Braces: A Story of Sexual Assualt Before MeToo
Triggering Content
Trigger Warning:
This article contains themes and real graphic stories of sexual assault/rape and eating disorders involving minors which may trigger and offend. If you or someone else you know are experiencing this, please seek help at Lifeline Australia, Reach Out Australia or your local GP or call 000 if there is danger.
In this article, there will be no names, places or institutions being named for the sake of privacy and legal reasons.
It’s taken me almost three-four years to figure out how I could open up about this story. I’ve dealt with a lot of isolation and hate for what has happened in the past and I ask that from anyone who knows me to not give me any attention or sympathy. All I ask is that we begin to take sexual assault, toxic masculinity, misogyny and rape a little more seriously and hopefully there can be a conversation about these themes.
My first introduction to high school had been a boy forcing me behind the school into the bushes.
I was twelve years old and beginning Grade Seven. It was my second week starting at high school and already something bad had happened. A boy who was a grade above me had tried to touch me. A boy who had been a mutual friend. A boy who followed me from class to class and was ‘welcoming me’.
It was 2015 when this happened. Long before there was a #MeToo or a #IBelieveHer movement. Years before protests and Twitter Threads. Long before documentaries of Michael Jackson and Bill Cosby had been aired on international television. Years before any stories about sexual assault was even been debated about or called out on.
I live in a relatively small city, where everybody knows everybody. You would go to school with a group of kids and you were more likely to end up working with some of them in your later adult years. I had friends who were older than me by a year to five years, many were just starting high school as I had been finishing primary school. When I gained an Arts, Academic and Indigenous Scholarship at a prestigious Catholic School that they went to, my friends had welcomed me and offered for me and some of my friends to hang out with them.
Amongst my close friends had been a guy. He was taller, medium-sized and was funny. He had introduced himself to me and another friend of mine and had added us on Facebook. For the first two-three days, he had been nice and showed us around the school. Basic things like toilets, Science rooms and the Auto-Tech Area. But then he showed us a place behind the school near a trail.
“This is where people go to fuck”.
That should’ve been the first warning. But because I was twelve, new to a school and didn’t know anything about this, I just ignored it.
When I told other friends about this guy. They had confided that he could be “a little creepy”. I didn’t know what they meant by that, they just said that he could make some weird jokes at times and to “not go anywhere with him near the trail alone”. I listened and made sure that I had at least one friend who could come with him and me when we walked around the school and chatted. Our conversations were about himself. How he had dated heaps of girls, how he had ‘touched’ them and how he went to Bali with some of them. Other times it was conversations about us- if we had crushes, who we dated or didn’t date and what our classes were.
Then he showed us the library, we sat in the corner of the room and got on our phones. At the time I had a cheap little pre-paid phone from the local grocery store while he had the latest iPhone. He pulled his phone out and showed us my Facebook. He had begun to look through my account saying pervy stuff about ‘how tight I looked’ when I was wearing my Grade Six Graduation Dress.
I asked my friend later what he meant, she just replied: “must mean you’re skinny”.
At the time I was a size sixteen in adult clothes, I was tall and chubby and different compared to most Seventh Graders. I didn’t have braces yet. I thought this might’ve been a compliment or a sign that I was losing weight and might’ve been looking pretty.
One day my friend hadn’t come to school, she called me to say she was sick and that she’d be back the next day. Which meant I had to deal with this guy alone. I tried to hang around my other friends, but he’d follow and stick beside me. Eventually, I went to the bathroom and he followed me near the entrance without me knowing. When I walked outside, he told me that he wanted to show me something. I stupidly obliged and followed him.
He was taking me near the trail.
I told him that I didn’t want to go in and that ‘the bell was going to go soon’. He didn’t listen and pulled me closer to him and tried shoving his tongue down my throat while grabbing onto my boobs. I shoved him away and ran off, thankfully a friend of mine was there. He took me into the guidance counsellor’s office just a little while before he confronted the guy and told him to back off.
But this wasn’t the last time, on multiple occasions he had shoved condoms into my schoolbag while I wasn’t around. Often, they’d be filled with his cum. He’d leave pervy notes saying things like ‘I want to fuck you in the cunt’ and ‘how I was perfect enough… especially my boobs’. He’d tell people that he had a crush on me and that he wanted to fuck me as soon as possible.
I remember I broke down at home, crying to my mother’s grandparents about this. It had gone on for almost six months and the school did nothing about it when told. They even said that there was no need for Police to be involved. The head of his grade said that-
“He can’t control it, but we’re gonna work on that with him”.
Thankfully he left it at that, I didn’t see much of him around me or my friends. Most of the guy friends I had blew him off and stayed around me instead.
I thought it was the end of it. Turns out it wasn’t.
