1 in 3

When I was teenager a hot topic between friends was “first time” stories. I was 13 when I gathered in a group circle shivering with the girls. The cold air nipped our noses, but the conversation was steaming. We were waiting for the doors to open at school and listened attentively as one of the girls spun a yarn about how romantic the night of the winter dance had been. They spent the whole dance/ activity night on the dance floor. Bumping and grinding, dry humping like untrained pups but there was slow dancing thrown in too. We stood beneath the curious, leafless red maple. The girls licked their lips and gawked as our friend spoke. I was uncomfortable that day. Partly because my converse were shit in the snow and now, my socks had become soaked from the icy slush on the sidewalks and partly because of the conversation, but I listened in anyway. And partly because the night before I was invaded by an unwelcome creep and I could still feel throbbing between my thighs.

The friend telling her story was our group's "Regina George"; she was mean and had an oddly powerful influence over us. She and her boyfriend had been going steady since they were 11. To us, they were like some ghetto fairytale except Romeo and Juliet don’t die. They go to the ball and get frisky. They get hot and heavy she says,

“And the next thing I know we were doing it.” I was struck when she giggled with the girlies about how nice it had felt and how in love; she believed herself to be. [How strange] I thought and stood wrists deep in my pockets, picking unnoticeably at my fingertips.

A week later, more girls are sharing their stories too. The more I listened to, the more interested I felt. Not in the act itself, but in the way the girls responded to the act and how they applauded one another like football players smacking each other on the ass and yelling,

“Good game!” Last up would be “Regina’s” right hand woman. This girl would be just as mean but less confrontational. The type to slither around and sink her fangs in when you are not looking. This one would also be considered the prettiest of our group. A tiny waist and round backside with delicate breasts, long blonde hair and striking blue eyes. “Regina” kept her eyes glued to her bestie.

“My man convinced his older brother to book a hotel room for us over the weekend.” The girl bragged. “Oh, and he bought me flowers, chocolates, and a giant teddy bear.” All of us were in awe with how hard her boyfriend had been working for it. He drooled after her like a bitch in heat. We were all taken aback when he dumped her two weeks later. “Regina” scoffed and rolled her eyes at me when I confessed to the group, I still had not done the deed. My palms were warm and wet. I had hoped this one’s stories would be enough for the day; I could not have imagined that the girlies would be dissatisfied by only having a single story.

Despite the nagging of my girlfriends and my boyfriend's handsy advances, I still had no interest in joining the club. I hated to see myself naked, and I could not imagine anyone else enjoying the view either. I developed early and would be moving into a C cup the following year. Still, I was nothing spectacular. I had small hips and a flat bum. I stood 4’ 11” and I had no business having sex. Somewhere deep down, I always knew that. I can still hear that trembling girl in my head telling me that I am not ready. I turned 14 that summer and I caved.

“Come on, she’s been doing it since she was twelve.” Barked one of the girls.

“Yeah, don’t be such a pussy.” The girlies hounded me at the breakfast table. I only wanted to eat the cinnamon bun on the tray in front of me.

I had a boyfriend, too. I had met him in sixth grade, and we got together halfway through the school year after he offered me a ride on his bike pegs when he caught me walking home from school one day. I grew fond of him quickly. He was kind and sweet and he made me laugh, which is something I did not often do in those days. We spent hours playing mortal combat, and I would help him with his homework. I knew he was waiting for me to give him the green light, and the girls were waiting for a juicy new story. I felt the pressure from my friends bearing down on me. Valentine’s Day was around the corner, and we were attending the Valentine’s Dance/ Activity night together. We would meet up with the gang there. My sister and I lied about the time the event ended and gave ourselves two extra hours each to get into mischief. The pair of felt bad for being dishonest but, some experts would say that teenagers are more likely to active impulsively and engage in risky behavior due to struggles with emotional regulation, failure to think in the long-term, and of course, peer pressure. When you add physical and sexual trauma to the mix, you might end up a self-loathing ticking time bomb full of reckless behaviors.

I had consensual for the first time on a couch in my 15-year-old boyfriend’s living room while his mom worked a double at Petris, and the tv’s blue light blurrily beamed in the background. I slapped my hands over my eyes when he took off my pants. He was larger than I expected. I winced and covered my mouth when he entered me. I kept my eyes locked on his and for the first time, I found that sex could be enjoyable. I knew right away that he was the only person I ever wanted to touch me that way again. At that time, anyway. Before him sex had been painful and humiliating. I had never been aroused, only ever petrified. Sex was mechanical. Bend here, move here, oil this, pull on that. There was no warmth. There were instructions and putrid odors. I did not know how to explain to him that I was not a virgin though, or that I did not remember my first time. I had been so young, and I did not know what was happening to me then. I knew that whatever had been happening to me was painful and gross, and I knew that I did not like it.

