Over on Facebook there is a wave of dignified and (almost) silent protest and it’s growing.
The first thing you’ll see on the status is:
Me too
This is to show the author of the status also suffered sexual assault – and the assault ranges from being made to feel uncomfortable or frightened, ‘a bit of groping’ to full rape, often consistent, and continual attacks.
If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote "Me too" as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.
I haven’t made my ‘Me too’ status post yet. This is going to be it.
The first recollection of anything untoward that I remember was when I was (I estimate) 3 or 4 (three years old or perhaps 4 years old).
The pit rows we lived on had a row of ‘outhouses’ along the bottom of all the gardens. Each house had an outside toilet (no sink) and a shed to keep the dustbins in.
I don’t know how I got there – I have an idea… I was always following the bigger kids, so I probably just tagged along… we ended up in one of the brick sheds.
I was pushed up against the wall by a kid a little older and bigger than me. I don’t recall much, he spoke quietly to me, you know… soothingly… I remember something that sounds so ridiculous now. Something about a train and a tunnel.
And the darkness… there may have been a door that was closed. There wasn’t a door on our shed, but there must have been one on that one.
I remember slants of light through gaps in the door, just enough so the shed wasn’t completely in darkness.
I don’t remember how it started, I don’t remember how it finished. And I don’t know the extent of what happened. Just that something was happening and I was three years old, maybe four.
I don’t know what happened but I do know who it was. I know his name. I’ve never forgotten it.
I didn’t tell anyone. I’ve never told anyone. Not my parents, not my husband, not my kids.
That was the first time. I was three years old, maybe four years old.
I remember another time.
A boy from school called to me as I passed his house. We stood talking over the fence. He knew I liked him but neither of us had done anything about it, we were kids. We’d not seen much of each other because it was the summer holidays and I hung out with a different crowd.
As we were talking, he reached over and touched my breast. I was shocked. I was embarrassed. I didn’t say anything about it and neither did he but I didn’t get close enough to the fence for him to be able to do it again, although he tried.
I don’t know why I didn’t punch him in the mouth, slap his face, break his fingers – any or all of those things, but I didn’t. I also didn’t say anything about it either.
I know who it was. I know his name. I’ve never forgotten it.
Over the years, boys have taken the liberty of touching me when I was neither expecting nor inviting them to.
Almost as though they have the right to touch, feel, grope my body whenever they feel like it, ‘just because they can’ or ‘just because I have tits’.
Cat-calls about my breasts, my arse, my legs.
One guy in a pub said to his friend: “Look at the legs on that!” On THAT - he said it to his friend, my father.
My best chance of success was to be a model according to my father. I had no other value than my looks.
When I was fifteen years old, I came home from school and my father told me he’d rung up about a modelling job for me.
I know a lot of teens may have been excited at that prospect.
I viewed it with deep suspicion.
“I turned them down. They only offered £25 and we had to get to London,” he said.
“What modelling job?” I asked.
“For The Sun, Page 3,” he said.
Fifteen years of age and he wanted to take me to London to allow someone to take pictures of my naked breasts.
My 16th birthday. I was drunk as a skunk. My 15-year-old friend told me later, that my father had sat down beside her and offered her a cigarette. “I don’t smoke,” she said.
He offered her a drink. “I don’t drink,” she said.
“I suppose a fuck’s out of the question then?” he said.
“It was a joke.”
I was never a ‘girly-girl’ – I was a tomboy. I looked like a lad, I acted more like a lad than a girl and I still only just escaped a nasty experience with a ‘boyfriend’.
My friends always seemed to have boyfriends. I asked advice and they advised nice clothes, make-up etc.
Sometimes they’d try to set me up with a friend of their boyfriends. One night it went horribly wrong.
I went round to the babysitting gig and met up with the lad they’d brought with them. He wasn’t a movie-star but he wasn’t ugly.
He got me to sit beside him and he put his arm around me – all going well so far…
Then he reached for my hands and held them tight while he had a grope around inside my t-shirt.
Rather than getting up and going home, I got the feeling I was being a whiney little girl and when he asked me to sit on the other side, I did. Because it’s my fault, right?
So, when he groped me in the same manner, hands held so I couldn’t fight him off, I really shouldn’t have been surprised.
It was when he started getting aggressive and insisting we went upstairs that I knocked it on the head and went home.
I RAN all the way home. Fearing for my life that he was going to follow me and rape me and there was nothing I could have done to stop him.
I know who it was. I know his name. I’ve never forgotten it.
When I walked through the door, a little tearful, very scared, I received the next shock of that evening.
It was my fault.
My father yelled at me. What time did I call it? Where had I been?
I didn’t tell him where I’d been or that I’d spent most of the evening fending off unwanted advances – it’s a compliment, right?
What he said then… that put the shiny top hat on the whole evening.
“I’m taking you to the doctor’s tomorrow.”
Not, as I first thought, to make sure I was protected if I did decide to have sex.
“I’m going to have the doctor check you out.”
That’s right. He thought he could have the doctor examine me to see if I was still a virgin.
I count that as an assault too.
I got a ‘job’ – a pretend, made up for the government’s statistics job and on the first day I was taken and shown the warehouse.
Stacks of materials from floor to ceiling, row on row.
“A girl could get raped down here,” a supervisor said.
Creepy as hell, threatening, menacing… NOT a joke, not funny.
I got a job. A real job. Not one of these employment scheme things where they promise a chance of a job after, I got a REAL 5 days a week job.
I had to wear a white lab coat – the boss bought a few second-hand ones which I had to take home and wash. They had name tags ironed on, above the breast pocket, you know, the printed stick-on name tags.
It wasn’t my name on the name tag and the boss backed me into a corner one day on the pretext of being irritated with the name tag. He started picking at the tag and then his finger flicked my nipple.
He looked right in my eyes as he did it and I was shocked and embarrassed and had no idea what to do.
It was my fault – I felt like it was my fault.
After that, I kept away from him as much as I could. I wanted to keep the job but I didn’t want to be raped.
The day he found a pair of his grandson’s shorts and threatened to put me in them scared me badly. My mother noticed something was wrong and she asked.
I told her.
“I don’t know how to deal with that,” she said.
OK then.
I have two children.
I have a daughter and a son.
BOTH kids were taught that anyone touching them inappropriately was a cause for shouting, yelling, kicking, biting, screaming!
BOTH kids were taught it is NOT their fault, they do NOT feel ashamed if anything like that happens and they most definitely can and SHOULD tell me!
BOTH kids were taught that they should NEVER take advantage of another human being for their gratification.
We’re the generation that KNOWS this is going on. WE have to be the first generation to start to make it stop.
You don’t have the right to put your hands on anyone except in self-defence.
You don’t have to accept anyone’s hands on you.
Your gender does NOT give you an excuse.
