We’re much more open about it now, we’re probably not in the absolute best place, even now, but at least I feel I can talk openly and say my mum had schizophrenia. That was the first time that it was mentioned, and it had never been discussed before. And funnily enough it was never talked about afterwards. We didn’t talk about it even after the word had been uttered by the psychiatrist. By that stage, we had 40 years worth of not talking about it. The third night after I moved in with her I went to her bedroom and told her I want to see her get undressed. She protested but I told her if she wants me to stay with her she had to obey in what I told her from now on. As she did I told her to remove her underwear as well and told her to lay on the bed nude. I looked at grandma for a while and then wished her a good night and left.

Lucetta recruited the men for her research with relative ease. This may lead one to assume this type of abuse is common. Frustratingly though, there seems to be no reliable data on its prevalence — including the Personal Safety Survey conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. According to Lucetta, society’s beliefs about gender are effectively stopping a cohort of male victims disclosing their abuse and accessing support. It peed on the apron while it happened, and a long, thin sound came out of Aunt Ellen. Mother wanted to jump on Grandmother and make her stop. She was going to scratch her. Or else she was going to run, or maybe just scream. But she did none of those things, because Grandmother looked at her in such a strange way. Like it was a kind of experiment and the idea was to find out how much chaos she could cause inside her. The more chaos and noise she could make there, the better. I nursed my mum when she was ill for a long time, and she had plenty of time to tell me, but she didn’t.” She didn’t want him to go. He had to stay at her side. Every time he got up to stretch his legs she became uneasy. Eventually he lay down beside her.

2. Christine’s family secret

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 was shunned, I wasn’t wanted. I felt that even from my cousins, uncles and aunties, grandparents,” Ian says.

Mr Byers And His Boy - Don't Wake Mom

I love my wife and for a lot of the time we had a good relationship but this thing [the abuse] came between us,” Hamish says, “it did slowly poison our relationship.” It’s an impressive ambition to try and keep it secret that somebody has got schizophrenia in the actual house where you are living. I hated her because of abuse,” he says, “I had a list of people who I wanted dead and she was on that list.” I laid on the ground in a daze as I heard my mother and sister screaming as the men in the other room laughed and shouted. I tried to get up and help them but as I stood the man who had hit me turned around and fired his rifle. I heard the sound of the gunshot and saw the flash of sparks leave the barrel. Then I felt a hard thudding pain in my chest and woke up screaming. It all just got too much for me. It was all I could think about. I couldn’t pretend any longer to my mum. My dad didn’t deserve it anymore, I had to get it out.”

Just fear of losing my family completely, fear of family falling apart and not them being the way we’ve always been.”

1. Ellen’s family secret

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. My mother’s whole family, they all knew. All her brothers knew. And my dad knew. Everyone knew except me. Even my dad’s sister knew evidently. How didn’t I know for the whole of my life?” 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.

Ellen’s mum told her that she’d had a relationship with a woman, but that she had married Ellen’s father and had never told anybody. 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. She saw me as like some sort of de facto relationship, I’ve got no doubt about that. She’d say: ‘You’re the man of the house’,” he recalls. 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.” I didn’t understand why but that’s how it was. It was only as I got older that I realised that not everybody was like that.”This is how it’s done,” she said, and without wanting to watch, Mother and Aunt Ellen saw Grandmother’s hand squeeze the air out of the rabbit. And he imagined how Grandmother had sat there with a sugar cube between her teeth, observing her daughters with amusement as they ran around the table in tears. Halfway down the stairs I saw someone that looked like one of the men with guns from my dream standing at the bottom. I was too scared to stop. I ran right at him and put all my weight into it, falling to the ground and right through him. He brought his rifle up like he was going to hit me with the butt of the gun but I got up and kept running. I was down the hall and in the living room when I felt a hand grab my arm and yank me to the ground. In the context of Lucetta’s research, Ian is unusual because he considers himself mentally healthy. There seemed to be a recurrence of the trauma building up over the years,” she says, “so from the late 30s onwards, it was really starting to become an issue for them.”