I found this website when I was watching “Sex Education – A Conversation About Sexual Assault” on youtube. I cried as I was watching that and I thought maybe I could share my story too. I was sexually assaulted in a public vehicle when I was thirteen. It was afternoon and I was coming home from school practice. I was wearing a long skirt and a fitted t-shirt. I remember the guy who sat next to me was wearing sunglasses, a black v-neck t-shirt, and his face almost white. At first, I thought he was handsome. I was holding on to this bar in the ceiling and I was resting my head on my arm because I was tired. I felt something rubbing my chest and when I opened my eyes, this guy was staring at me. I didn’t know what was happening, but it just felt weird so I moved away. But every time I did, he got even closer to me. I wasn’t feeling scared or anything, I was just annoyed and confused. I didn’t even bother to look down to see what he was really doing, I could just feel something was going on. I stared at him and he stared back at me like nothing’s wrong. I felt relieved when he banged his head up the ceiling when he got off the vehicle. And then the passenger in front of me said something like, “Hey, are you okay? That guy was doing something to you.” I didn’t know that ‘something’ meant ‘sexual assault’, I just thought that it was some ‘weird touching’. Like, if strangers touch your hair without consent. And then the person added, “I was gonna kick him if I saw you cry.” I thought, ‘why would I cry?’. I tried to process what happened when I got home. I couldn’t tell anyone yet because I wasn’t even sure of what happened. When I finally thought things through, I realized that what happened was bad. I was sexually assaulted. That one incident evolved from some memory when I was a kid into a scar, or some kind of trauma once I became aware of what it really was. It became something so ugly that I wanted to hide. I thought that the passenger who ‘almost came to my rescue’ was kind, but now I think ‘if you knew what was happening, why didn’t you stop it? Why would you wait until I start crying?’ After that, I began to rethink everything that happened in my childhood to see if there were also other cases I overlooked. There was a lot. I always feel like it’s my fault I didn’t catch it sooner. I feel like it’s my fault I was ignorant about what’s considered as ‘sexual assault’ and what’s not. Because if I was just smarter, I could’ve called them out. Maybe I could’ve told someone and prevented any of them from happening to me.