'Forgiveness is hard, but it can set you free'

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ELIZABETH HISLOP was eight years old and lying in bed, pretending to be asleep, when she heard her father come into her bedroom. She can't remember exactly when it started, but she also can't recall a time when she wasn't being abused.
She had hoped that if he found her curled up asleep, he'd leave her alone, but he never did. This time was no different, except that for the first time he raped her.
"Now clean yourself up and don't make me do that again," he said, shifting all the responsibility on to his traumatised child.
Elizabeth's story of what happened to her behind the modest front door of her 1970s Renfrewshire home is one of those that makes you want to weep and rage at once, and yet it also makes you marvel at the survival skills of a little girl failed by social services, who overcame so much to become a loving mother and grandmother. Still fighting for changes in unjust compensation laws, plus a simple admission of failure by those who were supposed to be protecting her, Elizabeth's story stands out from hundreds of other tragic cases because of her decision to pardon the man who ruined her childhood. It enabled her to move on to live a life that is a testament to the redemptive powers of forgiveness.
Both her parents were alcoholics and, from a young age, while taking care of her two younger brothers, she endured her father's sexual abuse. Once her two older sisters and big brother had left home, she had to care for the younger ones as well as her parents.
It would be hard to find more depressing reading material than her social-work files - at least those she has been able to obtain from Renfrewshire Council. Despite the fact that her father was eventually jailed for sexual abuse in 1977 - when she was 12 - social workers allowed him to return to the family home without first removing Elizabeth and her younger brothers from his care.
William had always ruled his family through fear, beating his wife and six children. Left as the eldest child at home, Elizabeth tried to protect her brothers. "I can remember times when I had to get in the way when he was beating them, as I thought he might kill them," she says. "'Please, Dad, let him be,' I begged once as blood poured down my brother's face. 'You can have his, then,' he yelled, turning the blows on me.
"I took more than my share of the violence, as well as coping with the sexual abuse. I felt I had no choice. I had to protect my family."
William was a mass of contradictions. He ran the house like a military camp. "We were like little soldiers to him and discipline was rigid," Elizabeth recalls. "If we stepped out of line, we were beaten. But to the outside world, he would have seemed the perfect father. He was good company, funny and could be very generous, but not to us. He was so kind to other people that it was hard not to love him. But it broke our hearts that his vicious side was just for us.
"My mum was terrified of him as well. I've often wondered how she could have failed to notice the sexual abuse, but I do believe she never suspected. No one spoke about child sexual abuse in the 1960s and 1970s. So while she took refuge in the bottle, my father took away my innocence."
As Elizabeth grew older, she realised that not all fathers behaved that way to their daughters. "I felt hatred and revulsion. But part of me still loved him and wanted his approval. This caused terrible feelings of guilt and shame. How could I love him after what he'd done to me? The confusion made it harder to tell anyone what was happening."