You’re Special

A survivor’s account of grooming, silence, and how communities protect abusers

By Andreia Nobre, Journalist and Writer

This feature documents a survivor’s experience of childhood sexual abuse and the wider pattern of harm surrounding it. Rather than focusing on one act of violence, it examines grooming, community complicity, and the cultural mechanisms that protect abusers. Shared as part of Make Yourself Heard, this testimony aims to raise awareness, support survivors, and challenge the systems that enable abuse to persist.

My name is Andreia Nobre. I’m a Brazilian journalist and writer who has been living abroad since 2004. I started speaking openly about surviving child sexual abuse around 2009, after I gave birth to my first child. This is a story about how grooming works and how male-dominated societies protect men who commit sexual abuse.

I’d like to make this account follow a timeline of events as they happened, not from the day I was abused, especially because I was not the only victim, which is the reason I am outspoken about it. I am the only survivor who manages to talk about it. The sexual abuse I experienced happened in 1985, when I was 8 years old, living in a small city in the countryside where I was raised in Brazil.

My mum is a survivor of domestic violence and of obstetric violence. She lost her first child, 3 days after her baby girl was born, due to a gruesome childbirth. She also endured years of physical violence from my father, who she left when I was four. A couple of years later, she met the man who became my stepfather, and they were together for 44 years before he passed away in 2025. My stepfather had a female cousin living nearby, who was married and a mother to four boys and a girl.

Here’s how this story starts. In the 1980s, porn became so popular that, when I would be looking for comics at a newsstand, I’d also have on full display the porn magazines. We could barely avoid them. You might think that this is just a guess by me, but the husband of my stepfather’s cousin became a porn addict. I know that because I have evidence for that.

When this man became a porn addict - to a very specific kind of kink, I might add - he started demanding his wife to enact those kinks. I don’t know if she ever indulged in his demands for a while and then got fed up, or never accepted these terms. All I know is that we heard rumours in the neighbourhood that this man had been kicked out of the marital bedroom. Whenever I can, I will bring the evidence I have for these claims.

At some point, this man started grooming boys in our neighbourhood by showing them porn and then sexually abusing them - another claim I have circumstantial evidence to bring. When he got away with the abuse, he started sexually abusing his own daughter from the age of 5. I spoke to her in 2017, and she confirmed it. When I say none of the other survivors speak about it openly, this is what I mean. I didn’t insist on her telling me everything. When I revealed to her that her father abused me, I lent her a listening ear, and she revealed that her father would force her to hold his penis while he was peeing. That it's all she disclosed to me so far.

After he also got away with abusing his own daughter, and a niece of his wife, who was living with them, he then started abusing other girls who lived in his street and who were friends with his daughter, something I also have evidence.

The grooming attempt this man tried on me was as follows.

My mum was a seamstress. That is how she met her partner, my stepfather, because his female cousin was one of my mum’s customers. Since they were together, my stepfather’s cousin and her family became “family/relatives”, and I would often go to their house to play with her little daughter. When I was 8, she was 6 years old, and she was teaching me how to ride a bicycle.

One day, I was at their place and, when I was about to leave to go back home, my stepfather’s cousin called me to her bedroom. I remember staying under the doorframe of her bedroom and refusing to go in, which she found odd. I explained that it was hers and her husband’s bedroom, and it would be disrespectful of me to go in, to which she replied, “He doesn’t sleep here anymore.” Reassured, I went in, and she gave me haberdashery to deliver to my mum. I then left her bedroom and saw her husband at the end of the corridor, watching me leave. He had an expression I could not understand at the time, that now I can only identify as a plan forming in his head. Days after that, he called me too when I was leaving his house, just like his wife did.

The thing was, we were rather poor. My stepfather could not afford buying newspapers every day. This man, however, was wealthier, middle-class, and could buy 2 or 3 different newspapers every day, so when he finished reading them, he would give them to my stepfather. On this day, he asked me to follow him to his little office at the end of his garage. Again, instead of going in, I stayed under the doorframe, and this time, I never went in. Nothing he said or did made me go in. I stayed firmly just outside, waiting for him to find the newspapers he wanted me to deliver to my stepfather, which he took a fair time to “find”.

