25. That’s the most primal fear I’ve ever known.
“For years I had an unhealthy obsession with finding the man who raped me to ask him why he’d done it and was it my fault?
I didn’t understand why. Was it because I gave some sort of signal? Did he think I wanted it?
I was 12. I’m in my 30s now.
I regularly skipped school to get out of gym class. Football was just an hour of tripping over myself then getting mocked for it until the next class.
I had a system: Go in for morning registration and sign in as present, go to the first class of the day, then slip out before gym to go ‘to the doctors’ (if anyone spotted me leaving). They didn’t take register in the afternoon so they never missed me. I’d take a book and hide out somewhere till my usual home time.
On this day I’d hidden out in the woods between home and school. I followed a path, found a clearing to settle down, and set up with my book….
I heard someone walking toward me. Assumed it was just someone walking their dog. Got up, jammed my things into my bag, and walked directly away from him further down the path. (I wasn’t afraid of him, I was scared of being found out skipping school.) The path (a dirt animal track) had lots of branches so every time I came to one I went down the more overgrown, muddier path deeper into to woods that I thought someone would be less likely to follow me down. He took the same one every time.
The fifth or sixth time that happened…that’s the most primal fear I’ve ever known.
I broke into a flat run…tried to angle back out of the woods towards. I was quite deep into the woods at that point so was running through brambles and getting smacked in the face by low hanging branches. I could hear him behind me.
In my head the thing I was afraid of was getting in trouble at school. I feel I have to make that clear because of what I did next.
I stopped running. The brambles were tearing at my school trousers. We were poor. I didn’t want to get in trouble for tearing them. I just stopped.
Then he was behind me. Lifted me clean off my feet. Carried me back into the woods.
I’m not typing out the rest. I was 12. I didn’t know anything about any of this. It hurt. I was covered in blood at the end. He made me tell me his name and where I lived. I did. I lived in terror for years that he’d find me and do it again.
His face. This is the thing. I can’t remember what he looked like. Even close to it. So he was everyone. He was my friends’ fathers, one of my teachers, the man from the corner shop, my own father, the man who I thought was looking at me on the bus. It was and am scared of other men even now in my thirties.
A few years ago I got beat up on the way home. A gang of young guys took exception to me and beat the hell out of me. I should be dead by all accounts. I saw the CCTV footage of my head being stamped into the pavement. Part of me wishes that had been the end of it.
I can’t stand physical intimacy. I can’t stand being held. I can’t stand sharing a bed with someone. I can’t have a romantic relationship.
Flashbacks. Out of nowhere. I can see the field out in front when his arm curled around me. My own feet and my arms hanging down over a log. I have to shake my head to get rid of it. It’s there all the time under the surface.
I told my nan, one of my friends (much later in life), a stranger online, and a counselor, but otherwise I can’t talk about it.
When I started this reply, I thought I’d be giving some deep and meaningful insight into this experience. Instead it’s a rambling mess, sorry.”
—itsbeenanhonour
26. I’ve been forcibly removed from ‘all are welcome’ support groups because as a man, I ‘engendered the violence these women are trying to forget.’
“How little support there is for male rape victims. How aggressively violent women will defend their right to erase your experience.
Sometimes both happen at the same time. I’ve been forcibly removed from ‘all are welcome’ support groups because as a man, I ‘engendered the violence these women are trying to forget.’
So you engender the violence I’m trying to forget?
No one listens.
No one cares.
You’re either a liar or a bitch or have something wrong with you.
Psychologists minimize your experience. Family members don’t believe you. Friends try to one-up you.
Male rape is real.
But you’d never think it was unless it happened to you.”
—shdarren
