To the humanitarian who sexually abused me.
by Anonymous
Photo by Alexander Kovalev for Pexels
TW: Sexual and emotional abuse, PTSD, mention of suicidal thoughts
Hi.
Remember me? You knew me as a 15-year-old girl, back in 2010. I was the one with very blonde hair, a questionable side-fringe and too much blue eyeliner, and you were the one who sexually abused me.
For almost a year, you coerced me into sex acts constantly. I fear that you also filmed me performing a sex act on you without telling me, because I saw your laptop camera light flashing as I was getting dressed. I was too scared to confront you, so I’ll never know what footage you captured, what you did with it, or if it had happened more than once. But soon after I received anonymous messages on social media warning me that you were ‘not safe’, and a ‘bad guy’. I wonder if they are connected. We eventually broke up because of an incident at your house where you tried to force me to have sex with you. You very nearly went through with it but stopped yourself at the last second – I think because of how much I was shaking. I had been saying no continuously. You dumped me a few days later for refusing to give in. You had a new girlfriend within a week, despite claiming that the reason we had to have sex was because of how much you loved me.
You will claim that you did not constantly physically attack me. But this was only because you didn’t need to; you were cleverer than that. You used many different techniques: emotional manipulation, intimidation, plying me with alcohol, and threats of being caught if I didn’t get it over quickly enough (because we were in public or your family were home and could walk in at any second), all to make me submit to acts I had already said no to. Once you had used physical force the very first time, any of these techniques were enough to recreate the same paralysing fear, so that I would freeze, over and over again, and couldn’t attribute it to physical force. So that I blamed it on myself.
You’ll point to my failure to escape sooner as proof that it can’t have been as bad as I’m claiming now. This took a long time for me to understand, even though I lived it. But I’ve worked it out now. You didn’t only assault me. You abused me. You sought me out, said everything that a lonely, naïve teenage girl would want to hear. It was only once I was dependent on your companionship, excessive flattery, praise and declarations of love, that you began to intersperse these with sudden onslaughts of physical intimidation, verbal pressure, and claims that your happiness was dependent on me doing what you wanted. You took the time to get to know me, to figure out what worked. My best friend was in psychiatric hospital, and I had become terrified of seeing other people in pain. You knew this and played on that fear every time you told me that my reluctance to engage in sex acts was upsetting you. And when that didn’t work, you resorted to physical intimidation, or physical force, or alcohol. It was right after these assaults, when I was the most frightened and confused and vulnerable, that you would then be the kindest, the most caring. All of this formed a bewildering pattern that completely trapped me, and you executed your plan with full knowledge of what you were doing. Looking back, I can see that many of the assaults were premeditated. I continued to say no, to fight you off and try to distract you, but it rarely worked. I was utterly out of my depth and that suited you perfectly. That was why you’d chosen me. You wanted someone you could control and use and have power over, not someone you could respect and love and be attracted to.
You’ll claim that I must be lying, because I haven’t come forward before. How could I have kept something so awful to myself for all of these years? This is complicated. I didn’t tell my family or friends when it was happening, because after the very first assault, I was living in a complete blur. I now know that I was dissociating every time you coerced me, which meant that parts of my brain shut down and the memories weren’t recorded normally. I remembered the acts we were engaging in, but the memories of how I felt – frightened, disgusted, excruciatingly exposed – were all stored in my subconscious. This meant that I lived in a perpetual state of fear, but didn’t understand why, and had no words to express what was happening to me.
And then, I escaped.
—————
It was ten years before I allowed myself to think about you again. By this point, I was living on the other side of the world and was as safe from you as I could possibly be. But then my drink was spiked on a night out. As I processed what had happened, I was forced to confront the fear I had felt around men for so many years. The memories rose to the surface because I was finally safe enough to acknowledge their true horror and process them properly.
