#WhyIDidntReport

The BBQ Pit
141

Hear, fucking hear. Fucking hear it AGAIN.
If you’re going to have prisons (and god knows the US is the leading light on that topic), you have to provide enough funds to keep the inmates from brutalizing each other - or worse, for guards to play god. I’m French - but it’s the same here. Once you land in prison, it’s a free for all while the guards either turn a blind eye because they can barely keep the people they’re supposed to be responsible for in check as it is, stretched budgets and whatnot ; or they take advantage themselves. It’s fucking shameful. And of course nobody cares because “it’s criminals ! they deserve it !”.

Well last I check the penalty for nicking a stereo, or dealing meth, or even killing people didn’t involve forcible rape. And if you think anybody “deserves” that, then fuck you. Criminals are made, not born. And they’re people.

142

I agree. They like Trump because he behaves how they would behave if they could get away with it.

143

This thread is a difficult and important read. I have read each and every post and feel sorrow that these things occurred, and at the reactions. You are courageous for sharing this. Thank you.

144

And then they wonder why prisoners often have such a hard time adjusting to post-incarceration life.

145

The time I did report it: I was 9 and at the Fair. My 14 year year old sister had ditched me to go party with a guy. It was Midnight madness so the Rides band my parents bought for me and the $10 I had for food (there were water fountains) kept me entertained until Midnight when the rides shut down. So I was the Front gate waiting for my sister and my parents when a guy came up, chatted with me, grabbed my crotch and ran off. I spent the next 2 hours in the First Aid tent while the cops tried to find my parents who had “Went to a bar, no, I don’t know which one.” My youngest older brother finally got home from his job and he came and picked me up. The older sister came home Sunday night.

2 years later my “buds” started. Women know what I mean but I will explain. Before a girl has breasts you get “buds” where once was flat starts to rise up as the ducts that one day will provide milk to your child(ren) and your nipples start to grow and push out a bit. They are painful (at least for me, they were) and meant not only no more running around shirtless but the total end of me sleeping on my stomach.

My step-father started pinching them. I complained to my mom but she said he was just teasing. The same man who just did court ordered family counseling sessions due to molesting the above 14… now 16… year old sister. He also got a vasectomy. She (14 now 16 sister) ended up running away often enough that she ended up in foster care and the rest of her life makes my heart hurt and my stomach heave. Not for her but for her kids.

I told my oldest siblings and from that time forward I spent all summers, all long vacations and most week-ends with the 2 adult siblings and their families.

But I didn’t bother reporting it at school or the police because they already had left me to live with him.

Years later I found out about the court order vasectomy and also why my next, next older sister who had ran away at 14 was for the same reason.

My mother condoned it to have a place to raise the large family she had after my father divorced her and then died.

I felt a bit of relief as they both passed.

Which leads me to this last bit.

I was a teen aged slut. I was very promiscuous. Very sexual. I am still the last (only with hubby… coming on 26 years of marriage and almost 30 years together). A party where a girl had tons of sex with different guys was a summer fun time. But at least it was my choice. Even if the “why” might not have been.

In my crowd, those who did… wanted to participate. Those who didn’t just didn’t. We didn’t have those kinds of drugs available to us nor were they needed by our crowd. Buying weed and booze was our financial limits.

I’m probably going to regret posting this all.

146

I cannot like this enough :slight_smile:

147

I was embarrassingly naive when I was younger. In my early 20s I went to a new dentist in the area, who told me I had multiple issues and needed many appointments.
Whenever he worked on my mouth, he would literally climb up on top of me. He said it was because he was a lefty, and needed the “leverage” this position would afford.
I was upset and beyond uncomfortable, but he was the professional and knew what he was doing. Until the day I felt the bulge on top of me… I won’t say more than that.