When I was thirteen, I had joined an extra-curricular group for youth skills. Obviously, for legal and privacy reasons I will not share many details about this institution/place- for the sake of this article I’m going to refer to this place as- The Group. At the time my parents thought it would be good for me to get out there a little more and meet people outside of school.
At thirteen I was really ‘one of the boys’. I dropped Netball for AFL and Basketball. I watched action movies and did stupid stunts with my guy friends and we’d go to movies and hang out at our local water park or skate park. When I joined this group, I had more guy friends. We’d hang out outside the Group and go watch movies or go swimming at the local pool.
Around this age I had gone back into modelling, I had lost a bit of weight thanks to sports and puberty and a lot of people were saying “I was getting more attractive”. I was never overly self-absorbed back then, and to me, modelling was just a fun sideshow. Around this time, I had begun dating and realised that I was bisexual.
Out of most of my guy friends, there was this one guy who was a bit of an outsider. His name was J*. He was about seventeen when I met him and about to finish high school. He was our instructor and had more authority over us. So, I naturally thought that was why he isolated himself and spent time with another instructor who was in his forties-fifties.
It took me about seven months to realise the real side of him. He had a short temper and would lose his shit in seconds. He would yell at people and insult them. Calling them idiots or assholes. There were heaps of reports against him, but nothing ever really came out of it. There had been a rumour that at a camp he had made a girl cry and go home early… but the rumours had been proven wrong and everybody moved on with their lives. He still came in and out of the Group and everybody was friendly.
I was fourteen years old. On the 6th of September 2017 between the hours of 7:30–9:30 pm, I had been sexually assaulted three times by J who was now nineteen years old.
People sometimes asked me how I remembered this date.
It was because I had gotten my braces that morning.
Even though it’s been three years since that night, I still shake and feel sick even thinking about it. Writing this on here makes me feel uneasy and I feel like I have to throw up sometimes.
The months following to this night had been on-edge. People had brought up this rumour about J and his girl. He had remained quiet by this and most of the guys in the Group had sheltered him, including the forty-fifty-year-old Instructor. He had added me on Facebook, and I let him follow me, he tried messaging me a few times and I pretended to not see it and say, ‘it was a glitch’ or that ‘my account was hacked’. I guessed he believed it.
But now and then he’d watch me from across the common room, on the grass or with my friends. Someone told me and said that ‘he always does this’.
On the 6th of September, he had come to visit the group once more before he’d leave for Brisbane to ‘start fresh’. We had a little party which involved pizza and soft drinks… in my case: vegetarian toppings and water. When I arrived at the Group he had commented on my teeth-
“Damn it, gonna have to figure out another way to suck”.
I thought it was a joke and I just laughed… out of fear. That night we went to a basketball court and everybody played on teams. He was on the opposite team. When we were playing, I had gotten the ball and was dribbling and defending against him, he was leaning on my left leg just as I was about to shoot the ball into the hoop. But I felt something hard on my leg, I had felt an erection before and straight away I knew what it was. I missed the shot and tried to remove myself away from him. I thought maybe it was an accident- maybe he didn’t mean to get hard on me, so I let it be.
After we ate dinner everybody was tidying the main common area up, I had been there tidying up the floors with a broom mucking around with a friend of mine. Then J had come inside and began to try and ‘fight me’. I refused because I didn’t want to get close to him again, but he grabbed my arm so hard that it left a bruise. He held me close enough to him and grabbed my ass and nearly close to my vagina.
I was wearing a baggy shirt and 3/4 tights and black runners. I was fourteen, 90 kilos, acne-ridden, and I had braces. And I said “no, stop” five or six times.
I pushed away and walked away, I went into the bathroom and stayed there for a good ten-fifteen minutes. I remember texting my on-and-off boyfriend at the time and replied to his messages- he asked if I was okay.
“Yeah, no I’m fine”.
I went back outside on the grass where everybody else was. We were playing some team-building exercise. It had rained earlier, and mosquitoes were biting away. I excused myself and went into the common area to find repellent. I recall holding this bottle and trying to squeeze this repellent out. Then I felt him near me, he was breathing calmly and had his hands on me. One hand pressed against my torso pulling me towards his erection and the other trying to get underneath my tights (which were pulled up high). His hands were cold and pressing near the lining of my black cotton underwear. His fingers reaching the top of my clit. I remember shoving his hands away and saying no. He just looked at me as though he was angry, and I walked away…
When everybody was getting picked up, I was waiting for a lift with my friend whose mum was the one taking me home. When I got into the car, I looked up and saw him staring at me. As though he knew that he was bigger than me and more powerful.
