Content warning: This article contains descriptions of child abuse

Editors note: This article contains allegations made by Harrison James based on his personal account. These allegations have not been tested in court, and no findings have been made against the person referred to. The publisher has not independently verified these claims and presents them as the author's account of his experiences.

When I was a 13-year-old boy, my stepmother began sexually abusing me. It happened every single day before and after school, for three years. 

I was a child who didn't possess the complex, adult language required to describe what was being done to me.

I was groomed to believe that I was in love with my abuser and was participating in an illicit affair. I was conditioned to feel as though no one was safe enough to tell.

The abuse had been going on for some time when my stepmother gave birth to my daughter.

For years after that, I was made to pretend that my own child was my half-sister. It was the only way to keep the secret buried, and keeping the secret buried was the only way I knew how to survive and protect my daughter, as well as the woman I thought I loved. 

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So I did it. I loved my baby from the only place I was allowed to: close enough to feel the bond, but far enough away to be able to deny the truth of it, if ever questioned.

At 19, the truth came out. My stepmother left Australia to return to her homeland, taking my daughter with her, where they have been ever since. I have had no contact with my little girl since the day she left.

When I finally spoke out publicly about what had happened — the abuse, my daughter, and the years of silence — everything I thought I understood about my childhood, my own body, and my place in the world came apart at once.

I wasn't only confronting what had been done to me, I was confronting what had been taken from me. Those are two very different reckonings, and they arrived together.

A young Harrison. Image: Supplied.

My first experience of fatherhood was not painting a nursery with storks and clouds or standing awkwardly in someone's backyard while the pink or blue powder from a gender reveal smoke bomb ruined the lawn.

It was violence. It was silence. It was grief. And then it was years of trying to survive that truth, speak that truth, and build something that mattered from the rubble of it.

I am 26 years old now. I have turned the worst thing that ever happened to me into legislation, into literature, and into a life that I am genuinely proud of. I have advocated and passed laws across multiple Australian jurisdictions that mean convicted offenders can no longer hide behind 'good character' references in court sentencing.

I have written my story down and put it into the world as my debut memoir, Transform Your Pain Into Purpose, because I believe, with everything I have, that the survival of victims should be honoured, never hidden.

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Survivor advocate Harrison James shares his story.

But nothing I have built compares to what I have found in Bella. 

She is my gorgeous partner and my reason for believing that love can be safe, steady and freely given without condition. We have now been engaged for over a year, and are expecting our baby girl later this year. 

We are absolutely elated. But I want you to understand what it means to a man who first became a father in silence and shame. It means everything. It means more than I'll ever have the words for. 

This isn't a rose-tinted pregnancy announcement. Because the truth is, this isn't a feel-good story; or at least, it isn't only that. It is a story about grief living alongside bliss, about love that has no clean edges, and about what it costs to hope again when hope has already been taken from you more than once.

This baby Bella and I have on the way is not my first experience of fatherhood. But it is a second chance at it.

Harrison during school. Image: Supplied.

What happened to me was abuse, and the circumstances in which my first daughter came into the world were shaped by violence and trauma. And for years, I let the shame of it convince me that I was the monster in my own story. That even though I was a teenager who fathered a child with his stepmother, it was somehow my own deviant choice. 

I carried that shame as though it were mine to carry. The shame told me I was a 'deadbeat dad' who had abandoned his daughter. The shame told me I didn't deserve to grieve my daughter because I never deserved to have her.

It took therapy, advocacy, and the brutal work of sitting with my own story until it stopped feeling like a weapon, to understand that none of that was true. But none of that ever changed the fact that my eldest daughter has been loved by me, unconditionally, from the moment she existed.

It's been many years since I last saw my first daughter. A father, separated from his child for so long. A little girl, somewhere in the world, who doesn't know the full truth of who I am to her. Both of us shaped, every single day, by something that was done to us rather than chosen by us.

That kind of loss changes you. It leaves an emptiness so sharp and unnatural that you don't move on from it. You move around it, carry it differently, live alongside it, but it never stops being there.

That is why this next chapter of fatherhood means so much to me: because life is offering me the chance to experience it in the way it always should have been.

Harrison and Bella. Image: Supplied.

My first daughter and the baby coming later this year, are two entirely separate and deeply loved human beings. I never want this next chapter to be mistaken for a replacement, a redo, or an erasure. My first daughter is not a shadow in this story. She is my little girl, and I carry love for her every single day.

At the same time, I feel an indescribable gratitude for the child we now have on the way, and for the beautiful, hard-won life Bella and I have built to welcome her into. I use the word "hard-won" deliberately.

