Scared

Anon

I work in the NHS and what I do is important for patients. In a work conversation a male colleague who is highly respected and educated commented about how he had been thinking about and really appreciated my cleavage from a private social event that had happened. Not that I should have to justify myself, but I wasn’t even wearing anything that revealing, it was just a dress that was more fitted than my usual workwear. Then I feel cross with myself because even if I had been wearing something more revealing, nothing would give him the right to comment on that. These are some of the emotions I am feeling tonight. I can’t sleep thinking about it but I really need sleep because I am exhausted and have work deadlines. Angry Pissed off Guilt/shame/self blame Anxious Fed up Scared Responsibility and weight of future women to stand up and say not ok Responsibility to honour the courage of previous women who have stood up and said it’s not ok Shocked he would think this is ok, that they have the right to do this Burden/ I have a lot of stress and going through some significant life events right now and honestly don’t need this extra shit to think about, to think about how to uphold the responsibilities, stand up for myself but also protect myself from potential future consequences of doing it. Internal arguments about whether I should do something, bargaining -maybe they didn’t mean it, maybe they don’t realise (although how someone who is very highly educated doesn’t realise) Honestly this is the tip of the iceburg. It is a surprisingly direct l comment that I am able to explicitly label as sexist. A lot of the behaviour at work is difficult to label sexist because it is insidious and individually you probably can’t label each item as sexist but when you think about it together, you think it is. It is a common feeling amongst the women at work. Senior leadership know it is and yet have not done anything meaningful to tackle it. I’m not sure they know how. How do you tackle something that is so entrenched in people’s behaviours? There is a lot of male power by middle and older me , there are maybe 5-10 men in non-senior positions in a staff of a few hundred. Although I have large experience in an area, I was ignored, undermined and publicly criticised by senior male colleagues on a project team. I have been given excellent appraisals so this leads me to think it must be not be to do with my skill set but bias against my gender and age. Just tired of dealing with this extra emotional burden on top of trying to do a good job. .

jax green-delarosa

i can’t remember which day this happened the first time. At first I was too scared for anybody to find out ( especially family) but now i do understand that I should share this, because i had reported this to my mom and she not only didnt care, she told me it was my fault!!! This was right after english class that i had with one of my best friends at the time. I had trusted him with almost everything in my life. We had just left english and he was walking with me to our friends and he turned and stopped walking and told me that if i didnt go with him to the bathroom, he would report me for self-harm which would no doubt get me in trouble with my mom who happens to be old fashioned and would punish me for it. I didnt want anybody to find out that i wasnt clean from self-harm so i did what he asked where i was later groped and he went on to tell our entire friend group with pride that since i said yes he was allowed to. I didnt understand that it was not consent if i was scared to say no. The boy who had grabbed me at the time was named [redacted by administrator]. I am no longer afraid to say his name and im definetly okay with reporting what had happened to me! i realized that i cannot get in trouble for “saying yes” because i was scared to say no. We were in the 8th grade and I am now a freshman in highschool and now im 14 years old and nothing has been done about [redacted by administrator] and the other girls he had groped in that same bathroom because people trusted him.

Maddy

Earlier this month a man wouldn’t let me leave his house. I’d voluntarily got in the uber with him, but had changed my mind and wanted to leave before we got in the front door. He said when we were inside I could call another to go home. The house was in the middle of nowhere, I didn’t know where I was and then he said he’d let me call an uber if I got into bed and let him spoon me. I said I wasn’t going to do anything, so he lay there for hours narrating his sex life and holding me down. I was too scared to kick up a fuss because he was far stronger than me. At one point I was hyperventilating and he told me to stop. Eventually, after the whole night of lying there clutching my phone, under his weight, he let me leave at 8 am. What makes it worse is he’s on the same sports team as one of my friends and has told him a very different story. Looking back, I should’ve just called a friend to come get me but I didn’t want to cause a fuss. It was the whole flight or fight thing, but I completely froze. I didn’t properly get scared until I got into my bathroom at home shut the door and it all hit me and I had the worst panic attack I’ve had in years. Nothing actually happened, and I don’t know why it’s got to me so much. Since it happened I haven’t had a proper night sleep, which is making my mood get low and I’m panicking going places that he might be (campus), and what he’s exactly said to my friends.

