Trending recently on the back of the #metoo movement, #whyididntreport has hit me hardest. Like many other women and men who have experienced full blown indecent assault / sexual abuse / physical, mental abuse, I realized almost too late, that I was medicating my pain and shame with substance abuse.
How does a prepubescent 11 year old girl child understand and “report” sexual abuse?
Let me unpack this here and now.
“She” wondered.
Why is he buying me gifts? I like presents. Perfume. I feel special.
Why is he behaving this way in secret?
He tells me I’m pretty and special, but he is my sister’s boyfriend. He is my “older brother”. It feels wrong.
I see him climbing up windows peeping at my mother who is naked and bathing – blissfully unaware in her bathroom. The first time I see this I laugh, 🤔 no, it’s a weird kind of joke? I ask him what he’s doing and he runs full tilt at me, red in his face, furious it seems. I’m scared. This is another kind of terrifying and why is it happening? He hisses menacingly that if I dare tell anybody, he will make sure they won’t believe me, that I can’t prove it. And he’s correct. I don’t understand what he did, but I’m scared now. I have become a hostage to his perverted deviant behavior. And it just gets worse.
Most weekends with my family at the dinner table. He sits directly opposite me, leering, with my mother my father and both my sisters sitting with us, he presses his foot between my thighs. I’m panicked and I freeze. My sister, his girlfriend is sitting next to him, facing me, she is unaware, they are holding hands on the table. He is fiddling with me under the table.
Now tell me, what eleven year old girl from a “nice” Christian family who is hostage to a pervert can
“report” what she can’t understand?
At this point, and from that moment on, she is not “safe” in her own home. He corners her while she’s washing dishes in the kitchen. Pretending to fetch a plate while groping at my prepubescent breasts. I flinch away and walk into a place where there are other people.
It becomes more and more brazen. He sits between my knees, no shirt, after playing rugby. He “asks” me to scratch his back, while I’m sitting with my mother and father watching TV! I’m pinned in the chair, horrified as he pulls my foot over his erection. Surreptitiously. He is 23. I’m 11 years old.
One afternoon there’s smoke in the back garden, when I come to see, my mother and my sisters tell me to go away. They’re burning something very bad, I hear the word “porn magazines”. Whatever “porn magazines” are, they must be very bad. I’m not allowed near them, performing this burning and destroying of terrible magazines. They’re Rupert’s pornography and in South Africa in 1977, it’s illegal to possess pornography.
I withdraw. I’m maturing into a young woman and he becomes more and more interested in me. And his deviant behavior becomes more aggressive. I switch off and spend my time alone in my room.
The fear and shame become a normal part of my teenage life. This man is the “golden boy” in my parent’s eyes. He was head boy of his school. He plays provincial rugby. He’s in the army, a brawny blue eyed soldier, a thoroughbred sexual deviant.
There are coping mechanisms I employed. I fluctuated between isolating and escaping. Angry, ashamed and trapped. My home was a horrible place. My bath time was frightening. The first time I put on lipstick, thirteen years old, he leered at my mouth and I quickly rubbed it off.
There was this mantra that kept me angry, because being angry was more empowering than being terrified. “I’m born alone to die alone.” Like a predator in the bush, he targeted me and separated me from the herd. Then he clawed and played with me. And he was right. I never could prove it. So I accepted what I had to endure, hating myself, my abuser and my life.
So it was nothing unusual as my bed time routine, that I drank sweet white wine until I blacked out. Because I wanted to “not be there”. Numb. Anaesthetized – meaning “to administer an anaesthetic to (a person or animal), especially so as to induce a loss of consciousness.)”
What happened during that sweet unconsciousness, was none of my business. It was a safe space. I wasn’t there.
Now it’s allowed to be spoken about. My mother and father are dead. And other women are telling their truth. How bizarre that now, a clean and sober wife and mother of two wonderful sons, Godmother of my abuser’s youngest son, and recovering drug addict and alcoholic, I still feel instinctive panic, fear and anger when I dare speak or write about my #whyididntreport my #metoo
“Fuck that and Fuck him!” – Pink