Lessons on Sexual Assault

When I was in the 8th grade, I moved to Delaware, Ohio and went from a country school, Big Walnut, to a city school.  I was just beginning to notice and be noticed by boys the year before. When I began school at Willis, I was the target of a lot of unwanted attention. I was very well endowed for an 8th grader, and my clothing sewn by my Mom, was different than others. She made "hot pants"-- a fad at the time-- shorts with a tunic that opened up to reveal the shorts.  She probably thought it was fashionable; but it was revealing, that and my anatomy caused me no end of shame.

I was called names like Boomba or Bambi, grabbed in the hallway repeatedly, and taunted in home room, boys would come by and shout "TV" because they said I was "throwing shots" (of my underwear).  English class was a nightmare.  There was a group of boys in there that constantly called me names and tried to lift up my dress in the back, the list of humiliations was lengthy.

I was frightened in the first place to be in a new school, and I was totally unprepared for the attention and humiliation.  I didn't even know what was happening at first. I was naive,  I had never been taught to set boundaries, never aloud to say no, or stop it. I didn't know what to do. I had no practice in dealing with this kind of thing, I had no practice standing up for myself.  In fact, I had been taught to take a lot of physical abuse while saying nothing to anyone.  Sometimes I tried to think of something to say back or something to do, but I really wasn't that quick on my feet.

Eventually, I made friends with another girl who was unconventional and damaged from abuse like me, and she gave me permission to stand up for myself. I started swearing and acting as tough as I could.  If boys tried to grab my ass in the hall, I called them out for it.  Once, a boy grabbed me, and I hit him in the head with my science book.  That backfired, because he caught me alone in the hall one day and threatened me with a knife.  He said if I ever embarrassed or disrespected him again, he would use it on me.  Luckily, another boy who also sexually harassed me, came up and stopped him from hurting me.

Once I started to speak out, to not let this behavior to go unnoticed, things got better for me.  I wasn't completely left alone, but the amount of attention I got was the same as most other girls.  I don't know if as females of that time, we just got used to being objectified and sexually harassed, or if we didn't know where the line was.  We all wanted to be thought of as good girls, pretty, kind, and fun. Where was the line between that and being cornered on the back stairway of the school by some random boy, feeling you up and down?  When I protested, he said "You dress like you want it".  Horrified I went to the school counselor, he could do very little without me giving my abuser's name, and I was afraid to do that.

I was very afraid of boys, men really, and what they might do to me if they weren't my friends. There was this double standard that perhaps doesn't exist as much today.  If I and my male classmate were both involved in some behavior, it was OK for him, and I was a slut.  And they lied.  They said they did things that they did not do with me.

In retrospect, this learning how to stand up for myself probably helped me in the future. Perhaps without this experience of finding my voice, I would not have been able to run away two years later.  I learned something in the 8th grade.  Autonomy. I learned that I could take care of myself and change how people treated me. I learned that I did not have to stand for abuse, that I had the power to change things.