My research has led me to the works of internationally-renowned authors, and others, who have been sexually abused as children. Oprah Winfrey. Maya Angelou who was sexually abused by her mother’s partner. ‘Mr Freeman lived with us, or we lived with him (I never knew quite which)’ she writes in I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings; Maya first felt something which was ‘too soft to be a hand’ and was raped by ‘a mush-hard thing’. Freeman was acquitted by the court because Maya could not find the words as he stood glowering at her, he was murdered a few hours after leaving the court; the child in Maya simply stopped talking as a result, well until she was a young adult.

The singer Billie Holiday in her autobiography Lady Sings the Blues reveals that she was raped when she was ten by a forty-five-year-old man. Quentin Bill’s biography of his famous aunt, the writer Virginia Woolf, says that she was sexually abused from the age of six in her nursery by her stepbrother Gerald Duckworth and then by his brother George Duckworth from 1888 to 1904, well until she was in her twenties, even as they sexually abused her sister, Vanessa, as well. Centuries of denial and the public’s disinclination to speak about the problem except in the most lurid of cases was overcome in America when the former Miss America of 1958, Marilyn Van Derbur Atler, publicly announced in 1989 that she had been sexually abused by her millionaire and socialite father from the time she was five, and right through until the age of eighteen. This led to literally thousands of adults who had been sexually abused in their childhood speaking out too. (It being America, this also lead to the False Memory Syndrome with therapists actively planting the idea which encouraged adults to think they had been sexually abused in childhood by their parents. As an American newspaper headlined it: ‘You fed them. You clothed them. Now they are back to say you raped them!’)

This is a personally important one: Latino rock guitarist Carlos Santana. His guitar has been my strength; Black magic woman to me is about strings being stretched to their limits to still produce that most magical of all God’s creations: music. Music can do a lot, it can even make you strong in your broken places; Carlos Santana said this too on American television in the early part of 2000, ‘Music mends.’ I wonder why record companies have not understood this. In India there are ragas for all moods and times, from dawn to midnight. Why are there no cassettes of non-film lullabies? ‘Music mends,’ says Carlos Santana, if only the music mandarins could understand this.

Carlos Santana had been sexually abused when he was eleven years old for a relentless two years. Now fifty-two, he had kept it his deepest and darkest secret for almost forty years. ‘Now,’ he said on American television, ‘I am free from feeling guilt, shame, judgement, fear.’