A journey from abuse back to life

Tanya's face is pixellated on legal advice, to comply with court orders related to her case. It is not her wish. She wanted you to see her "survivor's" face, and she believes such orders, in her case, give power to the perpetrator and remove it from her.

This is not a sad story, though there is tragedy and ugliness aplenty. Tanya's story is a triumph. It's about her refusal to be destroyed by crimes that extinguish the spirit of many. Crimes committed by someone she had every right to expect would act in her best interest.

It's about surviving the impact of those crimes, about living rough in South Auckland, a period when getting drugged and boozed was as routine as breakfast, lunch and dinner.

It's about defying the odds to become the person she is today: an attractive, positive, 37-year-old who is a mother and a career woman.

In essence, it is a remarkable comeback story: Tanya's journey back to life.

It's not easy to pinpoint when Tanya "died". Was it when her father first forced himself upon her when she was 10? Or much earlier?

There was no real love in the home. That's clear to her now, all these years later. But back then, how was she to know the norms of her family were any different from the rest of us?

Love wasn't a concept discussed in her home, let alone understood. Everything was conditional, she says.

Dad was a malevolent and volatile presence, someone to be tiptoed around.

Tanya describes him as a macho blue-collar Kiwi who'd talk, vaingloriously, about his rugby days, blaming his wife for his failure to become an All Black. His rationale: mum had wanted kids; family responsibilities got in the way of rugby.

Too much alcohol too often was the familial backdrop. He may have been drinking the first time he raped his daughter, but that's irrelevant. It wasn't the drink, says Tanya. "It was whenever he got the chance, whenever my mother wasn't around."

It was many years before Tanya could relax taking a shower, for example. That was one of the places where he got her. Since she's had her own home, she's installed locks on the bathroom door.

Fear was the device he used to maintain control. "It was always the same threat," recalls Tanya. "'If you tell, I will kill you'. My world has never been safe." She's never underestimated him, having once watched him put up a furious fight, his blood smeared over a wall, as several policemen called to the home struggled to overpower him.

But fear alone doesn't ensure silence forever. Nineteen years later Tanya walked into a police station and told of her father's abuse. He had used her for sex until, at the age of 14, she ran away for good.

Tanya's dysfunctional family didn't support her going to police. Although her mother left the marriage after learning what was happening, she preferred that the family shame remain private.

But giving voice to the unspeakable was a vital step for Tanya.

"I had to do it. It was eating me up. I was destroying myself with drugs, and alcohol: self-abuse basically. I couldn't handle it.

"I was always condemned for wanting to speak about it but I wouldn't be here today if I hadn't. I am a survivor and that was part of surviving.

"I'd just had enough, enough of being the person I'd become, and of Dad being out there living a good life."

Tanya's life revolved around drugs and alcohol, which brought temporary relief. Crude tattoos are a legacy of those years, an indication of how she turned her anger on herself.

"I had destroyed my body, or he had destroyed my body. I had lots of street tattoos. I was out of it all the time, then would wake up with street tattoos."

She used to cut herself in the delusion her pain might ease with the letting of her blood. There were suicide attempts: pills and a knife.

FOR the first couple of years after running away she split her time between her grandmother's house, the streets and the home of her boyfriend, with whom she later moved in.

Despite the turmoil, she worked: running bars, cleaning, as a machinist and at the engineering firm where she's been employed the past nine years. Though there were mornings when she was the worse for wear because of drugs and alcohol, she mostly made it in.

"I was always a worker," she says. "I needed to make money, so I worked."

The work provided a sense of routine, but the real catalyst for change was facing her fear, dealing with what had happened and holding her abuser to account.

The trial was gruelling. Tanya vomited regularly from nerves and hardly slept during the week of the court hearing. He was sentenced to eight years' jail, the judge making a point of her father's failure to express remorse.

That helped, Tanya says. The importance of society's condemnation of his behaviour should not be underestimated. It meant the world to her.

"It was a huge turn of events for me, emotionally. It just felt right. Finally!"

Looking back, that's when the hate and anger began to fall away. That made it possible, she says, to let love in to her life.

Her guide was a friend she refers to as "my soulmate". From her and her family she learned that love was a gift that asked nothing in return.

She'd been manipulative in her own relationships, jealous and violent because, she says, that's what she'd known at home. She's had two relationships which each lasted years, despite suffering from her inability to trust.

"How can you trust when you've had a father, supposedly a protector, do such things to you?" After that, how could she, she asks, just accept the word of a boyfriend who told her he loved her?

Changing her life meant changing her attitude to herself. "I had to learn to believe I was capable of being loved."

Her story since has mostly been good. A recurrent nightmare in which she thrusts a knife at an assailant has stopped. "It petrified me for years. The man never had a face, but in the last one I saw it was my father."

There are setbacks and hangovers, of course. Discovering that her father was recently released from jail having served just over half his sentence is an example.

She's tried and failed three times to sit through Once Were Warriors. Too close to home. And for a long time she couldn't stand the smell of rum. "That's what he drank," she says.

Gaining control over her use of alcohol and drugs has been progressive. Something would happen and she'd "cop out and go back into it".

The men she dates are exclusively younger. "I could never date an older man. That's one hurdle I'll never get over."

She sees this article as a last step in her journey. It's her chance to make good of bad, to let others like her know they need not be destroyed. "If they can hear it from someone just like them, maybe it will give them strength to take the first step."

Tell a teacher, ring the police, she says, and don't be controlled by your fear. If she was able to pull through, then so can they. That's her message.

"I have had to learn how to live life, love myself, be confident, learn how to deal with people because I was very rebellious. If someone looked at me I'd get up and hit them. I was a horrible person, full of anger and hate. I know I have changed into a good person."

She came to realise that although you have to accept what happened, you don't have to live by it. "You can blame your past but you still have to deal with it." She has lapses but nothing like when she lived in virtual emotional paralysis.

"I'm 90 per cent happy today," she says. She drives a sporty BMW and works as a supervisor in a predominantly male industry.

In the waterfront cafe where we meet for an interview on a pretty summer day, she's effusive, vivacious, full of positive energy. It's true, life has never been better. But it could be better still.

"The best would be someone coming up to me and saying, 'Because of your story I managed to get away from abuse'. That, to me, would be priceless."