For years Kathryn was silent about her brother's abuse. Now she's confronted him in court.

CONTENT WARNING: This post contains details of sexual assault against a child, which may be distressing to some readers. For 24-hour help, please call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800.

With shaking hands clutching her notes, Kathryn Bailey looked across the court room at her abuser, the person who had repeatedly raped her, who had robbed her of a childhood and cast a dark shadow over her future. Her own brother.

“James, what you did was sexual abuse. It was not curiosity,” she said. “Do you really think so little of what you did to me?”

James Bailey, 31, from Syracuse, New York, was last month convicted of assaulting his sister between 2003 and 2006, and on Thursday was sentenced to 32 years behind bars.

After four years of abuse and a decade of fallout, last week’s sentencing hearing offered Kathryn Bailey the chance to address her brother directly about what he’d done. About the seizures she developed as a result of the stress, about the loneliness and self-hate, about how his one word explanation to detectives – “curiosity” – compounded her trauma.

“Just when I thought the memories and the way I felt were enough to make me cold and numb inside, you managed to damage and hurt me again,” she told the court, in a video captured by Syracuse.com.

The court heard that the abuse occurred at a time when then-teenage James was often tasked with caring for Kathryn and their younger sister; their mother was a nurse working at a local hospital 12-14 hours a day and their father was regularly on the road for work.

It was kept quiet for years until Kathryn ultimately came forward in 2013 - her final year of high school - when she learned her brother had been kicked out of the family home for drug use, reports Syracuse.com.

When she opened up about the abuse, which occured from age 9 to 12, she immediately realised that her mother had been unaware it had occurred.

"The anger I placed on mom and dad was wrong of me," she told him. "This should have all been placed on you. They trusted you to take care of me."

While Kathryn told her brother in court that she has received support from those around her and justice via his conviction, she said she will never be free from her past.

"How ever long I live I will have a life sentence," she said. "I have the rest of my life to bare this weight of the abuse. And that is that. I will never forget what you've done to me. I will never forget how I felt through those dark days."

Still in spite of it all she doesn't hate him.

"I suppose a goodbye is in order, but I'd like to say one last thing," she said. "I don't hate you. I hate what you did."

N.B. While the media does not normally name victim's of child sexual assault, Kathryn chose to be publicly identified.