The founder of Talk Hong Kong, which supports survivors and drives prevention of child sexual abuse, shares her story, why breaking the silence is so necessary, and what she wants everyone to know about child sexual abuse
TRIGGER WARNING: The following story contains themes and descriptions related to child sexual abuse. Reader discretion is advised.
“How do you invite strangers to a room they’ve never been in to talk about the worst thing that probably ever happened to them in their lives?” asks Taura Edgar.
It had taken Edgar three decades to break her own silence after she was raped by her father between the ages of 10 and 14. Now, she was inviting other survivors to share their experiences in a peer support group from Talk Hong Kong, an organisation she founded to work to prevent child sexual abuse and support adult survivors.
It was 2019, and initially Edgar met mostly with empty rooms, which she actually welcomed. “It let me get over my nerves,” she says. But soon, people started to show up.
“It wasn’t comfortable, but it was something I personally needed, and when I realised that there weren’t a bunch of experts spending time on it, I was willing to experiment,” says Edgar, whose therapist had encouraged her to seek out a support group. Unable to find one that took place in English in Hong Kong, where she’s been based for the last 26 years—the only one she did find, in Cantonese, has since ceased operation—she set about launching her own. But that was not until she had read extensively, undertaken some specific training and visited The Prevention Project Dunkelfeld in Berlin, the world’s only large-scale paedophile treatment centre, “just to prepare myself to see whether I could do the work”.
If you have a parent who was abused, you are more likely to be abused yourself, especially if that abuse is untreated. And I think we have a lot of untreated trauma in the population at large.
To date Edgar, who is a Front & Female Awards Hong Kong 2023 winner, estimates that Talk has supported about 150 survivors through its group sessions. Additionally, in 2022 Talk produced a report on child sexual abuse in Hong Kong, based on evidence from 2010 to 2021, to shine a light on the scale of the abuse and to catalyse prevention.
She knew from the outset that she needed data. With her business background—Edgar works as a digital marketing professional by day—she had seen that “if you want to convince someone to do something, give them evidence.”
From the research, Talk estimated that 12 per cent of children suffer from some kind of sexual abuse before they’re 18 in Hong Kong. It’s a similar number in the UK and US, which doesn’t surprise Edgar, though she does believe that the number is much higher. A study last year in Australia on child maltreatment found that 28.5 per cent of the national population has experienced sexual abuse before they turn 18, a figure that Edgar thinks most other nations are closer to.
“Over time you recognise patterns of abuse. A lot of our stories are very similar, and it doesn’t really matter what culture you come from or what language you speak. It’s a human problem,” she says. Additionally, Talk estimates that 96 per cent of cases go unreported.