Kate Price was sexually abused by her father as her mother kept silent

This Happened To Me by Kate Price (Leap £22, 320pp)

At the beginning of her book, This Happened To Me: A Reckoning – by turns deeply shocking, always bold and ultimately hopeful – Kate Price writes, ‘This book is a betrayal.’ She reveals the devastation and chaos perpetrated by cycles of domestic violence, sexual abuse and poor education.

‘Girls in our hometown’ – a small Appalachian mill town – ‘were expected to be economically dependent on their families, support their husbands, raise children, not have lives or minds.’ Her paternal grandparents had their first son when her grandmother – a silk-mill girl and a prostitute – was just a teenager and her grandfather still married to his first wife.

Her father – one of four boys subsequently – was good at basketball and made the high-school team. He might have got into college on a scholarship, but his mother made him give it up to get a job.

‘I often wondered,’ Price considers, ‘whether my father would not have become such a hardened, cruel man if he’d been able to keep shooting hoops as a kid.’

His abuse of his daughter began when she was young; Price remembers that she was eager to start kindergarten the next year as she describes how her father would drug her before molesting her. She woke to the smell of rubbing alcohol and the feeling of a cotton ball wiping her bicep before a needle prick.

Sometimes he’d make her drink something that tasted like cough medicine to make her drowsy. He would change her out of her nightgown, into clothes, and carry her to his truck, her mind ‘sputtering in and out of consciousness like a flame in the wind’.

Later, when she awoke, she would ‘cup the soreness’ between her little legs.

It is only much later that Price gathers the shocking evidence – based on the memory of her father’s conversations with a man who called himself the ‘Chicken Plucker’ – that it wasn’t just her father that was abusing her, it was many other men too. Price’s father was trafficking his young daughter for sex.

Price brilliantly captures the confusion and conflict that victims of sex abuse endure and the guilt-tripping by their abusers: ‘Don’t tell Mummy,’ he urged. ‘Only special little girls get to be sexy.’ Her father insisted what was happening was normal: ‘This happened to me, so it’s happening to you.’

As a little girl, Price enjoyed her father’s attention. He singled her out as his favourite, pitching her against both her mother and her older sister, Sissy – his modus operandi a perverted sort of ‘divide and rule’.

Price enjoyed the affection and the suggestion that she was apparently able to please her father in ways her mother and sister could not.

She also learned that keeping her mouth shut and her ‘legs open’ was what kept her alive. When Price was six her father discovered that she had a crush on a neighbourhood boy called Bobby. As a punishment he dug an ‘x’ into her forearm, ‘“You’re mine,” he said, spitting the words as he carved, “you will always be mine”.’

But he didn’t stop there. He threw her down two flights of stairs to the basement, choking and beating her until she passed out.

Price describes how she loved to go fishing but began to decline invitations to join her father on fishing expeditions when she understood they provided an opportunity for abuse.

She learned he was less likely to press the point if her nose was buried in a book, so she began to read voraciously. Just as books were a way out of difficult lives for Jeannette Wallis and Tara Westover, so they proved for Price a passport.

She visited a school friend one day whose mother had completed a Harvard fellowship. Theirs was a peaceful home full of books not booze, unlike hers, she writes, with no shotgun at the front door. For the first time in her life, Price entertained the powerful thought that she ‘could be something different from my family’.

But Price’s journey to that ‘something different’ – given the shocking abuse she was a victim of – was not a smooth one.

There was more confusion when her father began a relationship with another woman and left her mother. Price felt relieved but also betrayed. ‘I’d not only been left as a daughter but also as a lover.’ She is sure if she could have stayed her father’s ‘sexy, perfect little girl’ he would not have left; in growing up, older, she’d gone from plaything to financial burden – an ‘obligation’.

And the confusion obviously bled into relationships with early boyfriends. The blows dealt by sexual abuse sustain as emotional bruises for years; Price sought to silently please partners – ‘I executed the routine my father demanded whenever he raped me’ and so she did not speak out when a boyfriend raped her too.

Where was Price’s mother in all this? She was there, a gentle advocate of education who had received none herself. This redeems her a little, but she remained silent despite knowing what was happening behind closed doors. Ironically, she cared too much what the neighbours would think.

It was not until years later that Price understood her father was abusing her mother too. As a child, she’d noticed marks on her mother. ‘I have a skin condition, so I bruise easily,’ her mother explained.

When Price began working at Harvard, where she was able to take free classes towards her degree, she sought therapy.

She started to see Dr Bessel van der Kolk, a local trauma specialist and subsequently author of the bestselling The Body Keeps The Score.

Painstakingly, Price pieced together her broken past and slowly, slowly began to feel whole. She reconnected with Sissy, from whom she’d been estranged for 15 years.

They learned together – and long after Price’s mother’s death, at just 48 from cancer – that their mother knew their father was trafficking them both.

With them being isolated from one another, the sisters never confided in each other until a writer at the Boston Globe helped bring them together.

The resultant piece would make the journalist, Janelle Nanos, a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Today, Kate Price is an internationally recognised child sex-trafficking expert.

She is happily married with a son. She and Sissy are reunited.

Her story is indeed a betrayal because, as she observes, and despite the odds, ‘I am still here.’