No Pity. No Shame. No Silence.
Aug. 3rd, 2004 08:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
buggeryThis wasn't the best day for me to come home and find links to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
misia's No Pity. No Shame. No Silence. all over my friends list. I had a long day of training for my new volunteer job, exhilarating before lunch, challenging (read: frustrating to the point of driving me near tears) after, all sandwiched between two 90-minute-each-way commutes.
But is there really any good time for it, or any bad time? Sexual violence happens all the time. Google tells me that estimates range from "sexual assault takes place every 45 seconds" to "one sexual assault every 127 seconds--or, in round numbers, one every two minutes." Maybe survivors' visibility should happen all the time, too.
Hanne wrote,
I wondered for a moment what it would look like if just for one day, everyone who had survived sexual violence were visible as a survivor, if we could actually see the extent of it, if we could all know just how very not-alone we are. I wondered how angry and sad it would make me to know. I wondered how much power there might be in the truth.
I wonder what it would be like if we were visible all the time. There would be a lot fewer people complaining about inflated statistics, I'd imagine. And maybe less stigma, if we're as close to a simple majority as it often feels like. I've been in plenty of those social situations when you look around and realise that your group well exceeds that much-bandied-about 1-in-4 statistic.
(The version of that I'm most familiar with, by the way, is actually that one in four women will have been sexually assaulted by age eighteen, and one in seven men, though the latter figure is much more problematic due to non-reporting and ignored reporting. I haven't seen any comparable attempts to track assaults on genderqueer kids.)
I'm not up to going into the details of my history tonight, nor even sure whether that's wise. I'll say that I don't know how violent the first assault on me was because it happened when I was three or four and I have almost no memory of it; I was molested again by older boys when I was seven, eight and ten, and by two adults when I was thirteen. I didn't report any of the abuse until years after the fact, when I told anyone at all.
I know better now.
I'm Jack. I'm a survivor of sexual violence.
No Pity. No Shame. No Silence.
misia's No Pity. No Shame. No Silence. all over my friends list. I had a long day of training for my new volunteer job, exhilarating before lunch, challenging (read: frustrating to the point of driving me near tears) after, all sandwiched between two 90-minute-each-way commutes.But is there really any good time for it, or any bad time? Sexual violence happens all the time. Google tells me that estimates range from "sexual assault takes place every 45 seconds" to "one sexual assault every 127 seconds--or, in round numbers, one every two minutes." Maybe survivors' visibility should happen all the time, too.
Hanne wrote,
I wondered for a moment what it would look like if just for one day, everyone who had survived sexual violence were visible as a survivor, if we could actually see the extent of it, if we could all know just how very not-alone we are. I wondered how angry and sad it would make me to know. I wondered how much power there might be in the truth.
I wonder what it would be like if we were visible all the time. There would be a lot fewer people complaining about inflated statistics, I'd imagine. And maybe less stigma, if we're as close to a simple majority as it often feels like. I've been in plenty of those social situations when you look around and realise that your group well exceeds that much-bandied-about 1-in-4 statistic.
(The version of that I'm most familiar with, by the way, is actually that one in four women will have been sexually assaulted by age eighteen, and one in seven men, though the latter figure is much more problematic due to non-reporting and ignored reporting. I haven't seen any comparable attempts to track assaults on genderqueer kids.)
I'm not up to going into the details of my history tonight, nor even sure whether that's wise. I'll say that I don't know how violent the first assault on me was because it happened when I was three or four and I have almost no memory of it; I was molested again by older boys when I was seven, eight and ten, and by two adults when I was thirteen. I didn't report any of the abuse until years after the fact, when I told anyone at all.
I know better now.
No Pity. No Shame. No Silence.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-08-03 06:34 pm (UTC)I'm T. I'm a survivor of sexual violence. No pity, no shame, no silence.
I wonder what it would be like if we were visible all the time. There would be a lot fewer people complated about inflated statistics, I'd imagine. And maybe less stigma, if we're as close to a simple majority as it often feels like. I've been in plenty of those social situations when you look around and realise that your group well exceeds that much-bandied-about 1-in-4 statistic.
When I was young, before I was assaulted, I went to a Take Back the Night rally with an older cousin who was also a survivor of sexual assault. And seeing everybody there, with their armbands and their ribbons, it made me *so angry* and so confused that there were *this* many people, even in my small city, who are victims, because that means that there are this many, or *more*, people who are terrible enough to inflict this abuse. And I was confused, and angry, and so very young. And then I grew up.
Thank you again.