Content warning: This post deals with abuse, and might be triggering for some readers.

My eight-year-old is the kind of kid every adult loves.

She’ll have a conversation with you about anything, share her ruminations on life, and show you the latest contortion poses she learned from YouTube. She’s got a smile that lights up any room and, though many things are tough for her, she works harder than anyone else I’ve ever met.

Relationships with other children, however, don’t come very easily. She’s not very adept at reading social situations and, while she craves closeness with her peers and is desperate to be liked, it has proven very difficult for her to form lasting friendships.

Her empathy and need for peer approval make her an easy target for abuse and bullying. Much like me, when I was a kid.

Watch: The signs of an abuser, told through his victim’s phone. Post continues below.

She’s been used as a pawn between other girls, made to believe she’s responsible for fixing their friendship troubles, fed conflicting stories from both directions and unable to decipher the truth.

She’s been involved in toxic friendships, where her so-called friends demand things of her that make her uncomfortable — from giving them her toys to showing them her underwear — and are unpredictable in their affections to her.

Lizzie was one such friend, and over time (and through many tears) my daughter came to realise that, as much as she had compassion for Lizzy, the girl did not mean her well or wish to be a genuine friend. The two are in the same grade at the same school, though, and their paths still cross from time to time.

This year, my daughter began talking about her new friend, Nina. I knew Nina’s mother from a parent-school committee, and the girls seemed to be building a genuine friendship. The two of them really seemed to have fun together, and I was happy for my girl. They had a play date one weekend and planned a sleepover for school vacation week.

Red flags come at unexpected times.

A few days before the sleepover, my daughter came to me as I was making dinner.

“Mum, I’m worried about the sleepover with Nina,” she said as I cut up hard-boiled eggs at the kitchen counter. My daughter worries a lot, and her anxiety is the same when she’s worried about what she’ll eat for dessert tonight as when she’s worried about an axe murderer coming to kill the whole family, so I didn’t quite know what to expect when I asked her why she was concerned.

…people knew something fishy was going on, but no one spoke up about it.

Immediately, she started hedging. “Lizzie told me this thing about Nina, and I know it’s not true. I know it’s not true because I know Nina would never do anything like this, but I’m still worried, because I’m afraid — what if it is true? But it’s not true, I know Nina and she would never — ”.

“Sweetie, you can’t know whether or not something is true unless you were there to see it,” I said. “But we know about Lizzie and how she deals with friendship, so you might be right that she’s not telling the truth. What did she say?”

“It’s a little uncomfortable to say,” she said. Abruptly, she turned and started walking away. “It’s not true anyway,” she said. “I just won’t say it.”

“Well, I’d really like if you could tell me anyway, though,” I insisted. “Just so I can know what’s going on.”

She circled back around and nodded, taking a deep breath and looking up at me with those big hazel eyes that will soon be above even mine.

“Well,” she began, “Lizzie told me that when she had a sleepover with Nina, she woke up in the night and Nina was kissing her privates.”

Miraculously, I didn’t slice my finger off with the sharp knife. Instead, I put it down and said to my daughter, who until that conversation had probably never considered that one person might kiss another’s privates, “I’m really glad you told me about that. I can see why you’d think it wasn’t the truth, too.”

I added some evidence that Lizzie was probably lying: “If Nina was kissing Lizzie’s privates, Lizzie would have had to be sleeping without any pants on, huh? Do you think it makes sense that she would be doing that during a sleepover?”

My daughter furrowed her eyebrows for a moment and then grinned in understanding. “That doesn’t make sense,” she said. I could see the relief in her eyes.

It’s so much easier to believe the innocent explanation and move on.

For a short moment, I was relieved, too. Well, I’m glad that was busted quickly, I thought. My judgment told me that, in the most likely scenario, my daughter was right. Lizzie made up the story, and Nina hadn’t really kissed her privates.

It would have been simple to drop the story right then and there, to move on with my evening and my life without a second thought to Nina, or to Lizzie, or to the silly stories kids tell.

Except that just days earlier, I had published a column in which I laid out my experience with childhood sexual trauma. I was the same age as these girls when the abuse happened, and I recognised shards of myself in all of them — especially Lizzie.

In the column, I’d reflected on what I consider to be the biggest tragedy of all: that, for years of my childhood, people knew something fishy was going on, and no one spoke up about it.

My cries for help were met with a patchwork of band-aids from different corners of my life, one-time halfhearted check-ins that I could easily bluff my way through.

Before long, all was forgotten and I was left once more to my own devices with no skills to recognise what was happening in my life and also no control over it.