TRIGGER WARNING: This article goes into detail about gang rape, torture, sexual abuse, and trauma. Please be warned it will be difficult to read.
The federal government has given $200,000 to BC’s Crime Stoppers, in order to help convince people to report about the recent gang activity happening around the province, and I am telling you that money alone is not a good enough incentive.
I personally do not give a flying fuck about being labeled a rat, I’ve been through too much to continue to show loyalty to the same men that beat me, tortured me, drugged me, called me a piece of ass, and raped me for hours without a break.
When I was fifteen I was raped by serial rapists who broke into my bedroom through the balcony door leading to the backyard. While my mom and brother slept in the next room, I was experiencing what it feels like to witness real life evil, and I couldn’t scream because I was threatened with death or the murder of my family if I said anything.
The same men that did this to me and many other children, turned the children that I was forced to have sex with into rapists, one of the men who beat me the last time ended up being a counselor I found on Google, that I spoke to about the intimate details of my life for 3-5 months before I realized he was there the night that I was gang raped.
It was a series of flashback memories that came to the surface all at the same time while I was sitting in his office, and I legitimately lost my fucking mind.
I don’t blame the other girls in our “familia” as the idiots called us, for not coming forward and talking about what happened to them, because they were all made FULLY aware of what happened to me.
I know that I am the worst case scenario, and I know that my survival is a gift that I refuse to take for granted anymore. I know fully what gang life can do to a person’s life. I am fully conscious of the fact that gang life can end your life in thirty seconds. It doesn’t even necessarily take the wrong word, sometimes it just takes the wrong fucking outfit to get you ostracized by people that you claim you trust, but only really trust because you’re too afraid not to.
I find it really fucking ironic right now that the RCMP of the Lower Mainland are talking about asking people to come forward, because when “I” came forward they had me declared insane, so what the fuck incentive is there for other people to come forward?
I’ve been pretty public about what I know about gang life, but I will say that thankfully I don’t know anyone on the list that is currently circulating around the local news stations, but for all YOU know, I could just be saying that to protect myself. (I’m not, I genuinely don’t know any of these selfish fucks.)
What I do know is that we’re past the point of no return, a fucking gain.
We are AGAIN in the middle of a gang war, AGAIN, and AGAIN they are throwing money at the problem too late for it to be effective. More people are going to die, more people are going to get shot in the streets, and eventually it’s going to be another innocent person, or a group of innocent people much like Chris Mohan and the victims of the Surrey Six murder.
It’s going to keep happening because cops keep making the same fucking mistakes, and the reason they keep making the same mistakes isn’t that they don’t care, it’s because they don’t have the adequate training and funding that they need to get the job done properly.
On one hand you tell people you want them to come forward to give you information that will allegedly help you to shut down a gang war, but on the other hand when they DO come forward and tell you what life is REALLY like when you’re surrounded by gangsters, you have them declared clinically psychotic.
Is there any wonder people are staying silent? I, DEVON J HALL, AM THE REASON THAT PEOPLE ARE AFRAID TO COME FORWARD, because they don’t want to end up like me. Fucking ranting on a blog hoping anyone, somewhere, will listen to them before it’s too late.
How many more girls have to get raped? How many more girls have to be forced to spread their legs against their will, only to be called prostitutes or whores for doing whatever they have to do to survive? How many more young Indo-Canadian men have to be murdered in the streets like dogs before we start to actually do something that works?
Yes we need education, but it’s not kids we need to be educating, it’s the teachers, the parents, the cops and yes all you fat fuck politician’s who are making money while sitting on your ass as people who are living the life that I used to live, are murdered in the streets.
To quote DMX, this is not a mother fucking game.
Cops, politicians, parents, and teachers really need to get over this idea that gangsters are gangsters because they think they are cool. Not a single one of these fucks thinks they are cool, they have DEEPLY rooted emotional issues that step from extreme poverty, abuse, and trauma.
The idea of being a gangster because it’s “cool” is as old as time, and it’s fucking bullshit. These men, in particular, are scared of being victims, because they’ve seen what victimhood does to people and they don’t want to be like that anymore. They want to hurt others before they get hurt. It’s psychological, and we need to start addressing these systemic issues that turn innocent children into homicidal maniacs.
