang – are the lowest of the low inside, and are often viciously attacked by their fellow inmates.) What was I feeling? Guilty, of course. Paedophiles survive during the time they are abusing by making their child victims take responsibility; by making them feel they are the ones to blame for the abuse. Dad was no different: he had made me complicit in a vile, dirty little secret – and now I was responsible – on my 16th birthday – for sending him to a place from which he might not emerge alive. Oh, yes, I took that responsibility on my shoulders; I welcomed the blame and the guilt inside me like an old friend. It was all my fault – of course it was: it always had been so.
    And I felt like that right up until the moment when, as the prison officers got him and began to take him away, he turned and spat out his birthday message to me: ‘You little bastard – I’ll