As soon as I got home in the shower, I cried for forty minutes. I threw my clothes into the laundry and sat naked on the ground of my shower crying. I then threw up in the sink and told my mum that ‘I ate something bad’. I got onto my phone and blocked his number and his Facebook.
Even the sight of his name made me want to throw up.
It had taken me almost four days before I could say anything to anybody. I had told one of my guy friends the story and a few girls from the Group. One of the girls had said it had happened to them before. I remember listening to her story and remembering the similarities between her experience and mine. Another girl had said that he had threatened her with his pocketknife. Then they told me about the other girl, the one that J made cry. He had gotten into her tent and touched her until she had woken up just seconds later. She was fourteen years old.
I was number fifteen on the list of girls he had sexually assaulted.
My family and I were estranged. My mum and I had a distant relationship sometimes, but we could be close. I didn’t know how to tell her about this incident. I went to school, threw up my recess and waited till lunch to call my mum at work using a teacher’s phone and tell her everything. My friends outside the teacher’s office explaining to him what had happened.
As soon as I got into the car, on the Bluetooth Speaker Phone had been a Sex Crimes Officer. The next day I would lodge a complaint to the Police and to the Organisation that ran the Group. I spoke to the officers, I showed them my bruises on my arm and near my hipbone. I told them what I wore and gave them the items of clothing. I let them take photographic evidence and I went to school and acted as if everything was normal.
The next day I went back to the Group. People had been told. My instructors had consoled me and said that I was ‘safe’. But people looked at me and straight away I felt like I was an outsider. My eyes looked straight away at the corner where he had touched me and the only way, I could cope was by throwing up and not eating.
While the Police had handed the case to the Organisation that ran the Group, it was as though friendships were falling apart. Girls blamed me for speaking up, but later thanked me. Boys told me that it was ‘because I’m a slut’ and ‘wanted drama’. My friendships with the guys had been ruined by investigation and paranoia. Some guys tried their best to cooperate in the investigation but there was always something holding them back.
The worst part of the investigation had been when the two investigators had told me that J’s dad had lived in the same neighbourhood as me and that J would plan on regularly visiting his dad. I felt sick and I really couldn’t help to think about the idea of J coming to my house and putting me in danger. I had ended up crashing and friends’ houses and stayed with relatives.
Then we’d later find out that the forty-fifty-year-old instructor had known about J and the other girls. The cases and incidents that had been reported weren’t kept on file. Because he was protecting J. He had even told some of the guys that J was innocent and that I was ‘destroying the *group*’. He then left the Group and cut all ties.
Those six months had been the worst months of my life. They picked on me, using details about my personality and tried to put it against J’s character. Being a fourteen-year-old girl who modelled, was friends with guys and had an outgoing personality was a threat to a guy who planned on joining the Government, going onto Uni and intended on being a wonderful character to society.
They even tried using past events such as guys crushing on me as a way for the story to change and defend J- as though I was this ‘hyper-sexual fourteen-year-old’ and he was some innocent nineteen-year-old. Despite evidence of him being a sex-addict/porn-addict or someone who found younger girls attractive. Even photos of girls in our area on his phone kept in a folder. His own Facebook projected his maturity issues and his toxic views of sex. Girls from school who’d he’d graduated with had even told the investigators about how’d he’d make vile jokes about their uniforms and guys from the Group had shared stories about ‘locker room conversations’ where he said: “he’d fuck a thirteen-year-old if she had a good body”.
When the outcome came, I didn’t find out until March just two months after I turned fifteen.
He was innocent. No charges would be put against him.
He touched fifteen girls, threatened three and never got a single punishment.
This year J would be twenty-two years old in August 2020. It makes me sick to think that now he can go get a good job and carry on further education and work with children despite ruining fifteen girls’ lives. He was allowed to keep his Working with Children’s’ Card and he can apply for jobs that involve taking authority over children.
The outcome of this entire investigation had resulted in two staff members for inadequacy to protect minors (true) and a legal gag order on everyone involved in the investigation. This gag order operated so that
“nobody would ruin Mr J’s character and convention as well as the Groups”.
This meant that if I or any of the other girls had wanted to- we could not take the matter to court. Let alone issue a restraining order against him. Even though his father lives in the same area as me, J would simply find my address to attack me and there would be no legal and protective measures put into place. During the investigation, I was asked if I would like to seek therapy that would be fully paid for and provided by the Organisation… believe it or not that therapist appointment never followed through. I was never emailed, called or notified about this ‘therapy’. It was as though everybody was oblivious to the outcome of the case and the effects of this.
When women say ‘fuck the patriarchy’ I understand what they mean. The Organisation’s investigators were all male, the courtroom was predominately males and J was a male who had authority over the girls in the Group. It was an example of a power imbalance between males and females.
