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.