Meanwhile, in front of the door where I was, there was a desk full of porn magazines, open for everyone to see. The newspapers, I was told, were at a bookcase at the other end of his office. While he “looked” for them, he would come to his desk and flip pages of the porn magazines in front of me and even point at them, inviting me to look at them. On the wall behind the desk, there were shelves packed with porn tapes, all on display - the signs of a porn addiction. He finally found the newspapers and gave them to me. I took the newspapers and rushed home.

The abuse happened days after that. I went to their house again, probably on a Saturday, because I went there just after lunch, and his daughter was still finishing hers. He answered the door and asked if I could wait as his daughter was still eating. I said I could wait and stepped back to wait for her on the pavement. He invited me to wait for her inside, and I agreed because he was considered a relative, therefore a “safe adult”. We were in their living room and his daughter in the kitchen, at the back of the house. He asked if I wanted to watch a cartoon on TV, and I agreed because we were poor and only had a small black-and-white TV set at home. They had a big, coloured TV set. He said I could sit on the sofa, and I did. He then sat next to me on my right, and I thought nothing of it, because he was a “safe adult”. A few minutes later, he grabbed my right hand, and I thought nothing of it, because my mum, my father, and my stepfather have done that often while we were watching something together, counting my fingers or patting the back of my hand. This is when he pulled my hand and placed it on his crotch, forcing me to caress his penis. It was all very fast - including me pulling my hand as much as I could, getting up, and rushing out of the house. But I still could hear him saying to me that he only did that because I was “special.” I still waited for his daughter on the pavement, I practiced riding her bicycle, but I said nothing about what happened.

In my mind, he made a mistake, and I was an isolated case, so for the next few days, I was just trying to digest the incident. But it all changed when I was back at this street, talking to some of the girls who lived there. At some point, the girls started to talk about upskirting - boys, especially at school, lifting our school uniforms to see our underwear. There were several opinions that day: one girl said that she didn’t mind - boys would be boys, it was just them being boisterous. Another said she heard an older child saying that if a boy did that, it was because he fancied her. One girl said she didn’t like it, period. I was asked what I thought about it, and my reply was “It’s not only the boys, you know.” And then I told them what happened to me. To my horror, of the four other girls that day, three said, almost at the same time, “Ah, yes, he does that.”

I can’t tell you exactly what went through my mind at the time. But some thoughts were clear: “Ah, so I wasn’t special after all. He’s doing that to these girls, too.” Another thought was that, when I thought it was only me, it wasn’t as if it was “fine”. But when I learned that he was doing these things to these other girls, I thought that was very wrong. This is when I decided to tell my mum about it.

She was livid. She had just had her 5th child, my little brother, and this time it was a C-section, not a normal delivery like with her previous four kids. She felt awful because she felt like she failed me for not being out and about after a major surgery, thus she felt as if this happened because she was unable to protect me. I never blamed my mum. We went together to tell my stepfather what happened, and the unimaginable happened. He was furious - but with me. He started angrily telling me that I was “defaming his relative.” I have no idea how I stood my ground. I was only 8 years old. But I did. I insisted it happened, and his next denialist reply was “But it’s impossible that this happened. He is such a religious person. He goes to church every Sunday.” I insisted I wasn’t lying, and then my stepfather said the sentence that silenced me for the next 30 years: “Then, you must have done something to provoke him.”

From that moment on, I took several measures to protect myself from further abuse. I avoided that “relative” as if he was the plague. I never spoke to him again. I would go outside if he came to our house. Cross a street if he was on the same pavement as me. He never had another chance to abuse me again.

I also made a point of “tracking” his other victims. I know of two boys (one living in his street, one living next door to us) because one day these two boys put me and another girl sitting on their laps and rubbed their penis against our bottoms before we could fend them off. This was days after I was abused by that man. These boys had been abused when they were between 8-10 years old, and when they abused us, they were around 13-14 years old. The other girl abused that day by these two boys was four years old, and our neighbour, the younger sister of the boy who rubbed himself against me.

The next piece of evidence I have to present was the fact that, when I was around 13 years old, my mum went out to do groceries and asked me to do her bed as she was in a hurry. Her bed lining was in built-in cabinets above her bed, and she asked me to find the green bed sheets she loved. The bed lining was neatly stacked, so I started taking the ones on the top without unfolding them to get to the green ones. After I removed about 4 other bedsheets and before I got the one she wanted, I uncovered 3 or 4 porn magazines that were hidden between them. I actually recognized at least one of them from that day in which that man tried to show me porn magazines in his office while he claimed to be looking for the newspapers to deliver to my stepfather. It’s hardly a stretch to claim that these magazines came from him to my stepfather, due to the newspapers' lending system they had between them. This is not only evidence of his porn addiction but also of his fetish and kinks, as the cover of these magazines I found in my parents’ house had men on it displaying silicone implants and what my 13-year-old brain could only describe at the time as “pink erections”.

