TMI

Don't you hate those weird, over-sharey people? You know the ones: you're minding your own business, at the bus stop or the supermarket, and you exchange words or a smile with a stranger. Suddenly, without warning, you're getting their life story. And it is grim. Always. No stranger has ever, uninvited, regaled me with tales of their blissfully happy marriage, or idyllic childhood. And it is awkward. What do you say? What do you do with this information? It is too much. Too much information.

And now, here I am. Sharing the worst things that have happened to me, with people I have never met. Worse, even: with people I have only just met. I began university (as a mature student) six weeks ago, and when I publicly launched this blog, with much Facebook fanfare, it will have popped up in my fellow students' newsfeeds. Some of them even got invites! 

My best friend (Leila, to you), tried to reassure me: "Everyone knows that you're not a rape-obsessed lunatic." Aha. Not everyone.

So, if I know that this behaviour is not normal... why am I doing it? 

Well, as strange as it may sound, this blog is not about me. Or, rather, it is not for me. If I want to talk about (as I refer to it) "grisly stuff", I have wonderfully understanding friends, an endlessly patient and gentle partner, and a mum with whom I can now talk easily, about even the most upsetting topics. I am very lucky. And, thanks to an extremely valuable course of cognitive analytic therapy (no Blob Trees, I promise), I am genuinely pretty much resolved about the whole thing: well, functional, and rarely unhinged. Who could ask for more?

For whom, then, am I writing this horrible blog? Two groups of people. And I'm sure you will fit into one of them...

1) People who have experienced sexual violence.

    One of my brothers understood my reasoning as being "so other people know they're not alone". Yes. Of course. But much more than that. 

    If you are carrying around the secret of a rape, or child sexual abuse, the person who did that to you may have told you "don't tell anyone", even "nobody will believe you". They told you that to protect themselves. 

    I want to tell you: forget that. Talking about what happened is the first step to undoing the damage that was done to you. It will be hard at first, but the right kind of help will make your life immeasurably better. Before I had my therapy, I was so unwell that I could not leave the house, I was so anxious and depressed. A year later, I had a job I loved, I had passed my driving test, and I was making plans for the future. I just had to start talking. I just had to stop keeping the secrets.

2) People who have not experienced sexual violence.

    Sorry, everyone else. The way that society treats victims of sexual violence is appalling. Victims are stigmatised, ignored, disbelieved, and blamed. The fans of footballer and unrepentant convicted rapist Chedwyn Evans have hounded and harassed the woman he raped, subjecting her to "psychologial GBH", as one police detective put it. You probably think that that isn't how you behave, or would behave. Hopefully you're right.

    One in every five women has been raped. The true figure is probably higher. This number does not include men, or people who have experienced child sexual abuse, or other types of sexual violence. You will know people who have experienced sexual violence. You will know lots of them. Have they felt able to tell you, or have they felt too ashamed? We need to change. We need to stop protecting perpetrators, and start protecting victims.

...

On this blog, I have shared my own personal story of experiencing sexual violence. I will be talking about sexual violence in the news. I will be linking to other blogs about sexual violence. I will be signposting websites and services that may be useful to those who have experienced sexual violence. But, most of all, I will be repeatedly reminding you: these are not my secrets. And they're not yours, either.

And if that makes you uncomfortable... I think you need to do some thinking.

August 1996

In my last post, I wrote about a sexual assault that happened in May 1996, when I was 11. Although the assault was not physically violent, it - and the events that surrounded it - left me with enormous feelings of shame and confusion. I did not speak to anyone about what happened, I just buried it inside.

...

When I was five, my maternal grandparents moved away to the Isle of Wight, an island off the south coast of England. Still wanting to see plenty of us, my grandparents bought a static caravan sited on a holiday park. Every summer, my parents, brothers, and I spent the full six week holiday there, plus the fortnight at Easter, and I'm sure I remember at least one freezing week in February! The holiday park was perfect: set in woodland which ran down to a secluded beach, with two swimming pools, a playground, cheesy entertainment and activities, an arcade, and lots of kids to make friends with, some of whom just came for a week, and others who were regulars, like us. I loved our holidays in the caravan, and I felt utterly safe and at home.

In August 1996 we were staying in the caravan as usual, and I was enjoying the increased independence that my parents were allowing me, roaming freely, provided I stayed with friends and kept to a curfew. Most of my time was spent in a group that, at its core, comprised the children of five caravan-owning families. Saturday was the holiday park's change-over day, and as the cleaners whizzed from caravan to caravan, vacuuming and scrubbing, we loitered around, mourning the departure of last week’s friends, and eagerly anticipating a new batch. We gladly welcomed newcomers, accepting them quickly, and promising to be penpals forever when they left.

