If you don't want to read all this true story, at least read the last paragraph that's in red.
Back in 1955 our neighborhood had 10 kids (5-girls, 5-boys) all near the same age (6 to 10). We would daily all gather in in Sacagawea's (pseudonym) backyard (with her 2 brothers & sister) and for hours these normal, innocent christian-raised boys and girls played kickball, whiffle-ball, and football - days full of exercise, even exercising laughter together. All those boys & girls most age 11-12 were "bubbly", quick-witty, glib. At my age 12 my family moved about 25 minutes away.
Three years later, me (15) selling school bumper stickers in front of the football stands, Sacagawea's (13 y.o) face appeared saying "I'll sell one for you." She immediately turned & sold to this admiring guy behind her, who I later learned followed her everywhere. I don't think she thought I recognized her face. She was beautiful. I more frequently met those other 4 neighbor girls because they were conspicuously out front as pretty cheerleaders & one majorette. So at age 13 Sacagawea had a personality change into a severe introvert, at 13 a sinking soul that nobody caught. I started dating her then.
Back in 1960 there was no publicity that sexual abuse of young girls by their fathers even existed. So education-wise at 14 such abuse was never admitted to my brain. Trained in the Baptist church, such sinfulness was nothing. Reading and being educated lots more in abnormal psychology, I pieced together this belief about the first girl I dated and first girl I ever kissed. Secagawaya was pretty but way too shy (now I know the term pathological shyness). I felt that rewarding teen tingling of those kisses, but something was absent in her response = she went comatose, like a trance of unconsciousness. {This abnormality was obvious enough that I tested it. Alone in my family kitchen. I handed Sacagawea triangle-cut tuna sandwich Mom made for us. We were standing. She held it between both her hands.
She was so pretty, I kissed her. I notice that sandwich rotate, on its way to being dropped. Quickly I took the receiver of the kitchen wall-phone and placed that dial-tone near her ear. Without coming out of her trance, eyes closed, she twisted her head away from that sound like it was unknown and dangerous.
Totally confused about the total absence of normal teenage endearment = if we held hands, it was always me that reached to her hand. When we hugged, I hugged and her body was merely like a dress hanging in a closet. No sweetness shared there?
One Christmas Eve, her family, all in the living room near the Christmas tree, her Dad came in and, in his tradition, he stuffed several $20 bills within the boughs of the Christmas tree for the kids to jump and push to get the most Jesus money. At that moment my 14 Y.O. girlfriend uttered in a voice like from horror movies that were yet to be produced in max creepiness : "I hate him." she uttered. So how did ignorant me, of a blessings family , respond.? I immediately scolded her. {So wrong of me.}
One day I sat in the hospital room of this 14 Y.O always noncommunicative girl. She was still under anesthesia affects. Sitting there with her mother and sister, it dawned on me that this dulled state companionship matched her human persona. { I didn't know to be more accepting of this abnormal teen non-romance?} So a few months later, I broke up with her. Her reaction was non-existant.
Furthermore, that hospital "surgery" was some kind of treatment by a Urologist. My sister was a 1st-year nurse at St. Vincents. She dropped by, looked at her chart. Privately at home, my sister assured me the pathology was minor, a crimped or twisted urethra (my later studies listed this as a "warning sign" for treating doctors to look closer for other signs of sexual abuse).
15 years later, I heard of her death due to drug involvement. By then I'd had plenty of investigation-education in textbook Child Development , and in Abnormal Psychology. I surely believe that when she started "developing" (~ 13) that her dad would sneak into her bedroom when all were asleep and "manhandle" her body. I think this is where even any honest "romantic" physical contact extended to her caused her to retreat into "tranced unawareness" "not there". She disassociated in psych terms.
The real importance of this story is the truth that the best corrector-eliminator will always be for the "little girl" to report her abuser immediately ... but then that little girl will be taken from the family? She will have ruined the family? Such are the worries or even the abuser's implanted threats to command silence, shame. This societal evil is one of the most "cryworthy" villanies still going, still growing.