When I sat down to write this post I didn’t know what was going on with me. For the past few days I’ve been more of an emotional hurricane in a bottle than my usual Enneagram 4 self. But while writing this, I fell apart. Tears, chest pain, trembling, I slumped to the floor next to my bed, hugged my legs and waited for the hyperventilating to pass. I realized that my trauma response has been triggered and my 37 year old body is trying to comfort my 11 year old inner child. It’s not going so hot, I have to say.

When I was 11 years old, I went on a multi-night school trip away from home. My first trip, no parents. I was soooo fuckin’ excited. My parents were overprotective to the Nth degree, especially when it came to me – with my younger siblings it was different, they were far more flexible, but with me, I was pretty freakin’ locked down. Hell, my first boyfriend was at 16 and only with supervised visits. I’m amazed I wasn’t thrown in a chastity belt, FFS.

I worked on my folks for weeks, months… begging, pleading, bargaining, throwing every tool in my toolbox at them in a bid to get them to loosen up a little and let me go. And they did.

The TL;DR of this story is that while on holiday, a caretaker-type-guy who worked at the hostel we were staying at, inappropriately touched a number of girls in my class – myself included. It’s at this part of the story where I downplay my experience. It’s where I say ‘he just smacked my ass,’ and ‘he only ran his hand up the inside of my thigh.’ I wasn’t raped, I wasn’t ‘really violated’ – because that’s what we do, right? We compare our own experiences to the absolute worst, or to Betty down the road – who had worse than you to invalidate our experiences.

But at the end of the day, a grown man repeatedly gave me unwanted sexual contact. The guy sexually assaulted me, at 11 years old on a school trip.

He had keys to every room in the building, followed girls into the toilets, and sat on the bottom of my bunk and watched me sleep.

We were fucking terrified.

I’ve always been a leader, a public speaker, and my father always raised me to speak out against bullies and injustices from an early age. ‘If you see bad happening in the world, shout about it so loudly that someone has to take notice and do something about it.’ So I reported it to the teachers. They got together in a huddle, sat us on a couch in their room and listened to our stories and told us not to tell our parents.

Not… to tell our parents.

Fuck that, my 11 year old self said. Fuck that, indeed.

I called my dad. I thought he’d be angry at me. I’d talked them into letting me go and I’d gone and gotten myself felt up by a grown-up and caused drama on the school trip. My teachers made me blame myself for something a grown-ass man did to the point I was scared my dad would be angry with ME for being touched inappropriately. Don’t ruin the school trip for everyone by tattling to your parents.

Oh, he was fucking mad alright. He called the Gardai, who dispatched units to the hotel but by the time they got there, he was in the wind. My teachers had essentially facilitated a criminal.

People say it’s ‘an age thing,’ but it’s really not. It’s an asshole thing. My dad was born in 1949 and he was a middle aged guy when I told him what happened to me. Not once did he dad question me. Not once did he doubt what I experience, ask ‘are you sure?’ ‘could you be mistaken?’ or do anything but support me 100%. He sat with me at bedtime and guided meditations to help me drift off to sleep after hours of staring at the ceiling, he held me when I woke up screaming from nightmares in pools of cold sweat and urine from wetting the bed in abject terror, and then freaked out again that he was sitting on my bed like the guy at the hostel.

My father was a lot of things, and it’s no secret that my family and I have had more than our share of dysfunction. But when I needed my dad most, he was there for me, he advocated for me, and he took the teachers to court.

The police were informed, but the man was gone – which for an 11 year old with an active imagination. I was convinced he was going to find me and hurt me for reporting him. I lived in constant fear.

The justice system process took a while to get to my case. And as a minor it was supposed to be a closed door session, my parents, me, and the judge. But on the morning of the hearing, they switched it and said it was in open court and the teachers were going to be sitting in there listening to everything I said.

I had a complete nervous breakdown. Telling a judge ‘alone’ was already a big thing to me, but talking in front of the teachers who let me down when they were supposed to protect me? I couldn’t do it. I had a panic attack, sobbing on the steps of the courthouse. I couldn’t find any strength to go in and stand up to them for letting me down.