One such new friend was Daniel, from Bagshot. At 16 he was older than the rest of us, but that didn't seem to matter, and he was absorbed into our little gang. The week of Daniel's holiday went by uneventfully, but on the Friday - Daniel's last day - he approached me with a serious expression, "There's something I need to talk to you about. Can we meet up later, just us?" I was concerned for my new friend, so I agreed to meet him, at seven o'clock, at the corner of the football pitch.

 

As improbable as it may sound, the sexual assault in May had not really dampened my ability to build a rapport with boys. Rather, I had internalised everything, feeling mistrust towards only my own body.

When I met Daniel that evening, he seemed preoccupied. We walked around the edge of the scrubby field, behind the football pitch, around and around, talking about nothing in particular, as it got dark. Whatever it was that Daniel had needed to talk about, he seemed reluctant to get onto the topic. He suggested we walk down onto the beach, so we took the gravelly path through the hedge, towards the sea.

As we passed out of sight of the playground and football pitch, Daniel changed. He grabbed my arm, tightly, and steered me towards a patch of tall, waist-height grass. I tried to pull my arm free, but Daniel manoeuvred himself behind me, and grabbed my other arm as well. Though his actions had become rough, his words hadn't, "I thought we'd just sit here for a bit." He pushed me onto the ground. 

In fictional rapes, women scream. In fictional rapes, there is clawing, and biting, and primal self-preservation. I simply froze.

Daniel had climbed on top of me, and he was pulling at my clothes, and saying things I didn't understand, "Just let me see - I'll show you." Sitting on top of me, Daniel undid his jeans, and pulled down his pants. I had never seen inside a teenage boy's pants before, but even in my panicked state, I knew that something was strange about what I was seeing. I didn't understand it at the time, but Daniel was wearing a condom. 

Even now, when I think back to what Daniel did, this startles me. Wearing a condom. Not carrying a condom in his pocket, in case he "got lucky". He was not hoping to seduce a girl, he was planning a rape. 

I don't remember how he got my trousers off, but he did. And, holding me down, and with a hand needlessly covering my silent mouth, Daniel raped me. 

It was pain, and fear, and confusion, and nausea, and tears - and then it was over. Daniel stood up, and he walked away. 

As soon as I could, I pulled my clothes back on, and shakily headed back to find my friends. I didn't need to search for long, before I found Ryan and Todd (pseudonyms), brothers from North London, two of my closest friends there. I didn't know what to say. I didn't have the words for what had happened. "Daniel hurt me. He really, really hurt me." The boys could see I'd been crying, and could hear the quavering in my voice. They gathered other boys from our little gang, and they - my very own little vigilante mob - ran off to mete out adolescent boy justice. I walked back to the caravan alone. 

As I approached the caravan, I saw my mum, standing in the doorway, peering out into the dark. I was late; she was furious. I went straight to bed, and cried, and cried.

...

Over the next few weeks, I told a few friends about what Daniel did. (All of the following names are pseudonyms.) The first, Gemma, a friend at the caravan park, told me: "Yeah, that's rape. It happened to a girl at my school. It's not a big deal." The next, Laura, a school friend, absolutely did not believe me, and smirked while I talked about it. My best friend Leila and her older sister Nora were wonderful. They listened to me. They believed me. They comforted me. And, when I asked them to keep it a secret, they promised.

My behaviour started to change. Returning to school in September, I was frequently sent out of the room by my new class teacher, who accused me (as I sat, hunched over my desk) of "displaying aggressive body language", and would stare at me across the classroom, saying, "I know what you're thinking". I stopped making any effort with my school work, and having never had a detention before, they became a regular part of my week. At home, I spent all my time in my bedroom. Often just staring out of the window. My baby brother was the only family member I wanted to spend time with, and my communication with my parents degenerated into grunts. I started to have headaches, stomach aches, nebulous pains all over; I started to miss days of school. I began lying about insignificant things, and became secretive and suspicious. I didn't want my mum anywhere near me. My eating started to become disordered: bingeing and purging without ever having heard of bulimia. I started to self harm, cutting into the skin of my thighs and stomach. 

Had anyone asked me why these changes were happening, I would have said that I didn't know. And it would have been true. It didn't occur to me, even for a moment, that there was a link between being raped, and my feelings and behaviour. 

