Kimberly Wyatt

Kimberly Wyatt

Kimberly Wyatt told someone as a child, and was not believed

Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.

Kimberly Wyatt was sexually abused as a young child. She said clearly that she did not want to go into detail, and this story does not. What she did describe is the shape of it. It was not her immediate family but relatives who were close to them, living in the same farmhouse, in a place cut off from everywhere else. She was, in her word, vulnerable — a child in a room down the hallway. It happened more than once, and not only with one person. The part she returned to was not the abuse. It was telling someone. She built up the confidence to speak about it as a child, and she was not believed. She describes that as consistent — that the people who felt safe to trust turned out not to be, and that when she was honest about it nothing changed. Looking back, she is not sure her parents had it in them to deal with it or protect her the way she needed, and she thinks that is because of hurt in their own lives. She says she has found a way to accept that. Where it went instead was dance. On stage, she says, everything she did had something behind it, and nobody watching knew: she was living out something true that she had no other way of saying. She describes it as therapeutic — a place for what she was not being listened to about. She now runs a dance academy and works with children who have been bullied, or are neurodivergent, or simply feel they do not fit. What she tells them is that a wider well of experience is something an artist can draw on, and that finding forgiveness can make it a tool rather than a weight. That is how she holds it. It is not advice, and nobody has to arrive at it. Nothing here is medical advice. If any of this happened to you, support is listed at the end of this page — and it does not matter how long ago it was.

• Sexual abuse and sexual assault