First, a confession: I avoid reading about the sexual abuse of little girls. I am a journalist, and I am glad to live in the age of #MeToo – I am all for public institutions holding men accountable for their assault of women and girls. But 10 years ago, my therapist and I decided it was important I walk away from the topic. It was imperative that I did. It was self-preservation.

As a woman who has made her career writing about the politics of gender, this dogged refusal to engage with this very specific category of stories has led to several raised eyebrows and barbed comments from editors and colleagues, early in my career. Most of them dismissed it as the eccentricities of an overprotected rich girl who couldn’t stomach the ugliness of real-life brutality. It was easier to allow the image to stick than to admit that I was constantly hovering close to nervous breakdowns and panic attacks, every time I was anywhere close to the subject.

It didn’t help that I started my career only a couple of years into my therapy. I’ve tried testing the waters a couple of times. Five years ago, I thought I was ready to face my demons, and attempted to organise an child sexual abuse awareness camp. It resulted in me having to take three months off of work to allow myself to heal. Then too, it was easier to pretend to be the flake who took off on a long vacation on a whim. As recently as last year, working on a story about a pre-teen rape victim sent me into a spiral of PTSD that took weeks to crawl out of.

I’ve spent so much of my life denying the existence of my horror that I’ve gotten really good at pretending. So good, in fact, that even my family never once suspected what was really going on with me.