The family dynamic was complicated. Ian, his two brothers, mother and her husband — we’ll call him John — lived in poverty in rural South Australia. Only in the last six years — and after decades of counselling and therapy — does Ian feel he’s started to recover. University of Canberra researcher Lucetta Thomas has interviewed dozens of men who have been sexually abused by their mothers. Picture: Ginger Gorman At the time though, it was a different story: “I thought I was enjoying it and I thought I was grown up.” It’s an incredibly confusing situation for victims, explains Lucetta, because “the boys still love their mother” and just like Hamish, “they don’t want the family to break apart.”

Just fear of losing my family completely, fear of family falling apart and not them being the way we’ve always been.” It did not have a name until my mum’s psychiatrist, who was then actually looking after her for dementia in her seventies, referred to her historical diagnosis of schizophrenia. At which point it was out and my father very nearly fell off his chair. But a year later, Jess found out that the affair was still happening. She and her brothers told their father.

I stopped to catch my breath and looked behind me to see the house about a hundred yards away in the distance. The lights were on, and something was home. There was no moon out that night and it was cloudy, but for some reason the entire valley had this faint blue glow. I stood there for a moment taking it all in when I heard the sound of a car engine coming up the narrow driveway. It was my grandmother. I didn’t think that I could ever forgive my mum, but it’s your mum, you’ve got to forgive, you have to. I was aware it was something I shouldn’t talk about. Without saying, ‘you must keep this a secret’, I knew that you must keep it a secret. Ian,* 70, was also sexually abused by his mother. Unlike Hamish, it happened when he was a much younger child. One gentleman, sadly, was completely house bound. He basically just felt that it was completely impossible to trust anybody or to be out in society because he had so little self-regard,” she says.

I heard my bedroom door creak open and footsteps cross the bedroom. Even without peaking through the covers, I knew something was standing at the window. I could hear where the footsteps stopped and I just knew it was the terrible thing from the night before. My mind kept showing me even more terrible versions of what I remembered until I finally shifted the blanket a little bit to take a peak.I used to hang out with my mum a lot, go shopping, do girly things, and I just started to notice my mum acting differently. He was not only sexually abused by his mother from a very young age but when he became older and was able to physically prevent her from abusing him, she engaged another friend to be her strong arm so she could continue the acts of sexual violence against him,” Lucetta explains. Since she met him, Lucetta had witnessed Marcus struggling to come to terms with what happened to him in childhood. They have experienced the same forms of trauma, the same forms of sexual abuse and emotional and psychological abuse as any victim of sexual abuse or sexual assault and they need to be taken seriously and they need to be believed.

I was born illegitimately,” Ian says, “and he [John] knew that because he wasn’t sleeping with my mother.” I’d been living my gay life quite quietly away from the family home and I just got to the point where I needed to talk to my parents about my life. I didn’t think I could continue not being honest with them.Ellen kept her mum’s secret for nearly 20 years. Her mum has now died. She feels like she’s finally able to talk about it. You can’t just bottle it up and think that it will go away, because it doesn’t ever go away,” he says. And he would know. About 10 years ago a television news story prompted him to briefly mention the childhood sexual abuse to his wife. After the disclosure he promptly told her: “I never want to talk about it ever again, ever.” Quietly reflecting on this, he says: “It’s really hard to tell someone you love, ‘By the way, my mother abused me and I had sex with my mother’.”