someone

growing up, my mom would make me change when her male friends would come over. it could be my my friend’s dad or her grandpa and I’d still have to change into something loose and covering. every. single. time. and she’d never let me have a sleepover at any of my friends’ house if they had any male living in the house. like it could be a brother, uncle, dad, grandpa and my mom would instantaneously say no. honestly idk if this counts…

Riley

It’s me again. The same 8th grader who sexually harassed my friends in January was passing by my class one day. I was waiting outside with my friend. He recognized us and started to just scream in our faces. Then, as he was leaving, he said, “F*ck you” I yelled it back cause I was so angry and I didn’t want to take anymore of his harassment. But he just cussed me out all the way to his class. The next day, during our snack break, he kept flipping us off and cussing us out. This wasn’t too bad, but the thing that happened after school scared me a little bit. I was walking down the hall and I saw him and I looked at him. (It’s kinda hard NOT to look at the guy who is the tallest kid in your school and has sexually harassed your friends.) He looked at me and shouted, “What?! Why do you keep look at me, n*gga?!” And then when he was talking to his friend he said, “This dumbass b*tch has something against me.” I ran away but I wanted so badly to yell how he has harassed so many people to a point that it is disgusting!

Lucia

I was going with my friend down a street after we went to Starbucks and then this car started following us, it was in broad daylight. We found it weird cause there was no one there and the car was going at our speed and there were like 5 men inside and we were 2 and then we started running and running but the car would just speed up so me and my friend started running back and forth and the car would just hit reverse. We then ran out full speed until we reached home and the car was outside the house but after 2 minutes they left. KEEP IN MIND THIS WAS IN AN ARABIC COUNTRY QATAR, IN BROAD DAYLIGHT, I AM 11, AND I WASNT SHOWING MUCH

Charlotte

My friend and I came out of the ladies’ toilet in a club, to find two much 50+ year old men purposely blocking our path. They said ‘We think you two are gorgeous’ and asked us repeatedly if we wanted to go with them, very immediately asking for sex. Another woman we had befriended in the loo tried to tell them that we had boyfriends and to leave us alone- they completely ignored her. She was around 30 and we are 19 so it was pretty obvious the men were targeting us because we’re younger. After their continued harassment where they received no positive response from us (I literally wasn’t looking at them) but I looked up and stuck up my middle finger at them. They were immediately angered and offended, we managed to pass them but they one of them said ‘I’ll follow you home’.

Rose

when this happed to me is was 14 years old and hadn’t even reached puberty yet. i was biking to school alone because my friend was sick. and a group of 5/6 guys with scooters yelled at me “nice ass” i wanted to ignore it because it scared the living sh*t out of me, and i heard about things like this happening before. when i ignored them they starded yelling stuff like, “fucking react” “yeay, bike harder bitch” “we’ll get you”, they were 5 years older than me, whith more people and they had scooters while i had a bike. i was shaking the rest of the ride to school. when i aksed my friends if they ever had something like that pretty much all of them did

