Another Story of Sexual Assault That My Uncle Won’t Believe
#MeToo
By Anonymous // Content warning: sexual abuse
I am asleep on the couch, annoyed because I had to sacrifice my bedroom so that my half-cousins could sleep in there — Callie in my bed and her brother on an air mattress next to it. The couch is only a loveseat and since I’m the smallest, I’m the one who gets stuck here.
I sleep with my face smushed in the corner where the armrest meets the back of the couch, legs tucked in so that my butt hangs off the edge of the couch a bit.
I wake up suddenly with the overwhelming feeling that I am not alone. I roll over so that I can look out into the room, but it is so dark that I can’t make out the vague and shifting shapes I think I see. Eventually my eyes adjust enough that I can be certain that someone is staring at me, watching me sleep.
I’m so scared that I can’t breathe. I squeeze my eyes shut a few times, hoping that the set of eyes watching me in the dark won’t be there when I open them back up.
Instead, the eyes get closer.
I don’t realize it is my 16-year-old half-cousin until he is already climbing onto the tiny couch next to me. He wraps one arm around my body, trapping me between him and the couch, and he runs his other hand over my pajamas.
My mind and my heart are both racing, but I don’t cry out. Not even when his hand plunges past the top of my pajama pants and past the elastic waistband of my underwear. I stare into the darkness and pretend I don’t exist.
The next night, when bedtime approaches, I beg my mom not to make me sleep on the couch again. She asks why over and over again, says it’s just for a couple of days while our family is visiting. I won’t answer her question but I cry hard enough that she eventually gives in, telling me I can sleep in my bed with Callie and he can move to the air mattress to the living room.
I felt the strongest sense of relief I have ever felt in my life, and for a few hours I believed that what happened was a fluke, maybe even just a bad dream, and I felt so certain that it would never happen again.
If only that was true.
I was nine years old when I was sexually abused by my half-cousin. It happened over Thanksgiving when everyone was staying at my family’s house for the holiday weekend.
The night after he assaulted me on the couch he snuck into my room, where I laid next to his sleeping sister, and he put his hands inside my pajama pants again.
According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, 25 percent of girls and more than 16 percent of boys are abused before the age of 18. Eight out of ten rape victims know their abuser and in over 35 percent of child sexual abuse cases, the perpetrator is a family member of the victim.
These numbers represent me, they represent a lot of our campus community and they represent the reality of our nation.
We hear about sexual assault on campus often, though rarely connected with any satisfying justice.
But what about the students who have already experienced sexual abuse before they stepped foot on campus? What about the people who were too traumatized by their assault to come to college? What about the statistic that, according to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, more than one-third of women who report being raped before the age of 18 also experience rape as an adult?
I did not understand what had happened to me, and I felt as if the whole thing was my fault. It is hard for me now, to conceptualize why I felt that way. I think I just knew what had happened was something bad. Something against some rule I didn’t have a name for yet, and people got in trouble when they broke the rules.
By the time I realized that it wasn’t my fault, so much time had passed that I was afraid no one would believe me or care. The thought of having to tell my mom what had happened made me sick to my stomach. The thought of having to tell my dad seemed impossible. I knew telling them about my sexual assault would be traumatic for me and devastating for them.
So I stayed quiet.
I tried so hard to suppress the memory, to convince myself that I had imagined it. I hadn’t seen my abuser since it happened, so I could almost pretend that everything was fine.
Until I did see him again, several years later, at another Thanksgiving get-together.
This time we were all gathered at my aunt and uncle’s house, and I hadn’t known my abuser would be there. The panic and anxiety I felt being in the same room as him again was suffocating. I remember being so angry that he was going to ruin a second Thanksgiving for me. My family had spent so much time preparing a meal to share, and I barely ate any of it.
Today, my assaulter is married and has two daughters who are probably about the age I was when their father abused me. I wish I didn’t know this. I wish I didn’t have to think about these girls I have never met, living with this man who looked at my body when I was a young girl and thought he was entitled to touch it.
I wish I wasn’t riddled with guilt for not saying anything when he abused me, so I didn’t have to worry about him abusing them.
Every time I see a member of my family sharing and liking social media posts that call survivors of sexual assault liars or mock my generation for using trigger warnings, I become more and more convinced that I made the right choice in not telling any of them what happened.
The mother of my abuser went to a Trump rally where the president openly mocked the #MeToo movement and when I saw the picture of my aunt and uncle at that rally, I threw my phone across the room and screamed into my pillow for so long my voice was raw the next day.
But screaming into pillows does not get me any justice. The National Sexual Violence Resource Center reported that only 12 percent of child sexual assault cases are ever reported to authorities, and less than 10 percent of sexual assault that occur on college campuses are reported.
I didn’t speak up, and my abuser walked away free.
The logical part brain knows what happened to me was not my aunt’s or my uncle’s fault. But part of me still blames them for being part of the system that fosters a culture of sexual assault in America. They assume that women who report sexual assault are liars, people who want fame or money.
They didn’t believe Anita Hill, they didn’t believe Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and they probably weren’t going to believe me either.
College-aged women are the most at-risk group of people for sexual assault, with 20–25 percent of women in college and 15 percent of men in college experiencing sexual assault, according to the Nation Sexual Violence Resource Center.
I frequently read stories of sexual assault survivors in my creative writing classes.
Last quarter, a professor apologized to my class for failing to get our essays graded in time for class that day like he had promised he would. He told us that he had had to stop reading them after a while, because so many of them were about some form of sexual assault, and reading them was affecting his own mental well-being.
We, of course, wished our professor didn’t have to read so many hard stories too. We wished those stories weren’t true and they didn’t exist. But they are true. They do exist. And they need to be told, over and over again, until they are believed.
*Names have been changed to protect privacy.
