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‘There was very little they didn’t do to me, every day for a year’
by Lia Hynes
20th May 2021
20th May 2021
" I felt that as a survivor, I should have seen the signs. I should have screamed; I should have run away. It’s total bullshit; you’re not going to do any of that. You just shrivel up into a ball."
Despite a history of horrific sexual and racial abuse growing up in a small Irish town, Chantal Kangowa is the youngest Black woman in Ireland ever to run in a local election, or any election at all. She is also founder and CEO of her own company. The deeply impressive twenty-seven-year-old sits down with Lia Hynes to bravely tell her story, in the hope that it might help others.
*This piece contains mentions of sexual abuse, assault and suicide IMAGE is publishing this article as part of World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development. It was when she was four, and starting primary school, that Chantal Kangowa began to notice the behaviour of those around her. “I didn’t notice the difference in me, I just noticed people’s different behaviours towards me,” she says now of growing up a person of colour in...
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