*Disclaimer: This article deals with sexual assault and may be triggering for certain people. If you have experienced circumstances similar to the one expressed in this article, please reach out:
Rape Crisis Centre: 1800 778 888
Childline: 1800 666 666
Samaritans: (01) 671 0071 *
I was sexually assaulted when I was six years old.
Until very recently I thought nothing of it. Everyone has a weird cousin, right? Crazy inside jokes just between you guys as a family, it happens everyone.
Who was I to know that my experiences were anything more than that. Every secret meeting was backed up with giggles and jokes, touches were tickles and we were the best of friends. He made me feel special and like I was the best little girl in the world, and I cherished that feeling.
I’ve spent the last decade searching for that feeling. Begging to feel wanted, through self harm, through binge eating, through sex. Yet here we are. Basking in an emptiness I’ve come to accept as a reality. I can remember so vividly the encounters I had with him. “Let’s go play a game behind the turf shed!” So, like a dog, I pattered obediently behind him, giggling. I was his favorite, you see, and that’s all that mattered. My experience with sexual abuse is something I am still only coming to terms with. Something I want to brush under the rug and forget about again but I can’t.
Sexual assault isn’t always just touching, it’s a memory, a psychological mark that is relentless in its presence.
A strange thing I’ve noticed about myself over the last week or so is how I was so unaware until, I wasn’t anymore. He never left a mark on my body, he only scarred my mind. It’s like I always thought that this scar was a birthmark and now I can’t look at it the same way, and I never will.
We all go on a journey of self acceptance. For some, a brisk stroll through a park, occasionally tarnished by thorns. For others, a boat ride through a storm, each wave of emotion crashing through you on what seems like a never ending quest for stability. But we all get there in the end. Though each journey is unique, each struggle is difficult and each person shrouded in loneliness, none of us are alone. It is not a battle of whose journey is hardest, not a competition of whose scars run deeper, or whose sky has the most clouds. It is instead a relentless fight against a common enemy, a revolution against the abuse and the people who take advantage of the children they are trusted with.
We as youth are not looking for your sympathy, but instead empathy. Do not pity the child who has grown up with thick skin, but instead help her insure no other child will be forced to grow up too fast the way she was forced to.
A Native American proverb states ‘We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children’. Let us make a world we are proud to hand over. A world they will not want to give back.
-Ash Maher, lead writer
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