‘I was raped by my stepfather as a child, I became an indigenous activist and today I help fight child abuse’ | I, Reader

“I’m from the south of Bahia. An indigenous woman from the Tupinambá people of Olivença. I’ve lived my whole life in the culture, but I wasn’t recognized as an indigenous person because it needs to be given by the government and the Tupinambá people were only recognized in 2002. I lived in a city of 5,000 inhabitants near Itabuna, 30 km from São José da Vitória, for most of my life and there, as a child, I suffered sexual abuse.

I was raised by my family. We were cocoa producers and my mother married a military police officer. He was my first abuser, when I was three years old. It was only when I was 11, during a class about the human body at school, that I had my first idea of ​​what was happening to me. I told my mother and she didn’t believe it, because he created a scenario so that he could commit the abuse and still discredit the victim.”

“I remember that he would catch me in my room sleeping. There was one time, when my mother was working, that he took me to a room, abused me and, a while later, when he heard the dogs barking, he realized that it was my mother arriving. He picked me up and threw me out the window, but luckily I was left hanging. It was a horrible scene, because I couldn’t scream, as I thought I was doing something wrong and didn’t want to be beaten by myself. mother.

He was the first abuser, but he was not the only one. And this is what happens when children are first abused, they become addicted to violence and other abusers notice. My mother worked a lot and used to be away from home all day, so she would leave me with neighbors or acquaintances until she returned. I remember sleeping at a neighbor’s house and I woke up with him giving me oral sex while looking at me. At another point, I spent the day with a couple of my mother’s colleagues and one of them would watch people taking a shower, tell me to look… it was something that happened daily.

Soon after, I developed an abscess next to my vagina. I went to the doctor because it was really ugly and it was too close to my sexual organ. My paternal grandmother, Dona Lourdeshe always told me that the body finds a way to explode its emotions, so this abscess was my way of asking for help, because he couldn’t take it anymore — and neither could I.

This professional was from a hospital in the interior and it is clear that the thinking is still sexist and the society is patriarchal. When he examined me, he said: ‘My God, what happened to this girl, she has the vagina of a woman over 40?’. Soon after that, they called my mother into a small room and nothing came of it, because she didn’t welcome me at any point, worrying about what I might be living out of her sight.

When a child goes through a situation at home, they are taken to the hospital, but they are accompanied by their parents and it wasn’t my mother who abused me, but she was the abuser’s wife and I would never believe that he would do something like that. with me. That’s why no one took a stance to report it or go after the police and I ended up going back to that nightmare. After a while, I couldn’t stand my mother’s inaction in this situation and I told my sister, Jamie, who advised me: ‘If it’s true, go there and tell him’. And that’s what I did, I confronted him and revealed that I had told someone in the family what happened, but the result wasn’t what I expected, because he called my mother and messed with her.

That same day, when she got home, she hit me with a paddle asking me to tell the truth and stop lying. In the end, I said it was a lie for fear of something worse happening and she kicked me out of the house, sending me to my grandmother’s house, with whom I had almost no contact.

I stayed there for five years and she blamed me for what had happened, making me go to church every day, because she thought it was the way to start over or get this dirt out of my life. It was violent to be there paying penance for something I wasn’t guilty of and it wasn’t that kind of support or treatment that should have been given to a victim. I ended up leaving my grandmother’s house too, I went back to my mother when I was 15.”

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“It was at this new moment that she recognized that I had suffered child sexual abuse, but the criminal said that if there were any complaints ‘her mouth would start with ants’. Out of fear, she did nothing and I gave up, because I had already after a long time and no one would believe me.

In search of an income, since my mother was unable to support the house, I entered the world of sexual exploration. I was surrounded by older, powerful men who made me believe that if I was with them, I would be valued and respected. I stayed in this cycle until I was 28, thinking my body was made for this.”

“I had my first two daughters during that period of exploration, of not understanding, of thinking that I was born to be a sexual product and that’s when I was able to understand what it means to have a healthy childhood, because I was able to provide that for them.

I was living in Itabuna, Bahia, when I met the Flaviothe father of Valentina, my third daughter. It was the first relationship in which someone took care of me. Having someone to take care of her, like he did, carrying out a healthy pregnancy, is priceless. Unfortunately, he ended up passing away and that’s when I sank for good.

I spent two years in that dome. My daughters say that I went out and took care of my other little one, but I don’t have that memory. When I left rock bottom, I was broke, starving — and I said: ‘I can’t let them live like this’, deciding that I would try life in São Paulo.

It was a lot of suffering, I came alone and I wanted to bring my daughters, who stayed in Bahia, with me, so I worked as a cleaner and everything I could do to save money. I managed to achieve this goal three months after my move. My eldest daughter and I bought a Digital Marketing course and decided that we would make this our income and our way of supporting ourselves. At the time they launched the Clubhousea voice application, and it was there that I began to position myself as an activist in child sexual abuse.

I fight hard so that children don’t go through what I went through and the data shows that every 15 minutes we have one of them in this scenario, and it’s very sad, even today, in 2024, that we have high statistics like that.

I approached the Luciana Temer, from Instituto Liberta, and she asked me to do the first event ‘Don’t be silent: one voice calls another’. And there I finally understood all the violence I had been through and I was aware that I was not to blame for anything that happened to me. How many women die without knowing this? It’s a daily struggle between living and wanting to die every day.

Today, at age 40, I feel much stronger. I’m at ATL (Acampamento Terra Livre), which is the largest Assembly of Indigenous Peoples and Organizations in Brazil. In addition to cyberactivism, in terms of using social networks for education in combating sexual violence and child exploitation, I have a profile called SOS Mulheres BR. Generally, I take a case that has repercussions, create content around it and publicize it. The videos get 130 thousand views on average.

In addition, I give lectures, join the group Women of Brazilgoverned by Luiza Trajanoowner of Magazine Luiza, I am a member of Female Turn, a collective of women, and in this context we discuss sexual abuse and child exploitation, trying to combat them, providing education in search of preventing crimes like these. The Tupinambá people of the chiefdom of Jamampoty will implement the first set of rules for this prevention, raising awareness among the population and preventing children from experiencing this. Movements like Me Tooare making themselves available to work with us in this campaign.”

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“Thanks to Mother Nature, I managed to escape my cycle of violence and my three daughters showed me what love is, especially family love, which I never had and it is a very strong construct. I want other people to have the opportunity to escape this nightmare and manage to have a decent life, like I achieved, and I will fight for it until the end.”