Open letter to an abuser

Howard,

The last time I saw you, I was fourteen years old. I walked out those double doors while you held one and Cliff held the other. At the time, you still controlled the things I did, said, felt and thought. I lived your language, where sexual abuse was a mutual pleasure, an induction into the world of adulthood. You ran my life, even when I spent months away from you. You took so much from me; my trust, chances for friendships that I never acted on because no one could know about you, the last years of my father's life were spent with me lying to him and distancing myself from him because you made me fear him. You took from me so many firsts; my first kiss, my first make out sessions, my first time giving oral sex, my first experiences with sexual pleasure from another human being. Those things were not yours to take. They belonged to no one but me and it should have been my choice who I shared them with, but your threats and coercion gave me no choice. The night that you forced me to give you oral sex was rape. The times that you forced your fingers into my vagina and hurt me so badly I bled afterwards were rape. Not pleasure, not sharing, not love or any of the things you said they were. You didn't teach me to be a good lover or a healthy adult, you taught me that sex was pain. That love was pain and that the people who claimed to care about me had the right to abuse me.

It has taken me most of the last four years to heal to the point where I can write this and place the blame where it belongs-on you. I've blamed myself for far too long and the pain of that nearly broke me more times than I can count. I did things that I'm not proud of, but that I forgive myself for because they were the only things I knew how to do at the time. I felt responsible for you molesting me, I needed attention and love so badly that even what you gave out to keep me coming back was better than nothing. I needed someone to care. I needed an adult to stand in for my parents and treat me as someone who mattered, who wasn't unlovable. You could have been that person. You could have made my life easier, taught me to respect myself and been the person who proved to me that the world was a kinder place than I believed it to be. Instead, you saw that need and took advantage of me.

At the time, I felt that I'd made a choice. I didn't. You did. You saw a vulnerable child and used her to gain sexual satisfaction that should have been found with other adults. You are not a man with needs as you put it, you are a pitiful excuse for an human being who chose to act on feelings that you knew were wrong. It's taken me a very long time to be able to say that, but I will not live my life the way so many others have. I will not waste my energy trying to find ways to make this my fault and nothing anyone can say will make me believe that again.

I am the kind of person you should have been. I am brave and gentle, I stand up for people who can't stand up for themselves and I call people on their lies. I love deeply and am deeply loved by a woman who will never harm me. I have friends who love and accept me for who I am. I will have children who will never know the pain I did and I will never become an abuser.

I will tell people about what you did without being ashamed because that shame is not mine. I will speak publically so that others can do so without fear. I will not allow people like you to continue destroying lives nor will I allow parents, teachers and the police to pretend that it isn't happening.

Many times people have said or implied that you made me strong by abusing me. You didn't. I did. I chose people to love me and help me become this person. I built myself back up with their endless help, love, patience, kindness and support.

My name is Raven and I was sexually abused. It was not an accident or a misunderstanding and you, my abuser, knew this. With this letter, I free myself from you. You are nothing and my future will be free of you and people like you.

Rights

I think alot about the rights of children and how grooming by pedophiles often involves giving them the illusion of having adult-specific rights and privileges to gain their trust. For example, one of the men who molested me allowed me to call him by his first name, despite the fact that he was a 54 year old adult and I was a 9 year old child. In my mind, this meant that he thought I was an equal.

I remember watching a Lifetime movie about a girl being sexually abused by a teacher in her high school. The teacher allowed her to do many adult-specific things but at one point, she lights a cig in front of him and he says, "you shouldn't smoke". She responds with, "yeah well, I'm doing alot of things I shouldn't be doing, aren't I?", he shuts up. That sums up my experience with feeling equal/superior to the person abusing me because I could blackmail them with what they were doing to me. I knew that I could get away with swearing, smoking or doing other things I shouldn't have been doing because he was getting away with doing things to me that he shouldn't have been doing and that gave me a false sense of equality because I thought I had some power over him. It worked wholly to his advantage, however, because it also gave me a false sense of responsibility for what he'd done.

I believe that, had I been treated as a worthwhile human being with rights, by other adults, I wouldn't have fallen into his trap. As it was, my controlling and abusive parents and the responses of the school staff to my repeated pleas for help taught me that I was worthless and that no one but my abuser would allow me to speak freely or have negative emotions about the other adults in my life. My abuser took away what was left of my understanding of boundaries and my right as a human being to choose without coercion or force who I did sexual things with and what sexual things I wanted to do at any given time, but it felt like he'd given me something in return where other adults didn't. I know now that it was a token to placate me, like my mother's gifts, while other, more important things were taken away. The reason I didn't see it then was that I was a child and that proves, more than anything, that I can't bear any responsibility for what happened because I didn't fully understand it.