As I was their oldest, my parents had nobody to compare me with, and so they accepted these changes as a natural part of adolescence. As I got older, it got worse. I became angry, and would sometimes lash out at my mum. I went to school less and less, and when I was there I did little to no work. I started to smoke, and drink alcohol. The family GP diagnosed me with depression, and I was given antidepressants. At school's insistence, I was sent to a child psychologist, who asked me, "Do you think you're special? Do you think you're different?" I saw a counsellor, who showed me a Blob Tree, and asked me which blob I was. I was assigned an educational welfare officer, whose job it was to get me to go school, and who I baffled with an outright refusal to engage in cosy little chats. When I was 15, I walked down to the Thames and took 100 paracetamol. I threw up the majority of them in the ambulance, and while semi-conscious, I heard a doctor tell my mum that I had obviously lied to the paramedics about having taken so many.

I hope that you would not consider it hyperbolic if I were to say that being raped destroyed my teenage years.

Yet, still, I allowed the guilt and shame to control me, to silence me. I kept Daniel's secret until I was 21.

...

All posts about my experiences are collated here.

May 1996

In May 1996 I was 11 years old. I was a tall child - 5'3", the same as today - and puberty had already given me full hips and C-cup breasts, which made me feel awkward and fat. I dressed in jeans and t-shirts, and I loved reading science fiction and listening to indie music. I was starting to look like a woman, but I was still a tree-climbing, football-kicking tomboy. 

Along with around 50 classmates, I went on a five day school trip to Beaulieu, in the New Forest national park, staying in a residential centre on a working farm. The staff accompanying us on the trip included Mr Holmes (a pseudonym) who had been my class teacher (meaning he taught me for most subjects) the previous year.

Shortly after we arrived, we were given a brief tour of the farm by a middle aged man we understood to be The Farmer. Trailing along behind the school party was a young man, maybe 19 years old, who also worked on the farm. I'm going to call him Mark. None of my close friends had come to Beaulieu, and I tended be more comfortable with boys; it made perfect sense to chat to Mark. It didn't occur to me for a second that the dynamic would (even could) be any different to that between me and my friends or brothers. 

On the second day, we were taken to get a proper look at some of the animals, and again, Mark tagged along. I spent the whole time talking and laughing with Mark. Because it was muddy, we had been wearing our wellies, and borrowed boiler suits, so when we got back to the centre, we entered by a back door, onto a hallway with shoe racks and coat hooks. I was still chattering away, and clambering out of my boiler suit when everyone else was turning the corner of the L-shaped corridor, filtering past the doors to the girls' bedrooms, and passing through the double doors into the centre's communal area, where we ate our meals. 

It was then, with the rest of the group gone, that Mark suddenly and roughly shoved his hand into my scoop-neck t-shirt, and groped my breast. I had no idea how this had happened, how to react, or what had caused it. I had no context for this. Mark stared at me hard, as if trying to judge my reaction. Tears filled my eyes, and a cry rose in my throat. I turned and ran, round the corner, past the bedrooms, and through the double doors. As I flew into the communal area, panting, tears running down my face, my eyes met those of Mr Holmes. He looked at me, a crying child, and turned to another teacher, "Looks like someone got turned down."

Looks like someone got turned down. Looks like someone got turned down. Looks like someone got turned down. Looks like someone got turned down.

I didn't even really understand what those words meant. But I knew how they made me feel: guilty, ashamed, caught out, dirty.

Instead of any of the words that I could have said, words that could have explained, words that could have told the truth, words that could have put things right, I said nothing. 

I said nothing. I said nothing. I said nothing. I said nothing. 

These moments still spin around in my mind. As though by replaying them, maybe they'll turn out differently. But of course they can't. 

I was so full of emotion, I couldn't speak. Perhaps most of all, I was shocked. I had fallen down a rabbit hole into another world, and I didn't understand anything that was happening there. The way that he looked at me, Mr Holmes' face said "I know you. I know things about you that you don't know." I was confused and scared, and I spent the rest of the day in silence. Mark kept away.

The rest of the trip is fairly blurry in my memory. But I do remember one occasion when Mark somehow isolated me from the rest of the group, and forced me to repeatedly touch an electric fence. I remember being so scared. But I didn't challenge him, and again I didn't tell anyone.

The best thing about the trip was receiving a short letter from my mum, which she'd "dashed off" while breastfeeding my baby brother. This little snippet of familiarity and safety kept me going until I got home.

I didn't tell my mum about what happened in Beaulieu for ten years.

The confused, shameful feelings about what happened, and a certainty that it had been my fault, grew in me over time. It felt so important to keep that secret.

...

Three months after this sexual assault, I was raped. Read about it here.

All posts about my experiences are collated here.