I read the posts here from time to time and always come away depressed at the number of pages there are for each day. And I look back on my life and realise I could fill so many pages just by myself. My first sexual assault happened when I was ten. He was very polite and we started talking. After all, he wasn’t driving a car and we had been taught to be polite to adults. He was grooming me as we talked, put his hand on the outside of my underwear, but didn’t try to go further. Then he guided my hand to the outside of his underwear and, even though he was moving my hand, I felt suddenly that I was an actor in this scenario that I did not understand and pulled away. He accepted this and we parted quite amicably. I walked home, unafraid, but knowing something wrong had happened. I made a conscious choice not to tell our mother because I didn’t want my freedom to roam the woods and the heath to be curtailed; a secondary consideration was the freedom of my older sister and younger brother – I’d have paid a heavy price if they lost it on my account. In later years I’ve mentally thanked that stranger – he let me go, he let me live. I didn’t feel violated. The ‘good’ molester, ha ha. Two years later a man put his hand up my skirt and touched me in the centre of town. I turned and saw him as he slipped away, but was paralysed and then horrified/messed up for weeks. I remained silent again, knowing by then that my father would blame me, probably ground me. From that age I became aware that every f**king construction worker of truck driver felt they owned a piece of me, could yell obscenities or invitations, supposed compliments that, when ignored, were quickly replaced by violent misogyny. At 14 I had a Saturday job where my 50+ co-worker would stand unpleasantly close and where I was interrogated about my ‘love life’. My first ‘success’ in one of these situations came at 16 when I was alone in an empty compartment on the train home from school and a man got in and sat right opposite, I moved away but he soon had his hand rummaging in his groin. There is little time between stations and, as we slowed for the next one , I hissed ‘if you don’t get out now I’ll yell for the station security’, and got up to do so. He hurriedly got out, spitting a few obscenities. At that school (all girls, thank the goddess) I usually travelled and hung out with a bunch of fellow feminists so we could support each other and wonder why so many unwanted sexual invitations were followed up by hate speech. But it never stops. The demeaning ads, a woman’s invisibility if she’s hanging out with a man, being told to my face that I got into college ‘because of your grades…and your tits’ by one of my tutors, being groped, assaulted violently, raped because I didn’t fight back because I didn’t want to worry my mother by ending up in hospital, and a long etc. My brother still never helps clearing up or in the kitchen unless he’s being the chef in his own. I’m 64 now and England now has an even worse take-up rate of rape cases than it did then, less than 2% even get to court (sorry if that’s inaccurate, but it’s in the right ball park) and it will take 18 years to clear the backlog, I read this week. Austerity from 2010 to 2020, the pandemic, the crash of ’08, all these have affected women more than men. Domestic violence against women goes up when England win and when they lose. The hair-raising stories of rape and sexual assault in schools, both public and private, that teachers either brush under the carpet or are more overtly complicit with. All these things add up, one painful bruise after another until one just waits for a man to put a foot wrong, attempt to hurt another woman (now that I wear the invisibility cloak of age), [redacted by administrator] Get your allies together and let’s make a stand against misogyny because it’s killing us by a thousand cuts.
