British celebrity baker Nadiya Hussain reveals sexual abuse as child

Oct 15, 2019 06:00 am

LONDON : One of Britain's best-known celebrity chefs, Nadiya Hussain, on Sunday spoke of the mental health issues she had struggled with since being sexually abused as a young girl and urged others girls facing the same ordeal to speak out.

The mother of three, who shot to fame after winning top-rated TV show The Great British Bake Off in 2015, said she was assaulted when she was five years old but did not understand what had happened until a school biology class years later.

Hussain, 34, said the abuse by a friend of a relative in Bangladesh had left her with mental health issues to this day, while she had also had to come to terms with the difficulties of being born a girl in a strict Bangladeshi family.

"I have grown up my whole life hearing about sexual abuse. If I did not talk about it, I would be part of the problem and not the solution," Hussain told Tan France of Netflix's Queer Eye TV show at the Cheltenham Literature Festival.

"It is very common. It is happening to men and women, and we are not talking about it."

Hussain first went publicthis month with the publication of her memoir, Finding My Voice, her tenth book in three years. - REUTERS