Speaking Up

“I’m going to rape you and f*ck you up, b*tch”

That was written in my seventh grade yearbook by the boy who had a locker next to mine. All year, he had pestered me in what I’m now sure was his interpretation of giving me “manly attention”. At one point about halfway through the year, he came up behind me, putting his hands on my hips, and laughed when I asked him to stop. When he wrote that lovely note in my yearbook, I instantly painted over it with whiteout because I was terrified of getting in trouble.

The part of this whole story that disgusts me more than anything else is the fact that I was convinced that I would be the one getting in trouble for having bad words written in my yearbook. By the early age of twelve, I was afraid that someone would say that I had done something to egg him on and that I just shouldn’t associate myself with a person who used what my parents deemed unacceptable language.

When I told someone very close to me (a person who I thought wanted to protect and comfort me above all else) about the circumstances surrounding losing my virginity during my freshman year of college, the first question I was asked was “had you been drinking?” When I told that same person about the abuse that pushed me toward my divorce, the first question asked was the same: “was alcohol involved?”

This is the culture that so many young girls are raised in today. This fear that they won’t be taken seriously, or worse, that they’ll be the one blamed when something happens to them. That they’ll be told they brought it on themselves. It isn’t just the super-mysoginistic men that run the disgusting so-called “pick-up artist” websites, either. For me, it was a family member that should be first and foremost concerned with my mental, emotional, and physical well-being. And that is unacceptable.

I was an innocent middle schooler that wore mostly t-shirts, jeans, and limited too. I was a young college student who thought I had expressed my intentions clearly when I stated I wanted to stay a virgin until I got married. Finally, I was a wife who believed I had married a man who would uphold his promise to protect and respect me. Throughout all of that, I was a woman who was encouraged to believe that somehow, my actions were the cause of the hurt brought upon me. That if I had acted more appropriately, those things wouldn’t have happened. Not once did the phrase “it’s not your fault” ever get mentioned. Not a single thing was stated to help me realize that the person that committed those actions was solely responsible.

Victim blaming has been running rampant for longer than I’ve been alive. Saying that someone brought on sexual harassment or even rape because of how they act or how they dress is completely unacceptable, and only encourages victims to keep quiet in order to avoid adding insult to injury. The only person who is to blame is the person who commits that action. It’s time to start making sure that the victims of any sort of sexual harassment know that if something happens to them, they no longer have to fear not being taken seriously.