let’s stop the carnage
**Trigger Warning: Rape, assault and child abuse**
I cannot stop the film reel in my head churning out story after story in a dark narrative of abuses. I want to share them, after the murder of Jill Meagher and the PM’s obviously impassioned speech against misogyny, because I feel the tides turning, ever so slowly in this country, towards equality, and I want to be able to say, proudly, that I did something to make women safer in Australia. If all that means is telling my own story then I am willing to face my fears and tell it.
Unfortunately, years of being told ‘you’re probably exaggerating,’ or ‘what were you wearing,’ means the compulsion to admit to abuse can be crushed. Every single one of these stories I’m about to tell you has remained mostly secret, because the few times I tried to tell them I was often mocked – by both men and women. Have we so internalised the idea that abuse simply happens that we will ridicule another’s tale of debasement?
My story starts at three or four years old, when an uncle, my father’s brother, pulls me into a shed at the back of our house and shows me pornographic magazines. I cannot remember if he touches me, but I remember being very, very afraid and confused. I tell my grandmother. I was not yet privy to knowledge of victim blaming and that people might not believe my story. Nothing is done, he is not taken from the family or to counselling, but my mother will no longer let him near me. He is currently serving a sentence in prison for rape.
After leaving my father who was an abusive alcoholic who once bit my mother’s cheek hard enough to draw blood, we went into hiding across the country. My mother found a new partner. He turned out to be a physically abusive tyrant who constantly stood over my family. I was of the upbringing: ‘If you don’t stop fucking crying I’ll give you something to fucking cry about.’ This continued until I was 18 and could finally move out of home.
At age 12, I took the quickest route to school. An elderly man started to wait for me at the front of his house. At first he would simply chat to me and I would be polite. This advanced to him holding my hands and trying to get me to come inside. I immediately began to walk another way. From my new route I could still see him, waiting for me each day. I did not tell anyone.
One day, a friend of mine and I were walking home from school. We would have been about 14. He stopped his car opened the passenger side door and told us to get in. We said no. He asked again, his voice louder and stronger. We said we didn’t want to. We were bone-shakingly terrified. He got visibly angry, we started to walk off, he slammed the door and screeched off. He continued to circle each block to intimidate us until we got home.
At 15, I went on a camping trip with friends. Everybody got drunk, as you did. A boy I had never met told me he needed to tell me something in private. I had no reason not to listen. He took me off into a bush area away from all of our friends and forced me to the ground. I kept saying ‘no, I don’t want you to do that’, but he got on top of me and started trying to take my clothes off, forcing his mouth on to mine. Yet again, I was terrified. Through sheer will I forced him off and ran back to our friends. I didn’t mention it. The next day I did, when only the girls were present. They reacted nonchalantly and said ‘yeah he’s a weird guy, but he obviously just got too drunk, don’t worry about it. He’s NOT BAD.’ (This told me – YOU ARE OVER-REACTING)
Another camping trip, much older, I fell asleep next to my best friend who I was sharing a tent with. I woke up to find he was using my hand to masturbate himself. I was so terrified I simply pretended to stay asleep until he was done, because I didn’t know what to do. I never brought it up with him.
Strangers in bars or in the street groping or fondling me unprovoked that I cannot even begin to recount them. Arse grabbing, pinching, running their hand up your crotch, grabbing your breasts or putting their hands inside your shirt. Telling you, always, that you’re a ‘slut’ or ‘frigid’ if you dare to question just what exactly the fuck they think they’re doing. I am often called upon to eject the creep from the party, or given the ‘please save me’ eye signals from girls who are backed into the corner in a bar.
Many of my ‘friends’ have fondled or forced themselves on me. They have gotten into my bed uninvited. They have pushed me into locked rooms and put their hands down my pants. They have lunged at me in cabs on the way home. They have assumed because I offer friendship that I must want sex, and are confused when I refuse.
The sexual partners who try to force you into anal sex and call you a prude if you don’t comply, or laugh in your face and try to do it anyway.
The housemate who used to practice martial arts and would find great joy in over-powering us for no particular reason, sitting on our shoulders and making sure we knew he was strong enough to rape us ‘if he felt like it.’
The couch surfer host would-be rapist who waited for my friend and I (at 21) to come home late to find him waiting up, drunk as hell in shorts and watching porn. He pulled me onto his lap and wouldn’t let me get up; he whispered in my ear and told us about the ‘party’ he was throwing us and all his friends were coming. We nervously went to bed. In the morning he walked purposefully in on my friend in the shower and laughed in her face. We snuck out while he slept off his hangover.
The men who say ‘if you don’t shut up I’ll fucking shut you up’
‘Don’t you know how easy it would be for me to kill you?’
‘You deserve what you get you loud mouthed bitch.’
For knowing none of these stories even start with me, but with my mother, who was raped by a “friend” at 14 while the rest of her male “friends” stood in a group around her and watched the whole thing happen. For knowing no less than four women who’ve been raped – one of them bearing a child who is not aware his brothers are not really his – while none of these rapes were reported or even known about by the men in these women’s lives.
I haven’t offered any solutions, I know, but another voice strengthening the conversation speaking out against violence is all it takes, until an army roars and we might one day live without fear. Let’s stop the carnage.
By Anonymous
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