I was bewildered; it turns out traumatic memories aren’t experienced in neat, chronological order. Even individual memories were fragmented, and at first, the emotions and images and bodily sensations that were erupting inside me didn’t match up. For the first few months, it was chaos; I would remember being assaulted, and then remember you telling me how much you loved me. I would remember confiding in you or making you laugh. How was I going to make sense of this mess? If you were that evil, why could I remember you being kind to me? Why had you acted like a friend? Why didn’t I walk away if I was as frightened and disgusted then as I was now? I could see that some of the memories were clearly assault, but what about the ones where you didn’t need to resort to physical force? Where I gave in before it came to that?
I needed to be sure what this was before I told anyone, so I secretly took on extra jobs to fund my own therapy. I learned that I was experiencing flashbacks, and I would have to work out for myself what they were telling me. Can you imagine how terrified I was, to realise that more were coming, that I would have to relive each one in order to understand them? For the first few months, flashbacks came a couple of times a day, and I would tremor and convulse with fear for up to an hour at a time. I wailed like a baby, and shook like an animal chased almost to death by a predator. I had no idea that humans could experience this much pain.
But sitting with the memories worked. They settled into chronological order, and I could see the pattern of abuse that you constructed, how you had timed your kindness and used my fear to manipulate me. I remembered which emotions went with which actions - how I would try to make you laugh to appease you, to distract you, to convince myself I wasn’t frightened. I read up on the psychology of trauma and realised I’d been experiencing the ‘4 Fs’: fight, flight, freeze and fawn, automatic neurological responses that occur when a person is overwhelmed with fear, to ensure their survival. I learned that the times when I ‘froze’, or gave in to appease you, were beyond my control, and were not my fault. I learned that this is actually how assault works in the overwhelming majority of cases; that so often men get away with it by using our bodies’ trauma responses to render us paralysed and defenceless, without actually needing to physically restrain us the entire time.
I also learned how hard it is to hold abusers accountable for what they have done. I’m not talking about finding justice through the legal system – don’t even get me started on that shitshow. I’m talking about how hard I found it to hold you accountable even within my own mind. Aside from the time, effort and courage it took for me to piece my memories together, I learned I was being held back by inbuilt psychological barriers that made me want to believe this was my fault. It is very common to subconsciously hope that we are to blame, because the inference is then that we could have stopped it, so we’ll be able to stop it next time. Self-blame, and the self-hatred it breeds, become a protective blanket insulating us from the horror that people like you exist.
This is one of the cruellest mind tricks that people who experience abuse must work through, and society makes it even harder. I wish everybody was taught the established scientific facts about trauma responses, proven by decades of research – so that defence lawyers aren’t allowed to ignore them, and juries don’t fall for it if they do. A lawyer wouldn’t stand up in court and argue that a victim is at fault because they didn’t overcome their ‘freeze’ or ‘fawn’ response to stop somebody from mugging them, or stabbing them, because they didn’t physically fight them off. But they do it for sexual violence every day. This doesn’t only harm the people who are brave enough to seek justice through the legal system, it harms all of us. I grew up exposed to the same victim blaming shit as everybody else, and I absorbed it. This compounded my psychological torture as I tried to work out who was to blame – and it is why our society urgently needs to reform its understanding of abuse. It terrifies me that society hasn’t caught up – because I only started to heal when I was finally able to accept what had happened, and I know from speaking to friends that sexual violence is endemic in the UK.
—————
So, it felt like the odds were stacked against me. You probably thought you got away with this, that I would never work out what you had done, never confront or report you. You were wrong.
You see, I also began to remember how I felt before you ever laid your hands on me, and realised your abuse had harmed me beyond recognition. Though I hadn’t been thinking about you, the excruciating sense of exposure, the persistent feelings of shame, the fear of not having control over my own body, never left. Desperate to avoid looking at the memories that would explain these feelings, I had presumed they were all caused by how disgusting and ugly I must be. I’d relied on humour and friendships to lift my mood, so on the outside, I seemed happy. But I had secretly fallen into a 10-year period of disordered eating, dysmorphia around my own face, crippling self-hatred – none of which I suffered before I knew you, and all of which evaporated when I finally went to therapy and healed from this trauma. I had not seen you for a decade, but you continued to abuse me from afar.
