Potent quotables
It was hard to decide who or what was worse: the perpetrators or the people and institutions that protected them.
Now I knew why so many girls were reluctant to report their attackers and pursue charges. The court system seemed designed to trample us into lifelong silence.
My stomach churned as I recognized my own story in her words.
I learned from Angela that the first person survivors disclose to can have a tremendous impact on their healing process.
I listened intently to Julia Dixon as she described how survivorship and healing is not linear. It goes up and down like a mountain range.
They didn’t seem remotely interested in resolving the case or in addressing the problems they knew too well. They just wanted to make this as painful as possible for me.
These are precisely the kinds of cases that prosecutors need to tackle in order for society to understand that agreeing to kissing is not an invitation to have sex. That victims freeze. That survivors deserve to be believed.
Sex is a part of the school curriculum, whether it’s official or not: jokes, teasing, social media, and real pressures—along with devastatingly criminal games of sexual conquest and predation.
One in four girls has been the victim of sexual assault or sexual abuse by the age of seventeen. No one wants to believe it can happen to them, to their child, sister, mother, aunt, friend. We understand that, and also had that mind-set. But the fact is quite different. It has happened to someone close to you. But they have remained silent, like so many other victims.