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Text/Haiyan Wang
This article was published in the "Sanlian Life Weekly" No. 37, 2017, the original title is "The Hidden Alliance of the Injured", it is strictly forbidden to reprint it privately, and infringement must be investigated
From the moment I began to realize that I could not be the only one who had been sexually assaulted, I seemed to have some kind of special perspective, and gradually discovered that there were 5 children who had been seriously sexually assaulted around me alone, which could almost constitute a complete sample of victim ecological groups. Among those friends I thought were as unsure as I was, those who had been hurt in childhood were everywhere. They are just like me, never forgetting but always silent.
Dictation / Ye Zi Reporter / Wang Haiyan
<h1 class= "pgc-h-center-line" > the occurrence and end of sexual assault</h1>
I was struck by lightning, and before I was in junior high school, I always saw it this way, I mean sexual assault, but I didn't know the word at the time. I probably knew what rape meant, but even in the face of myself in my heart, I couldn't use such sharp words. "Struck by lightning" is one of the few words in my cognition that can be used to refer to this matter, and the two have a lot in common, such as the same death, the same probability is small, and the same with some kind of major moral instruction.
In fact, my memory is more warm and vague, I only remember when I was about 7 years old, the second grade of primary school, the seasons have been relatively blurred, maybe summer, it seems to last until the autumn, but how long it lasts, in fact, I really don't remember, the memory is not left in a logical form, but a clear scene picture.
One of them was my cousin. I grew up in the countryside in the northeast of Chongqing, my father's brothers and sisters totaled 6 people, the distance between the two families after starting a family is not more than 1 kilometer, is a very typical rural big family, I am the only little girl in the big family, there is a large number of cousins, they always compete to take me out to play.
One of my cousins, who was about 4 years older than me, was particularly kind to me, and my mother described it to me when I grew up, "If you have good food at home, you will come and carry me to his house." But she probably wouldn't have known in her life, and then this cousin carried me to the bed on the second floor of his house. He was already in junior high school, studying in town, and only came home on weekends, and I was still an ignorant idiot, and I had to follow the instructions of my adults and listen to my brother.
And more than once, I later recalled that this thing should have stopped at any time, if I had shouted to stop. But the truth was that I obediently followed his instructions, and I took off my pants myself, which seemed strange to me at the time, but my body was really unharmed.
In fact, during the same time, my neighbor, a unemployed young man in his 20s, frequently took me to bed with "huge money", which was about 5 corners and 1 yuan. At that time, I did not lack pocket money, my mother was the kind of pregnant who went to the county to take a prenatal education class, a unique rural mother, even if she went out to work later, in the money sent back, there was also pocket money specially given to me, which was completely enough for me to play in the children of the same age, and she has always been vigilant for me and my brother to "see small money and open eyes".
But the neighbor's invitation carried a subtle excitement. For example, once I was at his house with another little girl, and the little girl also wanted a "chance", he said almost with a contemptuous attitude: "You? "Then he blew the little girl away." The little girl's flower skirt was not as beautiful as mine, usually dragging her nose, dirty, even among children, it was not welcome, watching her "sadly" go, I felt a certain vanity that seemed to enter the adult world.
Things quickly went out of control, and sometimes there were other people in his family, and he took me to the semi-basement of his house full of firewood, broken cotton wool, and spider webs. The basement was by the road and against the field, and usually lived a mental patient who would swing around. From this basement onwards, I felt great humiliation, but I still didn't seem to have tried to shout stop. I probably always knew it wasn't good, but I let it develop. Maybe then I would have been afraid that he would be angry, and I had been praised from an early age as a model child who was well-behaved and obedient.