I’m grateful to understand all of this now, because it has allowed me to heal. But piecing it together and accepting it was gruelling; I was focusing all my energy, intellect and money on understanding the psychology of trauma, on grieving, on learning how to deal with flashbacks. When you’re living through this much pain and fear, suicidal thoughts become a comforting fantasy. There were points when I was dangerously close. I didn’t have any capacity left to torture myself wondering what had become of you, let alone confront you.
It took two years, but I crawled almost entirely out of the gutter you left me in. I processed the memories properly, which meant that the actions, feelings and emotions were matched up. My brain could then file them with my other memories – and it understood that they were in the past. As a result, they weren’t erupting constantly anymore; I rarely experienced flashbacks, nightmares, or hypervigilance, and I no longer saw your face mapped onto strangers. Work became easier; I stopped smelling you and tasting you randomly as I was trying to give presentations to my colleagues, and was no longer triggered by my laptop camera light flashing when I was on Zoom. The song you played as you tried to force me to have sex with you stopped playing in my head 24/7. I could still revisit the memories when I chose to, but you didn’t haunt me. I had accepted that this was not my fault, which gave me permission to grieve for what I had lost. This was horrifically painful, but it gave me something in return; I rediscovered the self-compassion that you stole from me. Of course, this wasn’t linear. It chaotically flicked on and off for about a year, but eventually it faded altogether and life became easier than it had been for a decade. I stopped bullying myself for being disgusting, ugly, and unlovable. I felt relaxed around food, I exercised because I enjoyed it, I rarely thought about my weight, I could see my own beauty, and I found a healthy relationship.
This was enough for a while, until the gratitude at getting my life back morphed into a fury that it had ever been stolen from me in the first place. I found that the more impacts I undid, and the happier I became, the more I realised what you had stolen from me for all these years. And then I came to the great plot twist: over the past year I had confided in friends, and one came across you by sheer chance. She informed me that you are now working as a humanitarian. Knowing that you have chosen a sector where you are always around vulnerable women, which is notorious for abuses of power and impunity for sexual offences, and where you are masquerading as someone with moral authority, almost killed me.
—————
Suddenly, it wasn’t enough to only work on healing myself. I was forced to start thinking about you, what kind of person you had become, who else you may have harmed, whether I could have stopped you if I’d understood all of this sooner. I wondered if any other offences you had committed were therefore my fault. And now I did understand it, surely I had to come forward? Again, I considered the legal system, believing it was my duty as a citizen to go on a public clean-up mission to ensure that you couldn’t hurt anybody else. But this would be futile. You cannot get a conviction unless you have proof beyond doubt – what evidence did they expect me to collect, other than my word? It wasn’t me that was filming us, was it? I was tortured again, until I realised I could never fairly be assigned responsibility for a problem that was not in my capacity to fix because of faults in the system that was supposed to help me.
But even if I couldn’t save other women from you, I still needed accountability for myself. I couldn’t live in a world where men like you don’t face consequences for what they have done. I felt worthless, that I didn’t matter. As I tried to make peace with this final injustice, my PTSD symptoms resurged. I decided I couldn’t do this again; it was the final push that I needed to turn my pain into the rage that is now fuelling me to confront you. So read carefully, this is going to be good.
Remember the inbuilt psychological defences that had convinced me this was all my fault? I’ve just spent two years deconstructing every single one. I don’t need the external validation of a jury of my peers to convict you, because I have already found you guilty. And don’t worry, your trial was more than fair. I did not rush to this conclusion because I enjoy making this accusation (does any woman?). Nobody wanted to deny this as much as me. So it is with great sadness that I finally accept the true horror of what you did.
Here we go:
Your behaviour was vile, pathetic, disgusting.