I had no interest in participating in sex though. I enjoyed the time I had with my sweet lover but, I still hated to have sex. I had just learned by now not to put up a fight. I learned that when I said no, he would punch and kick. I learned that if I cried, he would bite and pinch. Most importantly, I learned that the bruises and bite marks would be explained away as sibling rivalry gone awry. I had bit down on him once when he forced himself into my mouth. He yanked me up with hair and sent me flying back to the floor with an open hand to my face. I had not learned that 13% of sexual assault is committed by a family member, and 28% is committed by someone who is well known to you. I learned that I was not safe in my home. I had nightmares of being dragged from my bed in the middle of the night.

I was being watched when I got up to pee at night, stalked. I felt his eyes on me through the sliver between the two sides of the door. I learned that even navigating my own home, I had to always be on guard because I was being hunted. There are still days when I sit on the toilet and freeze. I do not move, I do not speak, I do not even pee because what if he’s still watching? I read an article that stated that out of 1,000 rapists and abusers about 994 of them will walk free. (Abuse Guardian. 2023.) Too often the question asked is, why did the victim not come forward sooner? Not often enough, are perpetrators of sexual violence heard. When we are, they ask what we were wearing. I could not imagine a frilly, princess nightie could be sexually appealing on anyone, let alone a six-year-old child. The systemic victim derogation and lenient sentencing for sexual criminals leave victims with little to no faith is the criminal justice. I am in the zero boat and I am angry. What does one do when they are angry? Well, in my case, when the abuse began, I was a child, and I took my frustrations out on my dolls. Not Barbie. I got her friend, or is it her sister? The Teresa dolls. Mom insisted I get the Teresa dolls.

“She has the same name as you. She even looks like you with your brown hair and brown eyes.” Mom reminded me.

I hated it so, I stuck sewing needles in her eyes and nostrils. I would burn them with my mom’s stollen cigarette lighter that I hid in the barbie car’s hood. I would rip out their hair and plaster them in red nail polish and wrap their bodies in fabric I found lying around my mother's arts and crafts supplies and I would find a spot outside. I tacked around the yard sitting crisscross apple sauce in a spot for a second and moving on until I found a spot where the world around me went quiet. I waited until the rush of traffic paused and the train tracks stopped rumbling. I waited for the birds to quit singing and the chirping of the crickets to come to a stop. In those places of quiet, I would lay Teresa to rest. I knew keeping quiet was the trick. That is what he told me. This was our little secret and I could not tell anyone. Not my mom or dad, they would not understand, and I could not upset them anymore because they were already getting divorced, he said. And not my sisters, they would be jealous of our special relationship.

I did not know that 1 and 3 women were likely to be sexually assaulted within their lifetime (NSVCR,2026.). While most of those cases are reported to be between the ages of 11 and 18. I was six when my parents separated. I was six the first time I was secretly pushed into a different room. The air in the house was dusty. Dad had been gone a few days by this time and mom was sulking and chain smoking. I never saw much of my mom when we lived with her. Mom preferred the solidarity of her darkened, tobacco-scented bedroom. I came home from school one day, excited to show her a macaroni picture I made in class and climbed into her lap and nudged her like a thirsty kitten asking for milk. There was a man with black hair and a funky moustache sitting beside her on the couch. He was speaking, and mom was locked in on him until I laid in her lap and flicked my foot into the ugly chatterbox's half-full coffee cup. My bottom stung after her palm slapped my skin. I would be sent to my room. My two sisters would be sent outside to play.

He cornered me at the top of the stairs. There was a dusty dart board hanging on the back wall.

“Do you wanna see something cool?” I trusted him to deliver on that. I had hoped he had caught another garter snake and snuck it into the house or Jurassic Park dinosaur toy. “Look.” He said and I did. I did not know what I was looking at. It sort of reminded me of the snake except it scared me. I stepped back and he pulled me in by my arm. I tried to scream but he covered my mouth. The door with the poster blue racecar with the white stipe closed shut and I was trapped in this room. I said no, and he would smack and kick and punch. I shook my head when he told me to touch it. My lips dropped and I turned my head away.

“Look at it. Here touch it.” I would yank my hand away. He tightened his grip and yanked it back. I said no and felt the sting across my face before I seen his body flinch. That is all I remember from my “first time.” I did not know how to explain any of it to my friends. I did not know how to tell them that I had been used for sex before or that I was part of a special relationship.

