Why Didn't I Tell?

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.