Things stopped more casually. That time, because my aunt was hoeing the floor outside the basement, I heard her cheerfully greeting people, her hoe buckled into the dry dirt and made a rhythmic "rubbing" sound. The voice I recall now, and it is still very clear, as if it were right next to my ear. This made me suddenly very uncomfortable and panicked, and for the first time I resisted fiercely, of course I was beaten, not punched in the face, punched in the stomach and arms, and also pinched in the neck, I was afraid that my aunt would hear it, and the pain was so painful that my teeth were about to bite off and did not squeak. A confrontation with a mouth sealed.
It was the first time I had suffered a more severe physical injury, but the real thing was that I had to sort out my clothes and hair in the inferior part of the nest and walk out laughing. I was a child with very strong self-esteem since I was a child, and this humiliation completely broke through my bottom line, and almost suddenly I was enlightened and had an epiphany that I had encountered an extremely serious bad thing, far more important than when I had fallen into a dung pit and almost drowned, failed to get the first place in the exam, and gambled with my mother to pretend to drink pesticides.
I vividly remember the time I came out of the basement and came home, my grandmother was washing clothes at the door, and my brother, who was two years younger than me, saw me and immediately complained, "My sister has been playing with that ×× lately and doesn't take me." I glared at him with great horror, and then at my grandmother with the same look. I don't know if Grandma saw what was going on, or if she just warned me in a sparse and ordinary way, I couldn't confirm it with her, and she didn't ask anything. That look became a vast and silent end.
I haven't spoken a word to the man and my cousin again, until now.
Silence is the only "sex education" that many children understand, but it does not allow them to avoid being hurt again
< h1 class="pgc-h-center-line" > a long silence</h1>
Like most girls who have had similar experiences, before junior high school, I always believed that only I had encountered such a bad thing. It's really too bad, isn't it?
In the upper grades of elementary school, about once or twice, I heard my grandmother and the neighbors talk about strange things, such as a girl who was spoiled in a rape field, and they used the word "waste", like the crop seedlings were eaten by wild animals, and they had to replant a stubble. Of course, they thought that the beasts were bad, and there was nothing wrong with the crop seedlings, but in the end, such crop seedlings were ruined. What a shame.
They are all kind of kind and simple, honest and honest rural women, so when talking about these things, there is always a sense of sneaking, and then when I approach, I suddenly stop and bluntly pull on topics like "what did you eat this morning?" But in fact, they don't lie at all, they don't know, like all children, I can fully grasp what they really want to express, even if they rarely talk about it, even if they want to stop talking, I can understand the fleeting expressions on their faces, and I clearly see three words along the lines of their expressions - "The sky is falling".
So when I first went to junior high school, when some little boys wrote me love letters, what I felt was not the vanity and shyness of the girls, but a huge despair, feeling that I was not worthy of any of them. In fact, at that time, I was not long disabled (joking), the popularity was good, and the results were almost always the first place, but I just felt that the huge secret was corrupting me, and I had rotted. When I hear the word, I will sit silently in my chair.
Then in the third grade of junior high school, one day, one of my best friends suddenly dragged me out of the study room, hugged me and cried bitterly. At that time, most of our class were left-behind children, but this friend was not, her father was a township cadre, she lived at home, if it was too late after study, she would not go home, but go to sleep in the dormitory of her father's office building next to her house, and some of her male friends often haunted the building. She told me: "A buddy who was originally very good, usually played together, that day played too late, as a result, he pulled the light, and there was an accident." ”
I was very shocked, she was a very fierce girl, wearing a cool sports suit, hair as long as the boys, but also play with the boys, at any time dare to slap people, simply a kind of Chinese pastoral youth gangster boss temperament, because it seems to be disobedient, parents and teachers have a headache for her. On the surface, she and I are the complete opposite of the girl, but she was actually raped, and she was equally overwhelmed, the same collapse to the point of crying, the same feeling that she was finished. I suddenly realized that she was not a teenage gang boss at all, she was still just a little girl.
