Ruby
In 1964 I was abused by a 14 year old boy babysitter when I was six years old. My parents tried to help but nothing happened. No one thought of going to the police because it wasn’t done in those days. I didn’t know it at the time but when my mother was seven she was sodomized with a broom handle by teenage boys in a park by her home. No one could find them. When I was nine a classmate knocked me down on my way home saying he was going to rape me. The school’s response was to keep me after school for about half an hour every day for a few weeks so he could get home before I tried to get home safely. At a YWCA pool a man I was chatting with took hold of my hand and put it on his erect penis under water. In my first term at the university a professor announced that he used to put slides of Playboy’s naked women in with the others to “keep students awake.” Another professor came into class and dropped his trousers to his knees so he could “adjust himself.” When I complained to the department head I was told not to worry because my prof would be retiring in the next few years. Once on the bus a man slid his hand under me and grinned salaciously until I yelled at him in the biggest, lowest pitched voice I could manage, “MOVE.” He did even though the bus was jam packed with people holding packages of holiday shopping. After years of putting up with a man whistling at me at work and when complaining to my boss didn’t work (it’s a he said she said situation) I finally yelled at him, “Don’t you ever, ever, ever do that to me again!” He turned around and went back the way he had come. A few years earlier a shorter coworker hauled off and decked this same man but clearly he didn’t learn a thing. As a sensible woman I am afraid to walk outside alone at night unless I am with a dog in my own neighborhood. This is no guarantee though. The halls of my apartment building are not safe. The management refuses to pay for a security guard even though I was assaulted in the lobby, there was a push-in robbery across the hall, there are often dirty needles in the stairway and many people are in wheelchairs. There are places I don’t go because it isn’t safe for me. I often think of what might help me in an attack. Fear makes me freeze almost always. I feel paralyzed and can’t make a sound. I’m getting more comfortable with the idea of yelling and also that hurting an attacker is just fine and may even be essential. I struggle with major depression, anxiety and PTSD though I haven’t felt suicidal in the last couple of years. I don’t hesitate to help others but I freeze like a rabbit when I feel threatened. All of this has left me hypervigilant and full of anger and rage and fear that I can’t get rid of. My mother is the same way and I think it nearly destroyed her to learn that I was abused in first grade. My life is circumscribed by fear.