Mel

I was 17 years old when I was in concert choir for my senior year of high school. It started out pretty well. I made some new friends. And one of my friends had decided that it wad okay to give me hugs and to touch my shoulders all the time. Whatever. I thought that I was just being crazy at first because I wasn’t used to people touching me. If never dated anyone before, still that way now, and so I want used to being touched by a lot of people. The only people that usually touched me, not innapropriately, were my parents, sister, my best friend, and anyone else I was comfortable with. But there was a guy in my choir class who made me uncomfortable who kept trying to touch me every time he saw me. He used to walk through my science class and I usually ended up crossing paths with him and he would try to hug me. It made me uncomfortable but I rolled with it even though I was embarrassed. The guys I satbwith in the back of the class were teasing me about it, but they didn’t mean anything by it because I knew them well enough to not really care about what they were saying. We were good friends and they never really made me uncomfortable. As time went on, the guy I mentioned before (who’s name will not be stated) had gotten worse. He made me uncomfortable and whenever I was trying to leave my choice class, he would pretty much slam his hands on my shoulders. I had really long hair then too, so it pulled on my hair and it hurt and I would tell him to stop touching me every day but he never listened. Eventually, I went to the assistant principle and told him what was going on. I told him how I thought the kid from my choir class liked me and wouldn’t stop hugging me or touching me no matter how many times I told him to stop and I didn’t want for the kid to think that I liked him more than a fried. So, the assistant principle told me that he was going to talk with him. So, a week or two goes by and the kid stopped talking to me and touching me. No big deal. I started feeling better about being in class. Well, when we went to solo ensemble (where we sang by ourselves or with a partner in front of judges), he decided that it would be a good idea to try and talk to me. He was seating three seats behind me, well diagonally if that makes sense…and he reached all the way over to place his hand on my knee to get my attention. That day, I dressed up because I was supposed to and I actually wore a dress. I never wear dresses. And wheb I do, the skirt I’m the dress is long. But this dress wasn’t as long as I normally wear so I was uncomfortable to begin with. When he touched my knee, it honestly scared me because I’m not used to that. I hate being touched unless if I’m comfortable with the person who’s touching me. He didn t seem to have a problem with it, but I shrunk away from him but he didn’t care, he kept trying to talk to me. Throughoutbthe rest of the day after that, we didn’t really talk much. I’d seen both of his performances, which were about me, because he asked our mutual friend in common to convince me to go. So, I relented just so then our mutual friend would stop hugging me about it. He sang a song called “Red Irish Rose”…i have red hair and I’m Irish… It kinds scared me a little. I forgot the other song title but it had to do with beauty and stuff and the song actually kind of described my personality a little bit. Either way, I was freaked out. After we got back onto the bus to go home, he put his letterman jacket next to me on my seat. I was sitting in the way back and our mutual friend was sitting next to me, but decided to move to talk to one of our other friends, so the kid who harassed me sat in the single seat across from me. Well, I told him to move his jacket and he said, “I just wanted to see if I could piss you off and make you throw the jacket back at me.” I listened to music the rest of the way back but wheb we were lining up to get off, I got in front of the kid who harassed me so then I could get off the bus quicker. He started trying to talk to me and was touching my shoulder. He told me that he loved me and I told him to stop before I got off the bus and didn t stop walking until I got to the bus that took me home. I was walking in heels and it was a bit hard for me to walk in two inch heels and walk fast at the same time because I didn’t wear heels often. I told my mom about what happened and then she talked to my dad who went into the school to talk to the cop who patrolled the schools. So, I wrote a report like I was told to and explained everything to the cop and to the assistant principle and they said that they’d have another talk with him. It worked for a couple of weeks before it all started up again. So, I told the assistant principle and he told me that I shouldn’t be worrying about it because it was almost the end of the fucking year. That pissed me off because that pretty much said that he didn t care. And I was honestly scared to go to school. But the kid who harassed me had lied to the cop and assistant principle so it was my word against his and it seemed that the assistant principle didn’t care. And I’m sure that the assistant principle took the kid’s word over mine which is absolute bullshit because not only I wouldn’t lie about that, but also I’ve never gotten into trouble in school so he should know that I wasn’t doing it for shits and giggles.

Robin

I recently am reading the book Everyday Sexism. 5 years on, I thought that some things might have changed, but only yesterday I was catcalled walking alone in the afternoon in modest clothing, and my childhood was still influenced by gender roles. I’m a 17 year old girl, but I definitely realise the importance and impact of change.