By Fran
It was my first year of college, and I was sitting in a room on the first floor of one of the all-freshman dorms with a group of friends. I don’t know how we got around to talking about it (although I’m not entirely surprised; I went to a very liberal school where conversations about sex, consent, and assault were ubiquitous), but a friend of mine shared that she had been raped at summer camp when she was in middle school. And it was as if a light switch flipped inside me, only instead of turning a light on, I was overwhelmed by a sort of suffocating darkness that was made up of the gravity of what happened to me those many years ago.
I was sexually assaulted by a camp counselor at age eight, and I have determined that this is, like so many things in life, a double-edged sword. In some ways, sexual violence committed against young children is its own breed of horrifying, because in most cases the child’s age means that their assault has the potential to color their entire consensual sexual life. In other, equally salient ways, I suspect that the fact that I was so young means that my experience has had less of a dramatic effect on my day-to-day life as an adult, since I don’t really remember a time before it happened to me. All of my adult life has been spent as a survivor of sexual violence, so it is simply my norm. Certainly this is not the case for all adults who were once victims of childhood sexual violence, especially those individuals for whom the abuse was ongoing. For me, though, the experience I had is one that I rarely think consciously of anymore, and its impact on my daily thoughts and actions is minimal at most.
This was not always the case, however. Immediately following my assault, I had a strong sense that I could not tell anyone what had happened even though I knew I had not done anything wrong. Who knows where such a strongly ingrained sense of shame comes from, especially for such a young child coming from a pretty sheltered home. Maybe it was because it happened at church camp, and I knew that if one person from my very small church knew, it would quickly become public knowledge. That is truly the only explanation for my shame that I’ve been able to conjure up that makes even a remote amount of sense, but I also feel pretty strongly that my eight-year-old self wouldn’t have been so thoughtful about how information travels in social circles like church congregations. In any case, I quickly turned to the incredibly cliché strategy of just not thinking about it, which worked remarkably well for about 9 years.
Following my flashbulb memory in that freshman dorm room, I immediately had to excuse myself from the room and I went back to my own dorm, where I stared at myself in the mirror for at least twenty minutes. I suddenly remembered every detail of my assault, except for the man’s face. I could remember the physical sensation, the emotional reaction, the mental processes I went through as it was happening, but I could not, for the life of me, envision his face. The whole situation seemed so overplayed – repressed childhood memories coming back to haunt someone as an adult, feeling dirty and used after experiencing sexual violence. I was finally having the “typical” reaction to this sort of thing, but couldn’t even remember what my assailant looked like. To me, this seemed incredibly daunting – being made to feel so small and worthless by this faceless, blurry figure made it seem much more like I had been victimized by something larger than just one person. Instead of being able to direct my negative emotions toward an individual, I was left to grapple with them on a more anonymous level. This resurfacing of my experience played a role in, but did not singlehandedly cause, a number of years of struggle with anxiety and, to a lesser extent, mild depression. I had shown some anxious tendencies as a child and young adult, but it certainly came to be a much more defining quality of my life following my dorm room realization. I somewhat unsuccessfully sought help for these struggles, which are still present but much less salient now.
After many years of what I like to think of as “active mental coping,” I was able to essentially shelve my experience with sexual assault into the back of my mind. There are certain instances that trigger me to be cognizant of it still, with different results, but for the most part, I consider it to be just another event in my personal story. In some ways, this normalcy is a point of pride for me; I know that I have made peace with something that is inherently antithetical to an act of peace. In other ways, I feel some sense of a break in the solidarity with other women who have survived sexual violence, since so many of them have not and may never reach a point where their experience is just another page in their story. However, I can step back and rationalize that the feeling of illegitimacy is completely fabricated in my head. I’ve found so much community with other survivors, and can’t imagine having taken my journey without the help of so many incredibly strong women. I don’t often talk about my assault anymore, but when I do, I am able to do so in a fairly matter-of-fact fashion. I don't think there will ever be a time where it is fully out of my consciousness, but I think this might be the closest it gets.