WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT: As a boy, Ryan Harland looked up to his older brother Kevin as his ‘hero’, but it wasn’t until they’d left their remote island home behind that he realised the lengths his sibling had gone to protect him
Growing up, Ryan Harland idolised his older brother Kevin, who he says “was and always will be a hero” to him. Little did he know in his younger years that Kevin was protecting him from a dark family secret.
Sadly, Kevin, who protected Ryan “in a way that a brother shouldn’t have to protect”, passed away in 2007 at the age of just 33. Now, everything Ryan does is centred around honouring the life of Kevin, who “put himself through hell” to ensure his younger sibling didn’t have to endure the nightmarish abuse their evil father subjected him to.
Born on the Isle of Sheppey, childhood wasn’t an easy time for Ryan. Although he adored his mother, his “best friend” to this day, and looked up to Kevin as a “hero”, Ryan’s father cast a shadow over their family life.
Now 48-years-old with two children of his own, Ryan opened up to the Mirror about his difficulties with the word ‘father’ – or as he terms it, the ‘f word’. Ryan shared: “When it comes to mentioning that F word when it comes to him, it’s hard because he never was. He was a narcissist, a paedophile.”
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From an early age, Ryan knew his father wasn’t a good man, but he didn’t initially comprehend the true depths of his depravity. His mother, with whom he shares an “unbreakable” bond, endured harrowing physical abuse at his hands, which took a devastating toll on the two boys.
Ryan, who now lives in Chatham, Kent, recalled: “We learned behaviour from an early age to do whatever he wanted, so my mum and then no one else didn’t get hurt or anything like that.” However, he didn’t see as much of what was going on as Kevin did. Ryan was more of an outdoorsy type and loved playing outdoors with his friends, while shyer Kevin preferred to stay indoors.
When Ryan was 11 years old, his mother left his father. The nature of his upbringing meant Ryan didn’t quite understand at the time why they were leaving exactly, having assumed then that “every household was the same”. It was only when they moved out and away from the abuse that he began to understand.
All the while, his father was able to put on a façade whenever they had people over. He was never loving towards them, but was able to put on a “nice” front that may have fooled those dropping by. For the next few years, Ryan continued visiting his father on weekends, partly because he wanted to see his old pals, and partly because he wanted to “keep the peace”.
He explained: “I thought if I went and saw him, then he’s not giving Mum any hassle and that, and I couldn’t understand why I was the only one going to see him. Kev didn’t, but later on in life, I found out the reason why.”
Despite Ryan’s hopes of making things easier for his mum, his father continued to give her trouble. It wasn’t until Ryan was sitting his GCSEs that he began to piece together a clear picture of who his father really was, when a piece about him was published in a national newspaper, showing him dressed as Father Christmas.
Ryan explained: “He was well known on the island for certain things – paedophilia, things like that – but back then it was covered up more than what it is now. He, being the narcissist and thinking that his s*** doesn’t stink, can do whatever he wants. He said something to our local paper. I don’t know why he said it, but he went there and said, ‘Oh, I’ve just been Father Christmas up in Woking’.
“So because they knew everything about him, they contacted the [national newspaper]. There was a big bit in there, him dressing as Father Christmas, and basically saying, ‘this bloke shouldn’t be around children’, and things like that.”
This disturbing revelation sent Ryan “off the rails”, and he found himself living in fear of being associated with his father, worried that this connection meant people at school would want to beat him up.
According to Ryan: “I didn’t want to go to school, and if I did, I used to stay behind school to let all the other kids go, so I didn’t get beaten up, or I left before everyone left. I’m trying to minimise everything, every opportunity, because I felt like everyone wanted to kick the crap out of me because I was so angry with him. Probably wasn’t, probably, in reality, no one probably wanted to do that, but in my head, that’s how I felt.”
After grappling with poor mental health for a couple of years, Ryan, by then in his late teens, decided to go and see his father at his flat. In an unthinkable turn of events, his father subjected him to a harrowing act of sexual abuse.
Ryan remembered: “I just froze when he started touching me and things like that because obviously learnt behaviour again, do whatever he wanted to keep the peace. I just froze, and that was the last time I ever put myself in that position to be alone with him.”
He went home in tears, telling nobody, as he felt he just wouldn’t be believed. For years, Ryan kept quiet, bottling up his secret until the time came when he was preparing to get married for the first time. Knowing he wanted to be “open and honest” with his bride-to-be, he finally told her everything, and she, in turn, gave him the “confidence” to share what had happened with his mother and brother. It was then that Kevin felt ready to tell his own story.
Ryan said, “That is when we all found out that he was sexually abused between the ages of five and 15 by him. His words were, ‘I let it happen to me, so it didn’t happen to you’. He’d put his life on the line to protect me, but I felt like, s***, he’s still got me. Everything Kev went through was worthless, do you know what I mean? Because he’s got me.”
By this point, Kevin had made a new life for himself in London, far away from the secretive island of his childhood. And he wasn’t – at that point – interested in digging up the past. Ryan shared: “Kev said he didn’t want anything done about it because he dealt with it his own way, and I respected his wishes. I wish I never did, because of what happened after that a few years later.”
Shortly after this conversation, Ryan’s life moved quickly, with marriage and the birth of his first child representing a hopeful new start after so much heartache. Then something terrible happened to Kevin.
By this point, Kevin was already having problems with his health. He’d contracted HIV, which had unfortunately turned into AIDS, and hepatitis. He was receiving treatment, but another devastating ordeal was in store.