After my real first time, I asked my dad to get me a lock for my bedroom door so I could lock it from the inside. To my surprise, he did not pry much. “Why?” He asked and I told him it would just make me feel better. Living with my dad had already made things more difficult for my attacker than they had been when we lived with our mom. Dad did not spend his time rotting away in a dog piss-stained bed smoking day and night. Dad paid attention, but he had hearing trouble and monsters come out at night, as they say.

I wanted to tell him that I was trying to keep a creep out but the last time I threatened to throw the guy under the bus with dad, he slammed my head into the wall. A fight that got my dad’s attention anyway but was blamed on a dispute over the television remote. After my dad secured the lock on my door, he tried other ways to get to me but this time when he came for me, I hit him back, hard. An overflow of red rushed from his nose. I laughed in exasperation. He stopped coming for me, but I kept the door locked.

I stayed steady with my boyfriend. Emotionally and sexually. I grew so comfortable that I found myself explaining my distressing history to him. I expected to be met with sympathy but looked up to discover an expression of horror and disgust. I knew our journey had come to an abrupt halt there. I cried the way one cried after losing a dear friend or a first love. I figured I would be able to confide in with my friends at school the next day. I met with icy silence instead and booted from the lunch table. Other students in school looked at me like I had a disease.

I found that my now ex-boyfriend had shared my secret with his friends, who shared it with their friends and so on. I was a leper with a target on my back. I had to stay off Myspace because girls who were once friends of mine messaged me calling me a whore and made new profiles to harass me from when I had blocked the first ones. I received messages and even a few phone calls to my house telling me that I should kill myself. The only consolation I had would be that I had not disclosed the name of my abuser with my boyfriend. Only that it had been an older family member. Since we lived next door to my aunt, her husband and children, and her brother and were frequently visited by her ex-husband, the father of one of her children and another of my dad’s brothers at the time and we still visited with our mother and her new husband for one night a week, the identity could have been a coin toss.

I had to involve my dad, who then involved the police. Two officers came to the house, one male and one female. I explained what had happened and the officers I confronted about the rape and I lied. I told them I was attacked after school one day, by a man I did not know. A man I could not picture. The false report burned in my throat but if I threw my attacker under the bus he would kill me, right? I mean, it would be easy. I knew even then that he would be released into the custody of my parents, and I would be in twice as much danger when he returned home with them. The complaint ended up being dismissed, but CPS gave us a visit and kept an annoying close watch on us for a couple of months.

A few weeks after things settled down, I walked to a friend's house. March was cold but soothing. Like a forehead kiss from the love of your life when the return home safe in a winter storm. I was off to see one of the only friends I had left. I asked him for a cigarette and when he asked me to come in and chill for bit, I knew I should have said no, but I did not want to be rude. Have you ever heard of revictimization? I sure had not, not at 15. I believed in the “not all men” idea a little too much. I bit my tongue when he pushed me face down into the pillow and yanked down my sweatpants. I tried I turn but he forced me down and when I felt him inside me, I knew it was over. I cried and begged him to stop, but I knew it was useless. Men like that, they like to take. Especially when it is not given to them. “Being sexually assaulted greatly increased the risk of future assaults, with one study purporting that being sexually assaulted once meant a woman was 35 times more likely than others to be revictimized.” (Mohammed, 2015) If I had been given these numbers, I might have stayed home that day. When I made it home, I did not bother to report what had happened. I did not bother to preserve any evidence. I got in the shower and cranked the heat. I sat bare-assed in the porcelain tub and sobbed. I stayed that way for 10 minutes before one of my sisters was pounding on the door. I got to my feet, grabbed a loofa, and scrubbed my skin red. I rubbed my vagina raw and when I got out, I wanted him off me. I slipped into long sleeved pajamas with long pants. I slumped up to my room and laid there like an infant in the center of the bed on top of the blankets. Door locked. I confided into a sister this time after being pegged with questions for an hour. She told my dad, who called the police again. The station was cold and institutional. Perhaps that is a good thing, though? Or maybe not? Do bad guys deserve comfort? I would say that it would depend upon the nature of their crime. Tax evasion? Eh sure, but violent offenders. There is a special place in a figurative Hell for criminals that harm others.

I gave them a name, and he was picked up. But I had washed away the evidence, and now it was his word against mine. The next day, my sister and I started receiving threats from the friend's family. My younger sister and our best friend came bolting into the house, terrified and out of breath.

