Oh, I did report!
And my mother called me a liar. If the same teacher hadn’t assaulted 11 other kids in the same day, nothing would have been done other than me getting a verbal lashing on lying. Because, you see, every time I had any kind of problem with a person in a position of Authority, I was clearly lying!
Then I spent the next 5 or 6 years getting random people telling me how impressed they had been at how calmly my parents had dealt with the whole thing. Nevermind that Dad never knew I was one of the accusers (Mom having pushed the notion that no names should be named) and that Mom was just happily convinced that we all lied. It took her 30 years to understand that yes, the accusations against that teacher were real. I have no idea how could she think it was more logical to believe that 12 kids who didn’t attend the same class, have the same groups of friends and who in a couple of cases were known to be on the indifference side of hating each other’s guts had come up with the notion of accusing the new teacher of doing something we didn’t even know was possible! (Hey, we were sheltered kids; we knew there was such a thing as “people touching you wrong” but we had no idea that could include teachers).
So yeah, next few times I didn’t report it to the people who officially were supposed to be in charge. What the fuck for?
Oh, and then there was that time years later that I tried to ask for help because Grandpa was… shall we say, not so much overstepping my boundaries as trying to polevault them? And Mom’s response was “if your father hears a single word of this you won’t set foot in my house again!” “B…” “You will never see your father or your brothers again. Your grandfather is like this, deal.” OK. I dealt!
And to anybody asking “but why did you go to your mother”? One, she was the person in charge of raising us (I didn’t know this at the time, but at one point she’d threatened with getting an annulment if Dad tried to oppose her views on child raising in public; hey, she was the one with the teaching degree). Two, that time with the teacher, she’s the parent who was home when I got there. And three, for Granddad? The mantra had always been “conflicts with each side of the family go to the parent from that side”. So, call it 18 years of conditioning, excuse me, education by a woman who shouldn’t ever have been allowed to either become a teacher or have children.
And that time two people tried to get me into a car. Rental plates. I mean, maybe there wouldn’t have been many red Ibizas with rental plates in Barcelona, but with that kind of experience and no record of the actual plates, would you have gone to the cops? What for?
And… and… and…
What the fuck for?