How I came to terms with my sexual abuse

Mark Allen was six when he was assaulted. He chose to survive, overcome his dark past and turn his story into a novel. This extract speaks to his past aa well as issues of crime, revenge and retribution

Glastonbury Tor from the River Brue (Getty/iStock)

As a businessman, Mark Allen has navigated his company through the pandemic crisis, not only surviving but thriving with record-breaking profits. As an entrepreneur, he’s nimbly pivoted his organisation into new modes of lockdown-era operation. And as a time-served media veteran who began his writing career as a journalist, working at the Sheffield Star and the Daily Express, he’s also found time to make his debut as a first-time novelist.

But before all that, Mark Allen was a child with a dark secret he couldn’t talk about. As a dreamy six-year-old in rural Somerset, with a chaotic and bohemian family background, he was sexually assaulted at random on a riverbank by a 21-year-old local man.

For some, that can mean a lifetime of pain, shame and trauma. But in his novel, Life Term, he’s proven that he can survive, overcome and, ultimately, alchemise abuse into a story worth telling and a novel worth reading.