“This is all your fault.” My sister shouted. “Did you really need a cigarette that bad?” Under threat of physical violence, I chose to withdraw charges. I was told by a female officer on duty that if I made that choice, I would never be able to accuse someone of rape again. I walked out of the station in shame.

I had cut my wrists a few times before. Sometimes I needed to punish myself, other times the pain and blood reminded me that I was alive. In a way, I had come to think of self-mutilation as comforting, therapeutic even. I had never been actively suicidal. I would fantasize about getting taken out in a car accident or a school shooting but, I was not jumping off bridges either. This time though, this time I was ready. I thought I was ready.

There had been more blood than I had thought there would be. My stepdad held my wrist while my mom cried and my sisters screamed. I was stitched up and put on a hold. They transferred me from that hold to Jones Hill where I would spend a week of cozy self-reflection, draw pictures and chat with strangers in group therapy, receive bullshit apologetic phone calls from friends and the ex-boyfriend who spilled the beans about my assault in the first place. I would stop accepting them. I would be told in group therapy that I am not alone. I would return home to be told by my family that I am not alone. I never believed them. I never believed them until I met another person like me. Another woman whose right to love when and how they choose was taken from them, whose innocence and childhood were taken from them. I found it in her, and she found it in me. And I understand I am 1 in 3. I confess I am still angry, a feeling that I continue to work with my current therapist. I am still haunted by nightmares, and I am terrified of phantom eyes.

I have a daughter now. The child will be turning nine this year. I got my first period when I was nine. I felt afraid of ending up with a baby inside of me for the first time when I was nine. I was in fourth grade and I cried. Hysterically. I would lock myself in the bathroom and boil my skin. Naked on the bathtub floor at nine years old. I have open conversations with my daughter, I do not disclose details but, she knows that I have been hurt. I tell her enough to keep her informed. I talk about consent in ways she can comprehend, and I have taught her the proper names for her body parts. Because of my own experiences we have had several conversations about where and what is appropriate behavior and what bad touching can look like. I have explained to her how her body might change over the years.

According to Planned Parenthood, talking with your pre-teen can help make puberty less scary for them. I can imagine that could be true. My parents taught me nothing about sex and used pet names like, “peepee” for our genitals. I wonder sometimes if there could have been anyway, I might have been spared. I can still hear him whispering,

“Tee Cee,” and the creek of my old bedroom door at times. The echoes make me twitch, but I have gotten better over time. But I can still feel the tearing in my crotch, and the tugging on my hair. I make love to my partner, and in the middle of it, I have panic attacks or at the end I scrub myself red the way I did when I had been a child. I still feel the need to scrape that man from my skin twenty years later. The last time I saw my attacker was when he popped in and out of our father’s funeral in 2024. Before that, it had been two years. He had dropped by dad’s house with his emotionally unstable, complacent wife to see the three children that had been removed from their custody thanks to a neglect case and deplorable housing conditions including no gas or electricity. There was no evidence of abuse though, not according to the report.

The girls acted strange when they first arrived; the oldest had selective mutism, and the youngest had been completely feral, as far as eating food directly off the floor. The older two wake screaming from nightmares, sweating, and crying. One caseworker we spoke with asked if our brother had ever gotten counseling for his inappropriate touching with me. We responded that we were not aware that he had been meant to. It had turned out that my other had been ordered by CPS to enroll him into a therapy program to help get his urges under control. Mom had known the whole time. How many other moms choose their sons' reputation over their daughter's safety, I wonder? I have two boys beside my daughter. The pair of them have not even reached the age of three yet but even now, I wonder who my children will be. I wonder who my nieces and nephews will be too. I have risen above my circumstances, but not all manage to do so. My older siblings and their living conditions have not improved over the years.

References:

National Sexual Violence Resource Center (NSVRC). 2025. https://www.nsvcr.org/statitics/

Mohammed, Farahnaz. “The Repetition Compulsion: Why Rape Victims Are More Likely To Be Assaulted Again.” 2015. GirlsGlobe. https://girlsglobe.org/2015/08/04the-repetition-compulsion-why-rape-victims-are-more-likely-to-be-assaulted-again/

Planned Parenthood. “Talking to your Children about Bodies, Relationships, and Sex.” 2025. Https://www.plannedparenthood.org/talking-to-your-children-about-bodies-relationships-and-sex/

Unknown. “Decoding Impulsive Behavior in Teens: Causes, Consequences, and Parental Guidance.” 2025. https://ourmental.health/Impulsivity/decoding-impulsive-behavior-in-teens-causes-consequences-and-parental-guidance/