You do not get to be exonerated because of the passage of time, or because you were younger then than you are now. You were old enough to understand what you were doing. I said no, very clearly, over and over again. You knew how frightened and disgusted I was, you even acknowledged it on a few occasions. Do you remember when I had completely frozen and left my body, and I couldn’t come back round afterwards? We were on the sofa in the smaller lounge at the front of the house. You had pushed me into something that I had repeatedly said no to, over many weeks. I just lay there not moving or speaking. When you were finished, you said: ‘I’m sorry bubs, that one was too far, you weren’t even there’. You grew more and more panicked when I didn’t snap out of it. This confused me when I looked back at my memories; had I got this all wrong? Did this isolated admission of guilt mean you had not realised that I had been frozen all of the previous times? But I can see now what was happening. You apologised repeatedly, dragged me into an upright position, made me down a sugary drink, and told me I should go home because I wasn’t feeling well. Your mother arrived back from work seconds before I left. You weren’t worrying about my welfare, or feeling guilty; you were terrified that if I didn’t perk up soon, your mother would get home and find me in that state. You knew what you’d done, and continued to do it over the subsequent months.
That you knew what you were doing was possibly the hardest thing for me to accept. It makes me feel indescribably violated and disgusted and inferior. But when I look at the whole relationship now, as someone with the distance and safety to accept it for what it was rather than someone who is living it, terrified and subconsciously blocking it out in order to get through it, I know exactly what you were doing.
You do not get to be exonerated because this was ‘a different time’, because as a society we spoke less about consent, because rape culture and toxic masculinity were challenged less often than they are now, because you may have been exposed to degrading pornographic videos on the internet like many teenagers were at that time. None of my friends’ boyfriends at the time behaved this way, including those who talked about pornography and used explicit language in the way that ‘boys being boys’ do. Male friends I have spoken to are horrified at what you did. It was not standard behaviour from a less ‘woke’ time or a less self-controlled phase in the male life cycle. Most people are repulsed at the thought of sexual activity with someone who does not want to do it. But you were different. You loved the power it gave you.
You do not get to be exonerated because you now work in a sector that helps people, or because of the moral superiority that you think you derive from obnoxiously spewing out left-wing political views (I presume you still do this?). I was shocked to discover your social media post in which you virtue-signalled all about your passion for consent. A celebrity was in the news after being accused of rape, and you wrote that ‘it is vital for all women who report sexual violence to always be believed, no matter who is being accused’. Can you imagine how it felt, to read those words from the man who had attempted to force me to have sex with him? From the man whose hands I can still feel inside me when I am triggered? I find it hard to believe that you have gone on some miraculous journey in that time. But even if you have, and you now know that what you did was wrong, your failure to acknowledge it only makes your attempts to get social currency from this newfound respect for consent all the more pathetic. I won’t sit quietly and allow you to convince everybody that you are a ‘good’ person. You can’t pretend it didn’t happen or that it isn’t part of your character record, and you certainly can’t pretend to be a champion of women’s rights. Given the side of you that I know, I suspect that your chosen profession and public declarations of support for women’s bodily autonomy are actually more to do with your ego than genuine morality. I reckon you’re just as pathetic now as you always have been.
You knew what you were doing, you did it repeatedly, and you enjoyed it. I have no idea what causes this kind of behaviour, and I desperately hope that you have grown out of it, but even if you have changed you must still face up to what you did to me. I will not minimise what I have endured by writing it off as collateral damage that you wrought during some journey of personal growth. I am worth more than that.
—————
Whether or not you will find the courage to reckon with what you did is out of my control. But I am not writing this to fix you; I am writing this for my 15-year-old self who needs somebody to stand up for her. In fact, I want to make one thing clear: I am not requesting, nor will I entertain, an apology. If you genuinely feel remorse, turn yourself into the police. Admit to everyone what you have done. Face the consequences. But keep me out of it. You do not get to come to me for absolution or forgiveness, to expect me to make you feel better. The person I knew is not worthy of that. I have no idea if it’s possible for you to redeem your soul, but you’ll have to work that out on your own. I have found peace and empowerment within myself. And if you’re tempted to reply with an attack on my credibility? I suggest you consider the strength of the person you’d be going up against.