My dad was angry at me here. I guess he wasn’t REALLY angry at me, but it felt like he was. He tried to get me to go in and tell my experiences to make sure the teachers got punished for negligence, and I wanted to, but I couldn’t.

The teachers got a slap on the wrist, and the dude was never caught.

A number of years later, a family member was raped by someone she was friends with and his friend. The police were called but she was drunk (they drugged her drink) and she couldn’t remember everything, and the guys said they didn’t do it. They both got away.

Northern Ireland has one of the lowest sexual assault prosecution rates in all of Europe.

In Madrid 2022, a male author I don’t know made crude comments to a friend and I at breakfast – and it wasn’t the first time he made it onto my radar for being a creep and he invited himself into my space and was a pig.

In London 2022 I heard recollections of other people’s experiences that made my toes curl and my stomach clench.

July has been an avalanche of men overstepping their bounds, of fumbled passes, and eye opening terrifying silence by the women who have been violated by these men. I came back from my trips disillusioned and disappointed.

By contrast, in Edinburgh 2019, I was walking a friend back to her room and a guy I didn’t know was behind us. I kept checking over my shoulder and he held his hands up, I’m not following you, I’m just heading back to my room too. My friend knew him, and he offered to walk her back so I could go back to my own room with the rest of my friends so I didn’t have to walk alone in the dark either. I have never forgotten him, the fear that someone nefarious was following my friend and I, or the relief when it turned out he was actually a nice guy.

As women we have been taught to downplay what we go through. ‘It wasn’t that bad…’ ‘it was only…’ ‘you must be mistaken, he’s a lovely man, maybe you picked him up wrong.’

As women we have been taught to make ourselves small and to suffer in silence. We have been conditioned to blow comments and actions off, or laugh like they’re funny. Our knee jerk is to keep the peace and stay quiet, but it’s not funny and it’s 100% not okay. We should not be so entrenched in a toxic environment that we feel crazy and question ourselves when these things happen. We’re being further gas lit by men into believing that what happened to us was ‘no big deal,’ that we’re making a mountain out of a molehill, that we are the ones at fault.

Even at 11 years old I was talking to my friends in a frantic bid to validate my experience. I was lucky, I had a middle aged white dude as a father who believed me 100% – I know not everyone is that lucky.

Some abuse is more subtle, but no less damaging than something ‘really bad.’

It’s our job to be allies to the victims in our lives.

We do not get to dictate how a victim processes their trauma.

It is not the victim’s responsibility to make people understand what they’ve gone through, the fact they’re changed forever and living with (often repressed) trauma or why they’re reacting the way they are.

It isn’t the victim’s problem. They don’t need dealing with.

Men can be victims of SA too.

Ask them what we can do to support them. It’s our job to get over ourselves and our own preconceived notions of SA, and of people too. Just because a person hasn’t assaulted you, doesn’t mean they could not or have not assaulted someone else. I bet when they asked around there were people who said ‘Oh, not Ted Bundy, sure he’s such a lovely fella.’

I’ve always planned on writing a book based on my experiences in primary school, but writing them out here tonight has shown me that I’m still not quite ready to write about them in a way that will help people the way I want it to. But I’m getting there.

I guess my TLDR #2 is this: enough of making ourselves small and avoiding rocking the boat. Enough.

It’s time to be vulnerable, to tell our stories, to speak loudly, to flip those who aren’t really our allies the bird, to let other victims know they aren’t crazy, they aren’t alone, and that we believe them. To let them know that we stand with them, we hold space for them, and to let them process their trauma in whatever way they need to.

Zero tolerance.

I’mma make it all-the-way uncomfortable. If someone speaks to me, or anyone I’m with, in a way that’s not cool, I’m going to call them out on it, right there in front of everyone. I’m going to make it so uncomfortable for that person that they realize just how we feel inside. I’m not going to sit awkwardly and smile. If someone lays hands on me, well, I haven’t trained in a few years but I still remember how to throw a decent punch.

And if you’re my friend and you’ve been assaulted by someone, no matter who it is or how scared you are to share your story, I’ll be here for you when you’re ready, and I’ll believe you.