I cancelled the remaining appointments, which is when the phone calls started. He would call most nights, asking why I wasn’t coming in anymore. He said I had hurt his feelings, and made him feel bad. I actually apologized! :frowning:

My next dentist was female (I had to search for a bit). I actually panicked when I saw she was a lefty, too. I took a deep breath and prepared for her to get on top of me, and was surprised when she was able to work on me while keeping a respectable distance.

148

mistymage: I don’t know how much you care about the opinion of some unknown guy on the internet, but I think slut shaming is tied with racism as the world’s greatest crock of stupid bullshit. A woman’s status as a lady depends on things like her kindness, fairness, and honesty. What she does in bed is her own business.

149

Just picking up on this to say that trusting a trained and licensed professional is not “naive” and nothing to be embarrassed about. You wouldn’t expect your dentist to be stealing money out of your purse: why would you expect them to be taking advantage of you sexually?

And the chutzpah of that sexually abusive dentist is absolutely jaw-dropping. Presumably he was charging you for each of those “many appointments” that I’m guessing you didn’t really need, so he had it set up that you would actually be PAYING HIM to climb on top of you for his own sexual gratification. Talk about adding insult to injury.

150

Wow. Thank you.

And you’re right, the next dentist couldn’t understand why I thought my teeth were so bad. She couldn’t find any of the problems that other dentist said I had.

151

If you’re not innocent when you’re young, when can you be? Sadly the price of experience happens to be scars.

152

Thank you. That was hard to do, and I appreciate the hell out of it.

153

This is a very heartening thread, on a currently very disheartening board. I find myself moved to post in this thread by the men who have remarked. It helps to hear your voices. Even in the face of not much changing. It still helps.

I want you to be aware of the silent, unspoken side, in the age of #metoo. I believe there is something you’re not seeing. I can promise you there are women reading this board, right now, who have never reported or told anyone about their assault. They will NEVER post in such a thread. Or join #metoo. They have NEVER spoken of it. And I can promise you there are a couple of silent ‘metoo’er’s in your life as well.

Their assault was such a complete betrayal, it left them too robbed of their own sense of personal safety in the world, to ever consider speaking. Shattered, walking through the ensuing days feigning normalcy for those around them. Hanging by a thread. They cannot risk the second betrayal, being dismissed, not believed, blamed, shamed, facing police interrogations, the rapist in court. For some it’s taking everything they have, just to face each day. Their silent struggle is Herculean in is magnitude. They are NOT weak.

And in the time that has passed since their assault, decades for many, they have NEVER been able to find a safe enough space, feel safe enough with anyone, to tell it. That’s how profoundly their sense of safety was taken from them.

I want us to remember they are part of this too. I want them to know we see you there. We understand, it’s alright. We can hear you too.

I just wanted the gentlemen among us to understand, that silence is sometimes screaming.

154

Which is exactly as it should be, and how each of us gets to want to participate this much or that little is a different issue; what matters is respecting each other’s boundaries, limits, choices. My own crowd tended to be boringly-two-shoes, but even when some of us discussed each other’s love lifes* it was never agressive; we each went at our own speeds. We were even pretty good about stuff such as anybody being able to initiate approaching maneuvers and not getting naggy if the other person moved away or said “no” (depending on whether the maneuver itself had been physical or verbal).

  • or rather, definitions of “boyfriend”; I still say that “met him on sunday, didn’t see him all week, broke up on saturday” doesn’t count. And I mean discussing them directly among the people whose love lifes were being discussed. Talk “behind backs” was only that needed to verify whether the person who’d being eyeing you and being eyed back for a while was “taken” or not and little more.
155

I too was fortunate when I was young that I hung with a crowd that had boys and men of character. There were a few instances of unwanted attention but “no” ultimately meant no. And I too was promiscuous by choice. There may have been a very few instances were I felt pressured and gave in for the sake of peace, but they were few and far between and I really never felt (nor do I now feel) guilt. And yeah, my ex would pout if he didn’t get what he wanted so it was easier to just go along. It took a much older man to actually aggressively sexually assault me and way past my youth too. So bizarre.
So I truly am one of the lucky ones.
To all the women out there who weren’t as lucky as I; my respect. You’re the strong ones.
Maybe, just maybe the attitudes are slowly starting to change. I hope so.

