The Stories We are, Francesca: “I, a victim of child pornography”

Francesca’s story is one we would never want to hear. But they exist and must be told so that it does not happen again. His story.

«EI am a tiny little girl with blond pigtails, a meek and taciturn character. At the age of 4 I not only started going to kindergarten, but I got involved in a child pornography network. I have been objectified, used, bought and sold.

I experienced the humiliation of standing in line with other girls waiting to be chosen to satisfy the greed of the adult on duty.

Together with other peers I made small films where my rape was imprinted on film. Due to this trauma, I still struggle to look at the photographs where I am portrayed. I am still working to clear this perception of my past and reclaim my own image. I’ve lived through hell and it’s all engraved on my skin, sometimes I still feel the big hands of those men on me. They tortured me repeatedly, selling me and trading me for money, all out of a disgusting lust for power.

For years my mind has protected me, removing the memory of those sticky bodies intertwined with mine. Forgetting happens to many abused children, it’s a matter of survival. To bring everything back to light I needed a psychological therapy consisting of EMDR, through ocular relaxation, we can remember and relive moments from our past, but with the awareness and tools of an adult. It’s a bit like watching a horror movie without volume: it still remains scary, yet it becomes tolerable enough to be able to analyze it for what it was.

Reliving parts of this experience was like falling into oblivion in a dark and black vortex. You torment yourself with the false thought that you will never get out of it and that you will feel those hands rummaging in your panties all your life, fortunately over time I have learned of the functional mechanisms that have allowed me to learn to live with my experience, I can’t say I forgot, it wouldn’t be right, but I can say that I have found a healthy balance to accept myself along with my trauma.

Having worked out many of the shadows of the past, I felt the need to turn this bad story into something beautiful, to make sense of this cruel madness. So after a long search I found a suitable place for me, the Meti association. Here I found my home and together with other people with my own experience I try to create new ways to lead us back to our self, to feel less alone and above all to get out of the conspiratorial silence that surrounds this type of abuse. If we want to defeat this scourge, we must create listening bridges that allow everyone to know the dynamics that are used to circumvent a child “.

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