And at that time she was still very close to the worry, she was afraid that she was pregnant. None of us have systematic knowledge of pregnancy, only vaguely aware of the causes and consequences of pregnancy. We were both frightened, of course, and apart from crying and waiting in horror, we had no idea of any solution at all, and could not do anything about it. But we all knew to each other tacitly that we couldn't tell anyone about it for help. Luckily, she wasn't pregnant and the secret wasn't revealed. The two of us were still good friends, and we never talked about it again.
But hiding secrets doesn't mean disappearing. After high school, this secret kept fermenting in my heart. In my sophomore year of high school, my table mate gave me a non-mainstream song by Wu Hongfei that described the story of a girl who committed suicide after being raped, and I immediately collapsed after listening to it. The symptom is not to speak, not to say a word for several days in a row.
I was a section representative at the time, and when I went to the classroom office to collect the homework book, I didn't shout "report", but the teachers did not find anything abnormal, only my classmates felt inexplicable, did not know what was wrong with me, and tried to tease me. In fact, I am usually a very noisy girl, described as "laughing the building is going to collapse", but in those days I could not say a word, as if as soon as I opened my mouth, the secret would automatically spew out, and I would seal my mouth like tape.
Later, I read a novel by the Norwegian writer Nils Frederick Dahl, "On the Way to a Friend's House", which describes a little boy whose mouth is sealed after being sexually assaulted. So I found that children all over the world, like the same, knew how to be absolutely silent about this truth.
But it's a very difficult thing to take on a secret that's still fermenting, so I wrote this secret into my diary, and it still got into trouble. At that time, I had a very good friend who had been in elementary school, attended another high school in the county, came to see me on the weekend, I was not in the dormitory, she just flipped through my diary in my seat, and then opened it and looked at it, and when I returned to the dormitory, she had already left.
I looked at the passive diary, immediately went crazy, skipped class and cried bitterly in the dormitory, forcing another good friend to carry the person in front of me in the middle of the night, apologizing to me, and swearing that she didn't see anything. In fact, I later found out that even if she saw the diary, she didn't even get the basic information of 5 W's except to know that something very bad had happened to me. Because I felt so ashamed, I couldn't use normal words to describe this matter clearly, just a bunch of lyricism. So I suspect she doesn't really know what it is, but I can't confirm and explain it to her, right?
This time, because the mood was too abnormal, it also alarmed my parents who had not been around for many years, they seemed to be vaguely aware of something, and desperately pressed me on the phone to ask me if I was bullied by anyone when I was a child, I was already on the border of collapse, but in the end I still held the line of defense and did not say anything. For me at that time, it was a war, keeping secrets, losing eight hundred, unable to hold, and losing eight thousand on both sides.
But after that, I did realize that I needed to talk about it, and the secret itself was part of the burning heart.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-center-line" > similarities in the population</h1>
At that time, I also occasionally went online, but I did not think of talking about it online, I did not believe that strangers could bring comfort, and I did not trust the secrecy of the Internet. Until then, I still think that childhood sexual assault is a very small thing that everyone looks very normal.
Within two days of that emotional breakdown, I told my two best friends that I trusted them so much that I tried for the first time to describe to someone in its entirety what had happened to me. But as the diary reflects, a new problem came, although I was a senior in high school at the time, and I was often the first in my class on the language test, but I didn't know how to properly describe a sexual assault of a bad nature. I don't have any vocabulary about intimate parts and "sex" other than erotic vulgar slang, except that I remember the word "seduction" used in Tolstoy's Resurrection, which seems appropriate, but I can't really say it.
Later, they told me that I was talking intermittently and in all directions, almost like I was talking in a dream. So the reality is, I thought it was clear, they didn't even know the basic information about the time, place, and person, but they even guessed what might have happened to me. But I am very grateful to them, they listened in the clouds, but did not force me to ask a word, they just held me silently and cried, and the other told me that when she was in elementary school, there was a girl in the class who was bullied by the boys in the upper grades, and the whole class knew it, and since then she has lived in the eyes of everyone. I thought, "Oh my God, everybody, if it were me, I would probably kill myself." "But she said the girl didn't, and I felt much better.
