How a herd of zebras helped me deal with child sex abuse

I never told anyone what was going on (Picture: Roswitha Chesher)

All I could see was stripes.  

It was February 2023 and everyone around me was dressed up in zebra print to come together as child sexual abuse (CSA) survivors and allies.

For the first time, I felt part of a visible CSA survivor community. I’d found my herd. 

It was a far cry from my early childhood until the age of 10, when I was sexually abused.  

I lived with dissociative amnesia at the time, which is a psychological response that involves memory loss in relation to traumatic events. On top of that, I didn’t have any words to describe what was happening to me throughout my childhood in the 1970s.

As a result, I never told anyone what was going on. All I knew was that I felt different, unreal, and was often distressed. 

Understandably, this had a huge impact on my life.

The collective noun for a group of zebras is called a ‘dazzle’ (Picture: Sergio Pitamitz / VWPics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

During adolescence, I was an intelligent but disruptive student because I did not trust adults, so I would often be oppositional with teachers – sometimes reducing them to tears.

I also developed compulsive behaviours like skin picking.

As I navigated adulthood, I struggled with post-traumatic stress, insomnia, chronic migraines, suicidal ideation, substance use, and homelessness. I had no idea why – I just felt like my life was out of control and increasingly unmanageable.

At 20, I tried counselling and explored what I thought was the big issue – my father leaving us when I was three. But that was just scratching the surface and my amnesia remained. 

I found solace in the festival scene, living outside and in vehicles. It was in these communities that I met a handful of courageous survivors who spoke  about abuse.

They would talk about emotions that resonated with me, but I didn’t know why. At the same time, I started to feel more connected to my body from living outside, which began bringing me out of dissociation.

Finally – aged 29 – I found myself crying for hours, my body contorting. Then I would recover a tiny fragment of memory, like a pair of boots, a face, or a body sensation.

It took a long time to understand these were flashbacks. But it was the first time I felt I could piece things together and accept that I had been abused. 

While it was like a bomb going off in my life, a lot of my past feelings and behaviours suddenly made sense. 

Thankfully, I was fortunate to have a very supportive partner, some friends who were also survivors, and access to low-cost specialist support. But processing complex trauma is a lifelong journey. 

It is time to remove the shame from the experience of CSA (Picture: Roswitha Chesher)

In the years since, it’s something I have learned to live alongside.

There’s an estimated 11 million adult CSA survivors in the UK. After reading this statistic, I suddenly saw my experiences as very political so I decided I had to do something. 

So in 2014, I wrote and performed my first theatre show titled ‘I am Joan’ about my survival. Speaking out in such a public way was terrifying at first and I needed a lot of support to break through a lifetime of being conditioned to be silent.

Every time I performed though, audience members would then queue up to whisper ‘me too’ into my ear and often I was the first person they’d told. I found this deeply moving and connecting.

But I wanted to do more. In 2020, I co-created ‘ABC of CSA’ as a resource to educate people about child sexual abuse – in collaboration with over 40 survivors. Like ‘B is for we Believe you’ and ‘U is for Under all the layers of trauma is the person I was supposed to be’. 

While setting up the exhibition, I re-read the Z card, which said: ‘Feeling like a zebra in a world of giraffes’. 

Though the card speaks to our experiences of alienation as survivors within the dominant culture, all I could think was that there’s nothing wrong with being a zebra. Then the more I researched about these creatures, the more I realised they have commonalities with survivors.  

For a start, every zebra’s stripe pattern is unique, just like every survivor’s journey is diverse. 

They migrate long distances across challenging territory and also form superherds (the collective noun is a ‘dazzle’) to defend themselves. 

I decided then to invite everyone to wear zebra print at the launch of ‘An ABC of CSA’. Sure enough, they did – and seeing that all unfold was the spark for Zebra Day.

Zebra Day CSA happens on 31st January each year (Picture: Arterra/Marica van der Meer/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

I remember a woman at the launch in 2023 in a zebra print dress approaching me beaming from ear to ear.  

She said she never wanted to take it off and was so excited to feel part of something positive, rather than feeling isolated and stigmatised. 

Zebra Day CSA happens on 31st January each year. This year’s theme was centered on community, so we made a campaign video, commissioned 13 survivor artists to make Zebra-themed creative responses, held an online event, and invited survivors and allies to ‘wear and share’ Zebra on social media. 

And I’m pleased to say, hundreds of people joined in.  

For one day, we enjoyed feeling like zebras, but our work is nowhere near done.  

We need to make it clear that abuse is never a child’s fault (Picture: Roswitha Chesher)

Celebrating survival, feeling proud of ourselves, and understanding that we are part of a community is a huge step forward. All of these ideas are essential to narrative changemaking around child sexual abuse. I use art, music and performance to make change.

But cultural silence continues to play a role in isolating survivors and perpetuating abuse that currently impacts 500,000 children and young people each year in England and Wales.

As a society, we need to make it clear that abuse is never a child’s fault and that survivors are innocent victims of heinous crimes. 

If we want a different reality for future generations, we all need to be part of this conversation. It is time to remove the shame from the experience.

The solution to this issue really is that black and white.

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing [email protected]. 

Share your views in the comments below.