I’ll explain how I got to this point, so that you don’t underestimate me like you used to. Although I have endured a lot of pain, I have ensured that my life has not all been miserable. I have fantastic friendships, a family I love fiercely, and I find the humour in every situation. I have been in love. My job is well paid. I have travelled and lived abroad and had experiences for which I’m truly grateful. As much as I have seen the worst of humanity in you, I have seen the best of humanity in the people that have helped me to recover from what you did. I love that my life feels like a journey, that I have a story to tell. I love the strength I have found within myself, and all of the lessons I have learned along the way. What you did changed me forever, but I made sure that this was not only in negative ways. I have drawn on the pain you subjected me to, and the knowledge of psychology that you forced me to develop, to help friends who have been through sexual violence, disordered eating, body image issues, grief, trauma, loneliness. You name it, you forced me into it, and I’ve been there to help my friends with it. I have felt incredible pride, connection and love within these friendships. Telling my parents about what you did to their daughter and seeing their heartbreak was the most painful moment of my entire life, but I am profoundly grateful to see how proud they are of me for how I have healed from this, to see how supportive and understanding they have been, and for how close we have grown after sharing this level of vulnerability. And every part of myself that I have had to claw back - my sense of self, hope, confidence, creativity, dignity, sexuality, vulnerability – are now so precious to me that I know I will never lose them again.
Before I could afford therapy and process the rage I felt, my only option had been to turn it into drive. With this inside me I didn’t only ‘cope’, or ‘survive’. I thrived. I built a career in preventing humanitarian crises within the United Nations. I was working at their headquarters and co-authoring their flagship reports by the age of 23. And now, since the great humanitarian plot twist, I plan to specialise in the prevention of sexual violence in humanitarian crises. I already have plans for the research and the reform that needs to happen. Oh, and you’re going to have to get used to reading my words, because I’m going to keep writing. It was the words of other women, who have gone before me on this journey, that caught me in my darkest hour and dragged me towards my own finish line. And now I’m ready to join them.
I am educated and articulate and I have a purpose in life. I have found my voice and I’m using it.
So, while I cannot greet you after all of these years with any forgiveness, it is not because I am filled with hatred or resentment or regret. In fact, I greet you today with a strange kind of sanctimonious gratitude. I’ll never know whether this is in spite of your abuse, or maybe even partly because of how I healed from it, but I now stand here incredibly proud of who I have become and what I have achieved and equally excited for what I am going to do next. Of course, I will always be impacted by what you have done. I am told that recovery from this kind of trauma is lifelong, as various life events can bring new triggers and waves of grief. But I know how to handle this now. I will always allow myself to grieve when it is needed, but I will also embrace the self-compassion and rage that this gives me, and I will use these gifts to create more empathy, connection, purpose, social change, strength and gratitude. I used to worry that if I told people my story, they would only feel sorry for me. Now I know that they should feel in awe of me.
—————
Before I go, I should confess that I didn’t always have this perspective. When I was in the depths of my PTSD symptoms and my grief after the great plot twist, I had no choice but to take back my power over you, or my suicidal thoughts were going to overpower my will to survive. I wasn’t ready to write to you, and even looking at photos of your face still made me vomit. But I remembered the one occasion where you had been scared. You were scared when you thought your mother would walk in and discover what you had done.
So, I told her.
It worked. My PTSD symptoms evaporated overnight, because I was no longer scared of you. I had come back 12 years later, and won.
I told your mother as gently as I could, and I have huge respect for how she reacted. She didn’t say much, but she didn’t defend you, she didn’t deny it, and she expressed hope that I would heal. I think she was only able to find this compassion towards me, despite the pain she must have been in, because she knew I was telling the truth.
I suppose I have you to thank for that? After all, it was you who so famously said that women who report sexual violence should always be believed, no matter who is being accused.
The author of this letter is begrudgingly remaining anonymous for her own safety. However, if it has resonated with you, she would love to hear from you. When you are ready, publish your own letter.
The following material has helped the author:
Journey Through Trauma by Gretchen Schmelzer
Hunger by Roxane Gay
Then and Now: 25 years of sexual exploitation and abuse by Jessica Alexander and Hannah Stoddard
If you have been affected by the issues explored in this piece, contact Rape Crisis or your local sexual abuse support services - you do not need to suffer alone, including if you are unsure whether what happened to you 'counts' as assault.