Louise Greentree, 18th June 2008
Once Upon a Time there was a girl called Harriet. Like the character in a Jane Austin book she wanted to be loved and she wove fantasies in her mind, as girls do, about that day, that wonderful day, when her Prince would come. He, tall and handsome (of course) and smitten by her beauty and bowled over by her gorgeousness, would sweep her off her feet and take her to the paradise of a young girl’s fantasies woven in the dreams of her emerging sexuality. This is a scenario that every psychologist and mother of an early teenage girl would recognise.
This is the story of how Harriet’s adolescent sexual fantasies, which she has nurtured from age 14 to age 20 and beyond, have brought disaster both to her as well as to a family who loved her, and whom she loved. In her mind she wove adolescent fantasies about the husband of a family whose wife and six children had welcomed her into their home and treated her like another daughter because she was unhappy in her own family. They brought her into their church community and involved her in Christian fellowship and love. There is no question but that the husband had no idea that Harriet had started creating these fantasies shortly after reaching puberty and that everyday she saw him she was weaving them into a story in her mind. She was tragically misinterpreting every act of kindness and word of encouragement in terms of demonstrating his special love for her. In harsh reality, he had treated her as he treated the various friends of all his many children who surged in and out of his home – with casual kindness.
This is the story of how one evening when she was 20 years old she tried to act seductively towards him and he reacted with horror and with physical flight away from her. How humiliating that instinctive rejection must have been.
No-one counseled her about the sexual desire she was feeling and the conflicts this produced in her when she considered that the object of her desire was the husband of the family to whom she owed so much. They left her to talk about ‘feeling uncomfortable’ and that things must be ‘wrong’. No-body suggested that the object of her desire did not desire her, and it was only her medical adviser who said that she needed to look elsewhere to form a sexual relationship appropriate to her age and circumstances.
This is the story of how she has been let down by her family, friends and advisers, and ruthlessly abused by the people of the parish leadership and those in positions of authority within the parish and the diocese to satisfy their own agendas under the guise of protecting her. As a result she has been left isolated and lonely, cut off not only from her own family but also from the members of the family who had given her unconditional Christian love. It is the story of how an Anglican Church parish and Diocese through its totally inappropriate processes abused (and are continuing to abuse) this now 21-year-old young woman.
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A Cautionary Tale
A Cautionary Tale – Summary