Having told loved ones he was heading up to Manchester to visit friends, Kevin, who already had a boyfriend, had instead met up with some men he’d connected with on a dating site. Horrifyingly, he ended up getting date raped by three of them, with police finding him wandering the streets after the brutal attack.
Ryan went to collect him. It was at this point that the Manchester police found out about what had happened and urged the brothers to speak with Kent Police.
They did so, and the day after Kevin was brought back to the Isle of Sheppey, officers paid them a visit. The siblings gave an unofficial joint statement, with Ryan giving an official statement a couple of days later. Sadly, Kevin never had the chance to make his own official statement, as it was at this point that he became ill again, with gastric enteritis.
Kevin was kept in over the weekend in a hospital in Chelsea, Westminster, where he was put on fluids. The last time Ryan spoke with Kevin was at around 10 am on the Sunday morning, just as he was heading out to work. Ryan remembered: “He said that he’s kept some food down and drink. He should be home today or tomorrow. And I was like, ‘Great, that’s beautiful. Love you, mate. I’ve got to go. I’ll speak to you later’.
“Fifteen minutes later, they found him dead on the floor. He’d died of a burst aneurysm.”
This was in 2007. Kevin was only 33 years old at the time of his shocking death, which came just as the brothers were reaching a significant shared turning point in their lives. Pausing for a moment with emotion, Ryan proceeded to open up about the profound feeling of regret that still haunts him to this day.
He continued: “It’s been niggling at me for years. I’ve learned to deal with it now because I’ve learnt in life that you kind of have to forgive things in the past. Not to forgive someone for the things they’ve done, but to forgive a situation that you can’t do nothing about, you can change. Because whatever you do, it’s never gonna change. But for years, I wished I’d spoken up sooner, with Kev, with the police and that, because I feel like if we had, Kev would have been around so we could have nailed the b******.”
For Ryan, this regret is all the more “powerful” as the trial against their father was still going ahead, using his official statement as well as Kevin’s unofficial statement, which could instead be used as a character witness statement. By this point, legislation had also changed, whereby witnesses and evidence from their father’s previous trials.
The year was 2008, and the trial looked all set to be a big one. It went to the magistrates’ courts in Sittingbourne for the pre-hearing, before being adjourned to the Crown Court in Maidstone. As keen as Ryan was to seek justice, this was an incredibly nerve-wracking time.
A couple of weeks before the case went to trial, Ryan was invited in to get his “bearings around the court”, as he was, in his words “s******* [himself]”. Ryan explained, “I was nervous, not nervous about standing up in front of him. But the prosecution or the defence side questioning me, that’s what I was scared about.”
But then, just one week or so before the trial was set to begin, Ryan and Kevin’s father “dropped down dead” with a tumour, taking away the closure his surviving son so desperately sought. Ryan reflected: “We never got our day in court.”
When Ryan first learned from the hospital that his father likely wasn’t going to make it, his first thought was that he was probably “trying to pull a fast one”. After explaining to hospital staff what had gone on, Ryan was allowed to visit the ward where his abuser lay, in a coma, curtains pulled around him. He learned that while his father couldn’t speak, he was still able to hear.
Ryan recalled: “I sat down beside him without shouting. A few swear words, but because there were people in the other ward, I was respectful. I just said everything I wanted to say in court and then got up and left.”
That night, Ryan’s father passed away, and he found himself in tears – not because he’d lost a parent, but because he felt “cheated”. As Ryan put it: “I cried because I felt like he got away with it, and I felt like everything me and Kev had been through, more so Kev, he’d got away with it.
From this point on, Ryan’s “life went off the rails”, with his traumatised behaviour ultimately destroying his first marriage. Having been denied a sense of justice, Ryan turned to drugs, drink, and sleeping around. As he explained, “I was using my body as a weapon to hurt other people and hurt myself, and that went on for years.”
This destructive behaviour carried on until 2016, when Ryan’s mother took action by contacting a mental health clinic. It was here that Ryan was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) on account of the trauma he’d endured.
For the next couple of years, Ryan underwent group therapy alongside others with BPD. Finally, Ryan felt a sense of belonging and used this as a turning point to “reinvent” himself. With a much greater sense of self-understanding, Ryan’s life took a positive, productive turn.
The following year, Ryan ran the London Marathon – which he did again the following year, and the year after that. In 2019, Ryan wrote Riding The Storm: A Memoir of Mental Illness, a deeply personal memoir which has inspired so many readers navigating their own trauma journeys.
An auditor for Morrisons, Ryan’s ultimate goal in life is to become a professional speaker, continuing to share his story in a way that shows others that they don’t need to be defined by the horrors of their past. By opening up and dedicating himself to helping fellow survivors, Ryan feels he has, in some ways, found a way to “regain power of the situation”. Although he still feels the pain of regret, he believes big brother Kevin would be proud of him.
Ryan reflected: “I’ll always love him, I’ve got a tattoo of him on my back. He always had my back without me realising it, so I wanted that to carry with me. But I hope that he’s proud of me, and I hope I’m doing the right thing. I know I am, but you always want the recognition from your older brother and that, you know, because he was the only male model that I had in life to look up to, and I didn’t appreciate it as much as I should have.”
If you’ve been the victim of sexual assault, you can access help and resources via www.rapecrisis.org.uk or calling the national telephone helpline on 0808 802 9999
Do you have a story to share? Email me at [email protected]
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