18, the age that everyone longs for.
18, the age of legally drinking. (UK)
18, the age my life changed for ever.
Not long before my 18th birthday, I called off my very on, off and on again relationship, determined to mean it for once. I even started dated the sweetest person I’d ever met, let’s call him Dan*. So a week after my 18th, me and some friends go out, including dan* and also adam* a friend of the family who I had known since we were kids. All night Adam* had been hovering around me despite me being close with Dan* since we’d left my house. To the point where at one time I went to the toilet and he kept hold of my hand, in a drunken state I’d seen it as innocent, looking after me even, I even confided in him that I was going to tell Dan* to go home, not come back to my house with my friends, to avoid doing anything which I’d regret. After a night of shots, pints of cider and spirits with mixers, well into the early hours of the morning when I decided I was ready to crawl into bed, retire from adulthood and sleep for the next 24 hours. So we all split into different taxis, Dan* in one with my friends that were headed back to their own houses and another six of us, including Adam* heading back to my house, where my brother was staying with my niece and nephew. My friends immediately put me to bed and left, all except for Adam*, it wasn’t long before he tried to make a move in which I straight out rejected, he said he was going to the toilet and I used this as my way to get some sleep, thinking maybe he wouldn’t come back.
But that’s when I passed out. And when I woke up my apparent family “friend” was on top of me, he was inside me. My first reaction was to panic, cry and say no, I don’t want this. He was clearly taken by surprise by my reaction as he jumped out the bed, pulled his jeans on all while swearing under his breath. I got up crying, not knowing what to do. I was in my own house. My own bedroom. With my brother downstairs. My friends in different bedrooms across the hall. I went straight to my brother crying and he instantly knew what had happened but had me explain it and the first words out his mouth were “that’s sexual assault, you’ve been raped.” And he hugged me while I cried. He said he’d gone upset to find Adam* asleep in another bedroom, and chose to keep it that way for my neice and nephews sake and made me stay downstairs for the night. The next day more than one of my friends tried to ask me what happened because one heard me crying, another two said Adam* had a smug look on his face all morning.
This is something I never reported, I told my mum in my own time, I swore my brother to secrecy but I was falling apart. Apparently Adam’s* family were all going on saying that we had slept together (my younger brother was and is dating Adam’s* sister.) and that’s when I started questioning myself, had I slept with him? I couldn’t get sexually assaulted in my own home could I? Surely not. There were the little things that bothered me, Adam* had a girlfriend, I was dating Dan*, I had sworn I didn’t want to make any mistakes after not long getting out of a relationship. Yet it still happened.
Two years later, after seeing a therapist, being on and off anti depressants, not being able to celebrate my own birthday without flashbacks. But I’ve finally realised I was a victim, I am. And fuck calling it sexual assault. Two years ago, 5 days after my 18th birthday I was raped, by a family friend, someone who had a girlfriend, someone who wasn’t even drunk that night, yet took advantage of me when I was drunk to the point of blacking out. I won’t be a victim forever, not in my own mind anyway, in time the mental scars will heal. I’m a survivor both mentally and physically. And just because you’re drunk or you get taken advantage of in your own home or by a friend, it doesn’t mean you are at fault or you are not a victim. It’s all about coming to terms and calling it for was it is, rape. So many women and men don’t report rape because of feeling like they won’t be believed or that it’s their fault, my one regret is not that I drank too much and haven’t drank since, or that maybe I didn’t say no as much as I could have before passing out. It’s that I never made it more known when I should have.
Anonymous