At the age of nine, she and a friend were sexually assaulted by a stranger. The assault was ignored by both her parents and the police, and was not spoken of in the family. The incident and its later treatment would lead Siouxsie to distrust adults. Years later, she stated: "I grew up having no faith in adults as responsible people. And being the youngest in the family I was isolated – I had no one to confide in. So I invented my own world, my own reality. It was my own way of defending myself – protecting myself from the outside world. The only way I could deal with how to survive was to get some strong armour."