Bella is a cancer survivor, and I am a survivor of child sexual abuse. This life, this safety, this love, this ability to choose, was not handed to us. It was built, slowly and imperfectly, from the wreckage of things we didn't choose and couldn't control. That is what it actually means to break a cycle. Not a declaration, not a single moment, but rather a thousand quiet choices, made over years, in the direction of something better.

One child does not diminish the other. They are both my babies, loved by me with equal depth, tenderness and sincerity. The happiness I feel right now does not cancel my grief. And my grief does not poison my bliss. They simply coexist, the way complicated things always do, in a person who has slowly learned to hold more than one true thing at a time.

Today, Harrison is a survivor-advocate, author and speaker. Image: Supplied.

My first daughter is a victim in all of this too. I will never speak for her. Her story is hers. But I can say this: so much was stolen from both of us. Not just time or our proximity to one another, but the ordinary, unremarkable things. The school pickups, the bad days, the learning to ride a bike, the first loose tooth… the just being there. I am aware, always, that she carries the weight of that loss even if she doesn't yet know its full shape.

I hope, more than anything, that one day we will get the chance to reclaim even a small part of the time and love that should always have been ours. I don't know when that will be. I don't know what form it will take. But I believe it with every fibre of my being.

And while I wait for that day, I am learning how to live inside the life that is here. I often feel guilty for being happy, and I often feel disloyal to my grief when happiness arrives.

For a long time, I think I believed that if I let myself fully step into fatherhood again, it would somehow mean I was leaving my first daughter behind. But I know now that love does not work like that.

Love does not divide itself into smaller pieces when another child arrives. It grows. It stretches into places you thought had been permanently damaged and, somehow, asks them to soften again.

Bella and Harrison are welcoming a baby girl together. Image: Supplied.

This baby girl on the way is not here to heal me. That is not her job. But her arrival does mean something.

It means I get to stand in a hospital room without secrecy. It means I get to hold my daughter without having to hide what she is to me. It means I get to say, openly and proudly, "I am her father." It means I get to be there for the ordinary things I once grieved so deeply. And yes, I am sh*t scared.

I am scared of what becoming a father again might open in me. I am scared of the old wounds I have not yet found names for. I am scared of being overwhelmed, of being triggered, of having moments where the past reaches into the present and asks me to fight for the life I have now. But I am not scared enough to run from it. 

I am ready to meet it. Not perfectly. Not without fear. Not as a man who has somehow transcended everything that happened to him. But as a man who has done the work, who is still doing the work, and who understands that breaking a cycle is not something you announce once and then frame on a wall. It is what happens when you choose gentleness where you were taught fear. When you choose honesty where there was once silence. When you choose presence where there was once absence. 

That is the kind of father I want to be. Not the perfect one. Not the one who always knows what to do. But the one who stays. The one who listens. The one who apologises when he gets it wrong. The one who lets his children know, in every possible way, that love is not something they have to earn, decode, fear, or survive.

So no, this is not the usual pregnancy announcement. It is a declaration. That my first daughter will never be erased from my story. That my baby girl on the way will be loved in freedom, safety and truth. That grief and joy can live in the same body without destroying each other. That what was taken from me did not take everything. 

And that, after having fatherhood stolen from me before I was old enough to understand what it was, I am finally getting the chance to step into it the way I always deserved to. 

Openly. Safely. Proudly. 

As Dad.

Harrison James is an award-winning activist, speaker and author whose survivor-led campaign, #YourReferenceAintRelevant, has driven legislative reform across Australia, abolishing good character references as a mitigating factor in sentencing of convicted offenders.

His newly released memoir, Transform Your Pain Into Purpose , is out in stores now and explores how adversity can be transformed into meaningful change. You can follow his work via Instagram at @itsharrijames .

If you or anyone you know needs expert help, please contact Bravehearts — an organisation providing support to victims of child abuse. If you are concerned about the welfare of a child, you can get advice from the Child Abuse Protection Hotline (1800 688 009) or the 24-Hour Child Abuse Report Line (131 478).

If you or anyone you know needs to speak with an expert, please contact 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) — the National Sexual Assault, Domestic and Family Violence Counselling Service. If you are in immediate danger, call 000.

RizeUp Australia is Mamamia's chosen charity partner, a nation-wide organisation that walks with victim-survivors of domestic and family violence to deliver practical, life-changing support. RizeUp supports women and families as they rebuild safety and stability after violence. Donate here to create safe homes and new beginnings.

Feature image: Supplied.