By Anna Holmes

When I was eleven years old, I had a crush on my best friend's older brother. We were in the same ballroom dance class, and I would get giddy whenever I had the chance to hold his sweaty, pre-pubescent hand. When I slept over at my friend’s house I would spend hours watching him play Call of Duty in their family’s cinema-esquire lounge room. During these sleepovers, my friend and I would share her double bed and sleep without the sheets, exposing ourselves to the summer climate and sweating through our cotton, spaghetti strapped singlettes. One night, after we had spent the afternoon putting on an impromptu aerobatics show (as eleven-year-olds do), I felt myself wrestling with a phantom tickle on my stomach. In my dream-like state, I could feel something skimming over the flesh of my exposed tummy, as somehow, my shirt had risen up in my sleep. At first I associated this feeling with that of the wind, so I drowsily flipped onto my stomach to protect it from the breeze. However, when I felt the same feeling on my lower back, just above the waistband of my pyjama shorts, I frustratedly turned to lay on my back again. The third time I awoke it was not to a light breeze on my stomach, but a slight pressure on my newly developed B cup chest, and for the first time that night I opened my eyes. The clammy hands of a thirteen-year-old boy, which had held me so gently as we danced, were now under my shirt as I lay asleep next to his sister. To this day, I was never sure that he saw my eyes open, but something made him slowly retract his hand, and as a girl born into a patriarchal society, taught to not cause any conflict, I closed my eyes and shuffled under the sheets.   

I had never told this story to anyone, until 2020 at the age of nineteen. I had recently joined the One Woman Project, when there was discussion about the reform of the consent laws in Queensland. While my mother was visiting, we were discussing my role as State Facilitator and how I wanted to educate communities about consent, when she asked:

But you haven’t had any personal experience with sexual assault, have you?

She asked this question as if it had been recent. As if the two months I had moved out of her home could have been the only time I had come face-to-face with sexual abuse. 

Well…

I think what shocked my mother most about this experience was the fact I had kept it a secret for so many years. By this time, my best friend and I had grown apart. Now I only know her as a Facebook friend, and my assailant lives on the other side of the country. I had continued to hold hands and dance with this guy for the three years after the incident, except I was no longer excited by his touch. Although I would not consider myself traumatised by the experience, I still felt the need to wait to tell anyone. Wait until it was an event of the past, and could not affect my day-to-day life. At the time, I had thought the fact I was not angry or scared in his presence meant that I had not been violated. And yet, I still could not tell anyone. To be perfectly honest I had forgotten about the assault, and did not think about it for most of my adolescence. It's only now, as I understand sex and consent better than my eleven-year-old self, I ask myself: should I have told someone?

My mother would not have stood for it. If I had told her the morning she picked me up after the event, she would have brought everything down on him and raged at the family. I can picture her dramatically chunking a U turn and knocking down their front door to give him a piece of her mind. I can also picture myself crying and begging her to go home, scared of the embarrassment I would face at dancing or in my social group if word of the event got out. But still I wonder if this brief moment of embarrassment would have actually benefited society, and perhaps other potential victims... By letting my best friend's brother, my ballroom dance partner, my childhood crush, get away with groping a child in her sleep… Did I give him the allowance to continue assaulting people? I may never know if he ever touched another person without their consent again, but there will forever be that question of, if? If I had said something, would it have happened again?   

These thoughts were actually prompted by Emily Ratajkowski's biography, My Body, in which she names her assailants and their injustices towards her. The recounts of her experiences seemed so direct and simplistic. I thought if this internationally recognised figure had the courage and support to publish her experiences, I as an advocate for sexual assault victims, should finally acknowledge my injustices. After not having a conversation about the event for some years, I never classified what happened to me as an assault. However, after my encounter with this book, I began to wonder about the nature of my experience, and let myself think critically about it. Sure, I had felt uncomfortable when he touched me and I definitely had not given consent for him to do so, but was it sexual assault? I mean he only groped my boob, right? It could have been much worse, right?

At this point, my thoughts began spiralling, comparing my experiences to those I had heard from my girlfriends or episodes of Law and Order: SVU. I was caught in this constant mentality of always invalidating my feelings and experiences because someone else out there had it worse than me. I should count myself lucky he had not found his way into my pyjama shorts. They say that 1 in 6 Australian women have been assaulted at some point in their lives. And somehow, I was letting this toxic mentality lead me to believe that I was not one of them, and that I should be considered lucky. How could someone who now sleeps with both the sheet and blanket out of fear, feel somehow privileged about her past assault? How could someone, upon reading Ratajkowski's experience of having her chest fondled in her sleep by her friend's boyfriend, dissociate enough to be sent home from work early, feel indeed lucky?  

According to Women's Legal Services, sexual assault consists of “showing indecent images to another person, kissing or touching them, as well as penetration of the person’s body with a body part or object”(Womens Legal Services n.d.). Their website further explains that if someone does something sexual that makes you feel uncomfortable or touches you without your consent, it may be sexual assault. This was the website I scrambled towards to see if how I defined my experience matched the legal definition, as if I still needed yet more justification to how I felt about the event. The Womens Legal Services even provide a handy column that categorises types of sexual assault, so I was able to identify mine as Sexual Touching, which describe an event when: “a person touches you in a sexual way on your breasts, vagina or anus; includes touching over the top of or under your clothing that does not penetrate in any way.” What I also found interesting is that under the Sexual Acts category it states that “it is not necessary to show that it caused fear/distress” (Womens Legal Services n.d.). When it came down to it, this statement was what actually justified my interpretation of the assault. Knowing that the fact I was sexually assaulted was not determined by whether or not I was scared or distressed, played a big part in understanding my experience. The crime did not have to shake me to my core, to still be a crime. 

I tell my story, along with my worries, research, and self-justification, because I want people to know it's okay if you do not want to tell people about your experience. It's okay to have feelings of fear and distress, but it's also okay not to feel these things. It's okay to decide for yourself what event you experienced, no matter what any website says. It's okay to feel what we feel, and to respond how we want to respond. Sometimes we need advice, help, and support, and sometimes we don't. I can wholeheartedly recommend reaching out to the One Woman Project if you are seeking help, whether that's finding resources for legal aid or just wanting to have a chat. Seek only love and support this Sexual Abuse and Sexual Violence Awareness Week.      

Reference List:

• Women's Legal Service NSW. (n.d.). What is sexual assault?. Women's Legal Service. https://www.wlsnsw.org.au/resources/sexual-assault/what-is-sexual-assault/