Both my big sister and my big brother confirmed to me over the years that they were abused by the same man. A girl who was being raised with us for a couple of years, so our foster sister, confirmed she was also abused when I became outspoken about the abuse on social media, around 2009. She came in private messages and asked who abused me. When I told her who it was, she told me of her ordeal. She and this man’s little girl are among the worst cases I could identify so far, especially because they could not avoid this man like I did. My foster sister told me that when she was being abused, she would have an out-of-body experience. This man told my stepfather that our foster sister “loved” the church, so he took her in his car. Instead, he would take her to the woods to abuse. He told her that if she ever told my mum and stepfather about it, that he would tell them “what she had done” and they would “kick her out of our home.” Years after she told me what happened to her, she visited her former home and spoke to my stepfather. She told me she made my stepfather cry for not believing us about the abuse. At the intercity bus station, when she was about to leave the city to go back home, she was talking to a man who mentioned that he lived in our neighbourhood. When they were exchanging names of people they both might have known, and she mentioned the name of the man who abused us, the man she was talking to replied, “Oh yes, the man who abused boys.”

It was startling to learn that the whole neighbourhood knew about the abuse, but nothing was done to stop it. I believe the reason for that was that this man had a facade, a reputation that was hard to break. He was indeed a member of a church, a married man, and a father of five kids. He was considered a man of higher status and therefore untouchable. Like the way he did with my stepfather, he would be this person who would regularly do several little favours to lots of neighbours. Before the abuse, when he would pick up his daughter from school, he would offer lots of us kids a ride in his car, and that ride used to be a “blast”. He would enter a shortcut which required the car to slow down before going in, as it was a quite sharp curve to the right. But he would not slow down the car to make that curve; he would get into that shortcut at full speed, giving us kids a thrill. Believe it or not, this was also part of the grooming process. All the kids he gave a ride to were eventually abused by him.

It’s hard to believe, though, that his wife’s niece, who lived in his house for a few years, was not abused as well, but she never spoke about it to me. Other girls in our neighborhood might have been abused, as his wife’s niece, a girl living in my street who was my friend, and another girl who used to live in the street after his (also another of my friends) all became teenage mothers. I heard of other girls who lived there at the time who not only had given birth during their teens, but engaged in something very similar to what prostitution is. Only, they were not being paid for their consent. Instead, they felt that they had no other value rather than to be a sexual object to older boys and adult men. You might think that this is just also a wild guess by me, but this is actually the exact way I felt about myself for many, many years. In fact, my foster sister, who is one year younger than me, is now a 47-year-old woman whose first child, a son, is a 33-year-old man. She has also been a grandmother for the last five years.

None of his victims got justice. This man abused around at least 20 kids in our neighbourhood. He died of cancer years ago, and his daughter was shunned by her family for refusing to go to his funeral. This year, I went to visit my family after my stepfather passed away. He was buried in the same family place as the man who abused us children years ago. My big sister went with me to visit my stepfather’s final resting place and she made me wait for a few seconds away before approaching it, so she could remove a picture of the abuser and I would not have to look at it while trying to pay my respects to the man who, despite failing us on that matter, nonetheless raised three kids he didn’t father.

My story has not ended yet. The abuse didn’t define me the way people think it did. I would certainly be a different person had the abuse not happened. I direct my energies to raise awareness about how prevalent abuse is, how grooming happens, and how lenient most male-dominated societies are with male abusers. Speaking about it is part of my healing process, which I believe will never end. But it gives me a kind of closure that gives me the strength to keep moving forward and have a fulfilled life that I believe it was denied to me the moment I was violated. By talking to the other girls that day, years ago, when the subject of upskirting came about, we might have even prevented abuse. Because after we all disclosed to each other that we were abused by this man, we begged the one girl who said that this didn’t happen to her to promise us that she would never be in a room alone with this man. She was a bit annoyed, but she agreed. I haven’t spoken to her in years, even though she is among my Facebook friends. We all hope that she has been left unscathed.