Listen: "She’s my daughter and she’s for sale"
Behind closed doors in the leafy suburbs of Durban, there are many dark secrets. Terence Pillay chats to a survivor of child sex abuse at the hands of her very own parents and despite staggering odds, has lived to tell the tale.
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When you meet Lucy X, she looks like regular 25 year old wife and mother. And that she is. She teaches pre-primary school by day and takes care of her family by night. But behind her soft, blue lies a dark story.
Lucy is the product of broken home – who had a sex worker for a mother and an abusive step father. When she was just a little 7-year-old child, her mother would dress her up in “sexy” clothes and take her to hotel rooms where she would be sold for sex to men old enough to be her grandfather.
Her repulsive mother would also take sexually explicit photographs of her and sell them to paedophiles– all the while without even the slightest consideration that she was just a child, and what she was doing was illegal.
Then the police raided the house in which she was living with her mother and step-father and Lucy was rescued and placed in foster care with her brother who also suffered tremendous abuse at the hands of his stepfather and other relatives.
Today, that world where a frightened young girl walked the gauntlet to be sold for sex is far behind Lucy. She met the man of her dreams, got married and they are parents to a beautiful two year old girl.
You can email Terence Pillay at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter: @terencepillay1 and tweet him your thoughts.