Why didn’t I tell my mom when I saw her, seconds after six
boys had cornered me in the library, pushed me up against the wall, put their
hands all over me, including on my crotch, and whispered obscenities in my ear?
I was twelve years old—I could talk. Why didn’t I tell my parents about the
ongoing abuse I was experiencing in the neighborhood, about the older boy who
took us up into a tree house, had us all pull our pants down, and then rubbed
his cheeks across each of our behinds? Did I think they wouldn’t believe me?
Why wouldn’t I tell someone about that? Why didn’t I tell them about the creepy
employer who stacked Christmas presents, so he could have me stand on a chair
and reach for them, so he would, he informed me, have to hold me around my
legs? Why didn’t I just say, “Hey, it was really creepy how he put his hand on
mine on the tape while I wrapped packages. And he closed the door and stayed
with me to do the work. I don’t want to work there any more.” He was a friend
of my father’s—why didn’t I tell my dad when he picked me up?
I was never raped. I grew to be about six feet tall by the
time I was 14, and I think that may have helped to deter those who look for
vulnerabilities in women. Although, it may also just be luck—I don’t attribute
any skill or knowledge to myself that prevented it. But I have been assaulted,
on multiple occasions, most of them happening when I was still a child. Most
were the acts of other children, though many involved children significantly
older than I was. And outside of counseling sessions, I have told very few
people. Not even my best friends in life know about these events. Why? People
are asking, a lot lately, why a woman would come forward, years, even decades
after abuse or assault or rape, and accuse a prominent man of doing something
horrendous to her. I’ll tell you this for certain: they do not come forward for
the publicity. They do not come forward for some political agenda. They do not
come forward just to mess with the prominent man’s life, or to gain money or
fame. Those are the acts of a psychopath. It is highly unlikely that women who
show no other signs in their life of being psychopaths would, in this one area
and only in this one instance, have all the traits of one.
There are two things to understand about incidents of assault, particularly sexual assault.
First: they are trauma. Have you ever had a broken bone or a deep cut which
required stitches? These are traumas to the body. Everything shuts down. The
instinct is to fold in, to protect. I can picture my children, who between them
had something like 12 broken bones, in the ER, holding the hurt limb to
themselves, quietly leaning against me as we waited for treatment.
Psychological trauma works the same way—it shuts things down. The instinct is
to fold in, to protect. I may want to get out of the situation, but beyond
that, I am not thinking about much at all. I am not thinking about stopping
this person from doing this again; I am not thinking about justice or
vengeance, either one. I just want to get myself out and to protect the broken
place, the wound that has happened inside of me.
Second: power. Power structures are at work here. Let’s say
there comes a moment of healing, when I might begin to process that I should
tell someone what happened. By then, time has passed. I probably have no proof.
I have no visible harm. It’s my word against his. And he already showed me that
he was willing to hurt me. And he has power over me—that is what enabled him to
do this in the first place: he was stronger, or had more money, or had more
status. Whatever it was, he felt invulnerable—safe in acting out and grabbing
what he wanted. And, as it turns out, he was right. The system is decidedly in
his favor. It is no secret in our society what happens to women or men who step
forward to say that someone more powerful than they are abused that power and
hurt them. The entire system comes down on their head and they are
re-traumatized, forced, not only to live again through the first trauma (which
they had steeled themselves to do in coming forward), but now hit with a new
trauma, the assault on their person, their integrity, their sanity.
It is so much easier just to let it go and to get on with
our lives, which is what most of us do. Deep inside, we believe that we were at
fault in some way—we let it happen. And that seed stays with us, providing yet
another voice which says, “Let’s not talk about that with anyone.” Power’s
favorite tool is the “bad apple.” Anyone who attacks it must be insane. Anyone
in power actually caught with their hand in the cookie jar (and you have to
catch them, in flagrente delicto, or
you just go back to step one, that the person claiming to be a victim is
insane) is just a “bad apple.” The exception, and not the rule. DEFINITELY NOT
the system itself. Power is more than willing to sacrifice the odd member from
the inside in order to protect the system (see Anthony Weiner).
The bad news, for all of us, is that this country was set up
by rich, powerful, white men, for rich, powerful, white men. The sooner
we all recognize the truth of that, the better off we are going to be. The good
news, for all of us, is that those particular rich, powerful, white men wrote
in a universal language. They had an idealism, which they might not have been
able to completely pull off, but which they wrote into our documents. And so
each person among us who is not white reads those documents and applies them to
him or herself. Each woman, who is, in places, completely ignored in the
language of those documents, reads those documents and sees herself. Each
person coming from elsewhere in the world, reads those documents and dreams
that they could apply to him or herself. We believe that equality is out there
for us to claim. We believe that those rights are ours by birth as well.
Power is a bully, and bullies are boringly predictable. They
have no creativity, no tools except whichever one (strength, money, status)
they are used to using to get their way. And they are wildly fragile. The
slightest word throws them into a tizzy, which they vomit onto the entire
population of the system. And there is
only one cure for bullies: bullies have to be fought. I’m not an advocate for
violence, so let me be clear what I mean by the word “fought.” Observably,
fighting a bully goes like this:
Step 1: Call the bully out. Out him. Say, in public, “This
is what he did.” Have whatever proof you can.