This incident also gave me a major revelation, that is, I was not struck by lightning, the hit rate of lightning would not be so high, and there must be other people around me who had encountered this kind of thing, and they just never said it like me. Later, after careful probing, I found two more girls among my friends.
They were two people with completely opposite personalities, one of whom was a simple high school girl, slightly fat, wearing glasses with thick lenses, taciturn, withdrawn, and had a slender literati sensitivity. She told me that she had been molested by her cousin as a child. She told me during a QQ chat after college, when we seemed to be discussing a novel, I said first, she said later.
The other, on the contrary, was a very lively girl, beautiful, who would perm her hair in high school, studied very well at one time, was very enthusiastic, and was the democratically elected secretary of the Youth League Committee in the class. But perhaps because she was so beautiful, she was molested by relatives when she was young, and after high school, she was taken out by a girl of the same grade, and in front of the girl, she was gang-raped by a social youth. Did we confess to each other after we got drunk one time, or did I say it first and she said it later. But this time I was even more shocked because what happened to her was so bad that our school was the best in the county.
I don't know how they spent their long, solitary careers, but I'm sure they didn't tell anyone except that we briefly confided in each other.
At that time, I also tacitly agreed that one secret would be exchanged for another, if the other party also had it. But after a long time, long enough that we could talk about child sexual abuse in an academic tone, the friend who used to cry without saying a word told me that she had been sexually abused by her own brother for several years. The end was also due to a fortuitous opportunity, bumped into by her cousin, and shouted out in confusion at the gathering of relatives, and was stopped halfway through the shouting. Later, this never happened again. She didn't know if her parents had stopped her brother later, but the whole family never talked about it again. I finally understood the source of her strange attitude towards her brother. She was tighter than my mouth, perhaps her pain was more intense, like I hadn't confided in that junior high school friend who had had a similar experience, and there was a strange hierarchy here.
But later, after going to college, I drank with the beautiful high school female classmates and a bunch of male classmates in the same class, and I had fallen down, looking probably unconscious, but in fact, my consciousness was still quite clear. I heard her say to a male classmate who had liked me for a long time: "She's really a really good girl, really." And then it was emphasized many times. I don't know why, but her tone made me realize that what she said "very good" meant completely, "She really is still an innocent girl".
Oh, innocence, this is the sword of Damocles hanging over the head of every child who has been sexually assaulted at an early age.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-center-line" > a molested boyfriend</h1>
Later, from the time I had a boyfriend, out of a strange cleanliness mentality, I would tell them about it shortly after the relationship started, and their reaction was very interesting.
One of the boyfriends was a high school classmate and a jerk, and after I told him, he probably felt the need to show his attitude, so he asked me very seriously, do you want to call your brother to beat up the person together? I hesitated and said, let's talk. In fact, my real idea is to simply hack to death. Of course, it didn't work out because we broke up very quickly.
But the idea of hacking was real, probably some time before and after I went to college, and I very seriously imagined what would happen if I killed those two people, and re-read the complete Sherlock Holmes detective collection for this reason. Revenge is actually only a relatively small aspect, and more importantly, the thought of two rotten people in this world besides my extremely trusted friends also knows about this matter, I am like a needle in a haystack.
A few times after I went back to my hometown after college, and I met the neighbor, and of course we didn't talk, and I saw him avoid it as soon as ever, and sometimes I suspected that he had forgotten it, but I always felt a strong sense of being hunted in his eyes, and I felt humiliated, disgusted, and frightened.
I also had a boyfriend who tried to take me to a therapist but then we also broke up very quickly, so it didn't work out again. But the most surprising situation for me was a boyfriend I had a relationship with in Beijing, and this boy was also very short-lived, he was a programmer, loved photography and marathons, often volunteered, his personality was also very cheerful, he was interviewed when he was in college, he hitchhiking, in short, he seemed to be a new socialist youth with an active life and excellent work.