156

I hesitate to post in this thread but others’ stories are compelling me to. (#me too)

1.) I was 15 when I lost my virginity to an older guy in his 20’s. I had been experimenting with sex, but had yet to do the “deed”. I didn’t know him well, but he had some weed and we got high in his car and before I knew it he was on top of me and it was done. I don’t remember trying to fight him off - but I didn’t exactly agree to it either. I had been learning words like “prude” and “cock-tease”, and these seemed to be VERY bad things for a girl to be.

2.) I yearned for a real boyfriend, but I became one of “those” girls - girls that guys would come screw after dating their “proper” girlfriends. I told myself that I was young and free and the double standard of boys being studs and girls being sluts was bullshit. But I always felt bad about myself.

There was one boy I really liked. He used to come visit me late at night at my window. I let him in a few times. I grew tired of him only wanting to see me for sex, and stopped coming to the window. One night he actually opened the window and got in bed with me while I feigned sleep. I kept repeating, “No!” but he forced me. During it a toilet flushed in the house, and I said. “That’s my Dad!!” and he got the hell out of dodge.

3.) I married at 17, and one night while at the county fair I got in an argument with my husband. I walked out and hitchhiked a ride home - at least that’s what I thought. He took me out in the boonies. I was scared out of my mind, and tried to think what to do. When he stopped the car, I ran down the road but he caught me easily and forced me into the backseat. I cried, but he didn’t care. I just lay there and didn’t fight. He took me home afterward! (Nearby, I wouldn’t tell him my real address.)

For years, I have felt like I deserved all these encounters, based on my lifestyle and stupid decisions. I’m coming to realize that it’s not necessarily my fault.

Of course I didn’t report any of these. To who?

157

I’ve stayed mum out of a feeling that it shouldn’t be about me–while I was molested as a kid and didn’t report it, it was really minor compared to the stories being told here–but if it’s helpful, know that I’m reading the stories, and admire folks for posting and am sickened by the stories. Contrasting this to the performance being put on elsewhere is ragemaking.

158

How ironic is it that the one safe place we’ve found to share our stories is in the BBQ Pit?

159

Just so you know, the events that several of the rest of us have described are also really minor compared to some of the other accounts here, so you shouldn’t feel your story somehow doesn’t “deserve” to be heard because it’s not “bad enough”.

I’m grateful to everybody who’s shared so far, and would like to note that men in particular sharing such stories often helps break down the perception that these sorts of abuse are “normal” or “just part of life”, which is how they’re often regarded when the victims are women and girls. Although I realize that in many cases men get even worse pushback for reporting such abuse because it’s a big ol’ masculinity taboo.

160

I have a serious question that I fear may derail this thread.

While I do take advantage of opportunities to let close friends that any event, no matter if it was consensual or not, will change my opinion of them or devalue them in any way. I would like to find some way to communicate this exact same sentiment in either a professional or with slightly more casual acquaintances too.

What would be a good way to share that you are a true ally and non-judgmental without seeming disingenuous or accusatory.

The complaints I have heard about fake feminist men with ulterior motives often as the “nice guy”, unrequited love, validation etc… tend to give me pause. Is there a fairly reliable way to communicate this and ensure that it is simply based on compassion, friendship, and respect?

I only ask because of some co-workers shared stories about some work incidents with me after I had challenged a male coworker for his public inappropriate behavior at an event . Several women coworkers later told me that they wished they had known my position earlier.

I simply do not have a basis or the experience on how to approach the issue in cases like this and the unfortunate reality is that I work in a male dominated industry and things will not significantly change unless we can bridge these gender roles. These women didn’t need a hero but sure could have used a friend and an ally on the male side of this artificial divide.

I would sincerely appropriate feedback.