A note to all the survivors of sexual assault.

I hated school, and I didn’t have many friends in my early school years. The corridors and stair cases in-between lesson times would get really crowded and congested, so it took a while to get from class to class.

One day I was trying to get up one set of stairs to a class when two boys below me started to touch me, quite badly, a bit worse than just groping, from behind me on the steps below. I froze. I was either twelve or thirteen, and in the ugliest uniform you could imagine (brown and yellow, hideous, long pleated skirt and frumpy jumper). I knew where they were touching was sexual, but nothing, even in the slightest, felt sexual about what they were doing. It felt humiliating, a huge joke to them, something to help them mock me – and I couldn’t understand why. I still have no idea who the boys were as I never looked back.

It’s one of the smallest occurrences in my life (hell I’ve been followed, stalked, harassed etc quite a few times since!) yet this one always stuck out most in my memory – maybe because I was so young, maybe because of the circumstances, maybe because I couldn’t understand it at the time. Maybe because I couldn't get away because I was on a crowded staircase. I never told anyone this tiny story till very recently, because it made me uncomfortable to have to explain it. I had no social script to understand it by, and it was only once debating on the SlutWalk walls that I talked about it.

When I think of how humiliating I found this experience, which is so insignificant, I now think of all the rape survivors. How much courage and bravery it must take to speak out if you’ve been sexually assaulted. How much it must stick with you, change your everyday life – and how amazing I think the people are that have been through the experience of sexual assault, whether they have spoken up about it or not – the very fact they have been through it and have to deal with it every day makes them amazing and so strong to me. 

So for all you brave people who are dealing with these things every day of your life, for the ones that have spoken out, and for the ones that haven’t, you are all amazing. I really hope SlutWalk and causes of the same kind are helping you cope with life and realise that you are never to blame and that life really can be wonderful, despite any difficulties you may face.