Because this matter did cause me some trouble in dealing with intimate relationships, so adhering to my consistent principle, I think this matter should be made clear no matter what, and what surprised me was that after listening to my brief explanation, he scratched his head and said embarrassedly, since you trust me so much, I will also confess.
Then he told me that when he was in junior high school, he was repeatedly molested by his own sister, who had pulled open the zipper of his pants many times while he was sleeping, and played with his genitals with his hands. Every time he pretended to be asleep, but every time he knew it clearly, he lay there, so sick that he wanted to throw up, and he never told anyone about it.
I don't know if that affected him in any way, but he did have a more severe depression. This incident shocked me as much as when I was in junior high school, when my good friend cried in front of me. Because he was a boy and came from another relatively developed northern province, not my strange southwest hometown.
As a result, I laughed and found that I could form a rich ecological group of victims around me. Only then did I begin to take a hard look at the fact that among the silent friends around me and me, we did not have anything in common, some of us were left-behind children, some were raised by our parents themselves; some grew up in remote villages, and some were always in big cities; some parents were farmers and migrant workers, as well as civil servants and successful businessmen; some were chickens and dogs jumping in the family, but some were happy and harmonious; some were mischievous, but some were obedient and docile; some were beautiful and sparkling, but some were plain-looking.
If we have anything in common, it is that we are surrounded by hormone-fueled adolescent boys and girls, and we have curious adults who are either ignorant or powerless to resist when their hands reach out to us. Although our parents and teachers have created a ubiquitous atmosphere, suggesting that if we are hurt, we will become discarded rag dolls, but no one has ever told us to be careful about who, what behaviors to be careful about, and how to stop. We are not hurt by lightning at all, but with great inevitability.
I am 26 years old this year, in the eyes of outsiders is very smooth, all the way is a good student, all the way to school, all the way from Chongqing hometown to Beijing, there is a good job. If you look at it from the appearance, I should be a girl without any victim characteristics, and even talked about normal relationships a few times. So are my friends, some are teachers, some are choreographers and directors in TV stations, some are translators, and some are ordinary white-collar workers.
I've been lucky enough to know I'm not alone, but it's not really an alliance, and I can't always have a mutual aid meeting or something. I really gained the ability to talk about sexual assault almost after working for several years. In college, I have theorized and unwaveringly that sex is a beautiful thing under the premise of reciprocal love; and sexual abuse of children is a conclusive violation of the law or even a criminal offense, the victim is innocent, the stigmatizer is despicable, and the concept of physical chastity is not worth refuting.
But reality is far more complex, and true self-awareness reconstruction is far more difficult and lengthy. We can't really talk about being sexually assaulted like we talk about being bitten by a dog. I once saw a piece of advice for sexually assaulted people on the Internet, and the suggester warned the sexual assaultee never to talk about it to anyone, especially acquaintances. In a sense, this is indeed an effective form of self-protection, but if the curtain is not torn off, this protection is bound to be fragile.
Sometimes I think that if talking about taboos about sexual assault is a sociological experiment, it would be so successful. The twisted sexuality and silence of the onlookers couple perfectly, creating a wall that traps the victim. If half of the children in the crowd had been sexually assaulted, the other half must have thought that such a thing had never existed in the world, and each of the half of those who had been hurt would think that they were the only ones trapped. The vast majority of people will never have the opportunity to see that in the thick fog, within a short distance, there are children trapped in the walls.
One thing I think I can mention is that after I was able to talk about sexual assault normally, I really forgave my cousin from the bottom of my heart, he used to be just an adolescent boy who didn't know the world, no one taught him how to treat his body properly and the younger me, he didn't necessarily really want to hurt me. I wouldn't accept his apology, but I did forgive him, and I hope he'll have forgotten about it long ago. As for the neighbor, when I saw him, I still wanted to hack him to death.