Warning: This article contains information that some people may find upsetting.
Updated: 10:35am – It took a decade for Peta Butler to get her mother to admit the unimaginable: organising for her own daughter be raped.
The confession, when it came, was devastating: Peta’s mother, Therese, had “tried to find another girl that was 16 so he didn’t have to touch you” to be raped in a hotel room by a balding, fat man three times her age.
But when she couldn’t, she confessed to her daughter, as police and friends listened in, that she not only gave him Peta, she then smoked cigarettes outside the motel room as he raped her a decade ago in Toowoomba, west of Brisbane, Queensland.
Therese Butler was found guilty this week of, in 2006, taking her daughter, Peta, aged just 16, on a “girls weekend” to Toowoomba, plying her with alcohol, and sending her into the bedroom of her their cheap hotel room to be forced into having sex with a stranger.
“Not long after that, he entered the room. He didn’t say anything. He just literally walked up to me and took off his clothes and took off my pants,” a brave Peta, now 26, told The Courier-Mail.
“I was frozen. I couldn’t do anything. I just couldn’t move.”
Peta has spoken out, seeking closure and to give others to courage to report abuse, after her mother was sentenced to four years in prison, suspended after 12 months, after pleading guilty to procuring a child for carnal knowledge.
“I had to report my own mother, my biological mother. But she will never be my mother again and she will never be a grandmother to my children,” Peta said.
-NZH
