S – as Orchard refers to him – was 26 when he met the teenage Orchard at a Melbourne nightclub and, one week later, started having sex with her. The relationship, which began at the end of 1985, lasted almost a year. It took the author three decades to recognise what had happened to her.
“I believed that I had been in a romantic relationship,” Orchard writes. “I managed to skip over what I believed to be an inconsequential detail – that I was a child.”
As a teenager, Orchard believed she was in love with her abuser. Like many victims of sexual grooming, she felt adored as never before.
With unflinching honesty, Orchard shows how “abuse is the most potent when it is interlaced with love.” She tells how S ridiculed her, ordering her to lose weight, calling her “a hopeless kisser”, and casually informing her that she needed see a doctor because he had an STD.
In New South Wales, only 7% of sexual assaults reported to police result in a guilty conviction. Orchard asks: “Is it worth going to the police on the chance you might be one of the 7 per cent?”