After the investigation had closed and I found out the outcome, I had begun to eat less. I would skip meals and sometimes I would throw up, never on purpose but sometimes out of anxiety. I had cut ties with many friends, both online and in real life. I refused to go to social gatherings unless I knew every person that was there, and I even would show up and straight away leave in a hurry out of panic that J would be there.
It continued for months, because of J and what had happened in the Group I had stopped hanging around my male friends. Even the ones I had grown up with. I believed that every guy was a predator and that they were going to harm me. I would cry at the touch of anybody if they came up behind me or if they bumped into me. I hated going to school and most of all it felt like everybody knew about it.
Every romantic relationship of mine had its faults. The first relationship I had after the incident was what I would now recognise as abuse. The guy I had been with for five months had known about the incident and tried to blame me for it. He controlled my clothes, my friendship groups and stopped me from modelling. He would even use my sexuality as a way of insulting me. When he cheated it was a wake-up call to leave and get my shit together.
Since then I’ve spent over a year and three months fixing myself. It was hard but it got me through slowly. Through eating, exercising, getting back into modelling and reconnecting to those friends. I had left the Group and refused to look back at the pain it had caused me. Although the Group had done it’s best to help me and other girls, through sending in public speakers and representatives from foundations that helped victims of sexual assault… it wasn’t enough. There was always going to be this tension in the air.
Then I got my braces off. Just a year after one of the most powerful movements known to mankind had started.
It was the 1st of January 2018 when the Times Up Movement had started regarding sexual harassment. Celebrities talked up about Harvey Weinstein and had raised over 22 million dollars in a legal defence against him and men alike in the industry. From there followed #MeToo, a movement where women said ‘Me Too’ if they were also sexually assaulted and abused.
In 2018 I was fifteen, a year after J’s sexual assault and three years after the one that had taken place at school and I had gotten myself into a shitty relationship that same year. During 2018 this movement had been the background music to the shitty reality I had been living. It came through waves of destruction and depression. It had taken me five months after my breakup to listen to those Me Too and Times Up stories.
For someone who had been sexually harassed and assaulted from the time they were twelve to the age of fourteen, it meant something. When I was twelve there was no such thing as speaking up about rape or protesting about consent. There were no role models who helped me or other girls and there wasn’t one when I was going through an investigation.
I remember looking at a celebrity and reading their story. Similar to mine even and girls I knew. Even when I Too was happening there was a feeling of doubt. As though nobody would listen or believe me. In the investigation, it was as though he had more credibility over me just because he was a white male. So, I kept silent while this movement occurred.
Every year on the 6th September I wallowed. I skipped school on my first anniversary. I skipped school and went to a new city on the second anniversary, and on the third, I realised I needed up speak up. It started with close friends, then a few guy friends of mine who didn’t understand. I had reached out to an ex of mine who was a close family friend, who had become someone I could confide in. I began writing down my thoughts and worries. Each day I would write something down in a journal and get things off my chest. Everything was fine.
Until I went to Brisbane.
I was holidaying with my family who lived on the coast of New South Wales, to get there I would have to catch a flight to Brisbane and drive four to five hours along the Pacific Highway. On our way back home, we were staying in a hotel in Brisbane near the CBD. For a moment my worries about J and Brisbane had never occurred to me until I had thought I’d seen him.
In the past two-three years, I’ve had moments where I’ve seen look-a-likes. But when I was sitting in a cafe near the window, it was as though I had a grenade strapped onto me and I was tied up. This was it… something bad was going to happen… As soon as the guy turned around there was a wave of belief with me and that’s when I realised that this has to stop.
And it starts with this story.
It’s now 2020, I’m seventeen years old and I’m doing okay. This article has taken me just about 730 hours to write. But as off 5:45 pm on a Friday, I write this at my desk just days away from starting my final year of school. In a few months’ time, I’ll apply to Universities in Sydney, Melbourne and/or Gold Coast where I’ll study Law and Media. I want to work for Human Rights, particularly for women who have been assaulted as I have. I want to be that voice for those girls I needed when I was twelve and fourteen.
I see that guy from when I was twelve every day, he works at our local shopping centre and always tries smiling at me. I feel sick knowing that he’ll never face the consequences. He’s graduated and is about to go to University… As for J, I have to go on Ignitor mode to search up his social media, so I know he’s not in Darwin and that I’m safe. It annoys me that he’ll never be registered on a Sex Offenders List and worst of all, it makes me worry for the other girls that might be out there.
When people say “Me Too is a scary time for men” … you’re right…. it’s a scary time for men who are rapists, molesters and abusers.
I’m not sure as to what the future holds, I’m not sure if this post will create a wave of emotions for all girls out there or if there will be consequences… but it’s my story and I need to own it.