Step 2: Keep calling the bully out. Never, ever, ever, ever,
ever, let him get away with doing what he does in secrecy. Bullies love nothing
more than secrecy. “Let’s keep this in-house,” means “I want to be able to get
away with again.”
Step 3: Set up policies, systems, back-ups, transparencies,
guidelines, protocols, and procedures which protect the most vulnerable people
in your system. Anyone can be vulnerable, including many white males. You have
to look at your own system to see who is actually vulnerable. Do the work.
Step 4: Use the goddamn policies. Write people up. Put
things in their file. Fire them. Fire everyone from CEO’s to janitors who will
not work within respectful guidelines.
Step 5: Try not to be naïve. THIS WILL HAPPEN AGAIN. THIS
WILL HAPPEN IN YOUR SYSTEM. MOST LIKELY, THESE KINDS OF ABUSES ARE ALREADY
HAPPENING INSIDE YOUR SYSTEM. Power would like nothing more than for us to
continue, Pollyanna-like, believing that our system doesn’t have
problems like these.
I recognize that I have used a masculine pronoun for bullies
throughout this writing. I know that females can be bullies, too—and,
incidentally, they are no more creative or interesting than male bullies. They
are just as boring, just as short-sighted, and all the steps listed above apply
to them as well. But they tend not to be sexually abusive—it happens, and
should be addressed. But in our systems, men have the power. A small number of
white men have the power. Best to start there. Power always rolls downhill—if
we, as a culture, begin to truly address the power we have given to a very
small number of pasty-faced boys who lucked into money, we will be able to deal
with all the other bullies as we go.
Why didn’t I tell? How could I have told? Why would I have
told? Who would I have told? It never occurred to me to tell anyone. As with
most people who have had traumatizing experiences, I have needed decades of
time to process; that may be the actual way we as human beings deal with them.
What should we do when someone comes forward? Stop worrying that she is a
psychopath, first of all. A psychopath will have a history of pathology. I
don’t mean looking to see if she has ever been treated for depression—of course
she has. She was assaulted and traumatized. Seeking mental health treatment
does not make someone a psychopath. I have sought mental health treatment—I
recommend it for all human beings who have a brain. But a psychopath does not
just suddenly appear on the planet, out of nowhere—it is a false story-line of
power that this could be so. And someone who came forward with a false story in
order to win fame or money is a psychopath. Women who step forward to tell
their stories do so with enormous courage, tremendous thought and fortitude.
Do this. Try believing her. Our system is set up in such a
way that THE MOST LIKELY SCENARIO is that she is telling the truth. He has
every reason to have done this, as he believes himself to be invulnerable (as
the system has taught him that he is); she has no reason to lie. None. There is
no advantage for her to come forward with a lie. Believe her story. Every word.
Give the power, for that moment, to her. Put it in his record: “On this day,
this person informed us that she was sexually assaulted by this man.” In his
record. One other thing that you can absolutely guarantee is that he did not do
this just once. If we begin rewarding people who come forward with stories of
how they were sexually abused—and the only reward they want is to be
believed—then more will do so. If the system supports them, they will do so.
And the stories in his record will add up; the truth will come out.
Another false theory of our culture is that somehow
punishment is what stops people from behaving badly. Observably, this is not
true. The existence of the word “recidivism” should tell us that. What stops
people from behaving badly is stopping them from behaving badly. Being fired
from jobs because you cannot keep from touching people inappropriately will
effectively keep you out of the workplace. Losing status, losing power, because
you use abusive language, embarrass people publicly and take advantage of them
privately will take you out of positions where you can continue your abuse. It
is wrong to believe that we have to get all these men behind bars. Because it
is such an aversive and dire punishment, it is actually what has kept the boys
in power: “You don’t want to take away everything he has worked for just
because of one little indiscretion? He doesn’t deserve to go to jail for that!”
Prison is stupid. It doesn’t work. It never has. It breeds systems of abuse and
bullying and secrecy of its own that only feed the existing power structure. We
all know this, and yet we cannot stop ourselves from the visceral desire to
hurt someone, to take something away from them if they hurt us. That is stupid.
And it doesn’t work.
What works is stopping them. What works is outing them. What
works is refusing to be part of systems of secrecy. What works is setting up
systems which protect the people who are vulnerable instead of protecting the
most powerful person in the system. If you’re the most powerful person in the
system, you deserve some protection, but you are already protected, to a great
degree, by being the most powerful person in the system. It is everyone else
who needs protection. Each of us needs to get our system’s shit together.
Protect our people. Protect ourselves. And stop giving leaders and bosses and
CEO’s and coaches and congressmen and governors and presidents the permission
to do whatever they goddamn please on a daily basis. It is the daily
protections that shut down the long-term ones. Get them in place. Use them.
And when someone summons up the courage to step forward and
tell his or her story of how a person of power abused them, fucking believe
them.