This isn’t a choice these boys make easily, it’s not a choice they make at all, it’s a choice that is forced upon them by systemic oppression.
“What about the kids who grow up in nice neighborhoods with nice schools,” are you fucking serious?
Al Pacino told you that Scarface lived in a fucking mansion on the hills, they hide among you and you’re either so scared or so God damned ignorant that you refuse to see that if they are making more money than you selling dope, they are living better than you are, because they have all the money in the world, and everyone knows their names.
More importantly they know better than to utter these names in polite company, they keep quiet because they are fucking afraid. They hear the news, they see the dead bodies in the streets, and they don’t want that to be them or worse their child.
All the money in the world isn’t going to get you to sell your child’s life to the end of a gangsters’ gun if it means that you can stay silent and have a better chance at security and safety.
Come on now.
You are asking communities as old as time to come forward and trust outsiders, or worse people that look like them but still wear the blue and black uniform of the police and rcmp.
It doesn’t matter if you have brown skin, if you’re wearing that uniform, you are an outsider and there is shit going on around you that you absolutely don’t know about, or you do know about it but you keep your mouths shut. I’m not criticizing you, I’m telling you the way that it is.
People are afraid to come out of the “I know a gangster” closet, and there are a million reasons not to blame them.
Death is not something that everyone embraces so eagerly, I know it’s not something that I embrace eagerly, I don’t want to fucking die, but nor do I want to stay silent, because there are worse things than death, I know this because I have died a very real spiritual death before.
I felt my soul leave my body when I was fifteen, I took a breath and then I wasn’t in my body anymore, this was shock they say, shock at the fact that a grown man was punching me in the heart of my entire being, repeatedly, until I couldn’t breath, until I died.
Now that you know this happened to me, now that you know they used weapons against me to convince me they were putting nails in my spine, or stabbing my vagina with knives, do you blame other women for not coming forward?
I don’t, not one fucking bit. I don’t blame them at all, because I know what the price of staying silent is – this shit happened before I ever opened my mouth about what was going on, because I didn’t know what was going on. This was my introduction into life in British Columbia.
No matter where I was or who I was with, some guy was always grabbing me, or kissing me, or touching me without asking, as if to mark my body as his, as if to tell the world that even if something didn’t happen, he’d go out of his way to make it LOOK like something happened.
And the more this happened, the less human that I felt, the less real, the less of a person who knew how to navigate the world. To escape what was going on externally, I started creating my own worlds internally.
Everyone in my life became a character, everyone in my life had a storyline, some of them were deeply interesting, and others were completely off limits to me. I have tried to respect boundaries in my story telling, but in my head? It’s a different story all together.
I remember the drama of it all, everything was a big dramatic play, and the one who got the most attention won, I got far more attention then I wanted, all I wanted to do was hang out, chill, and just decompress from everything that I’d been through at that point.
But the more that I tried to deal with my childhood, the more my early adult hood was filled with more traumatic events of abuse, I couldn’t escape the hands of at least a gang guy or one of his friends, and it wasn’t because I was a stunning conversationalist, it was because to these kinds of men I don’t exist as a human being.
I was a thing to be owned and controlled, and in small ways I rebelled hurting those who had my back, and disappointing those who wanted me to “choose them”, even though I had no idea what that meant. In their heads we were fighting a war that I didn’t understand and wanted no part of, and that my friends is why people don’t come forward.
The last time I talked to a cop about what happened to me, and a psych nurse it was in the apartment hallway of my building. They asked if I knew a certain person and I said no because I genuinely did not know who they were talking about. The next week this person was found in a hotel from an apparent suicide.
Do you know how fucking easy it is to fake a suicide? I face the possibility that the men who raped me as a child and a young woman may come back and kill me any fucking day, and I wouldn’t wish this shit on my worst fucking enemy, and I have a lot of them.
Gang life is the most stressful shit you will never fully escape. Wherever I go, whatever I do, there will always be people who know exactly who did what to me, and there will always be those who remain silent out of fear it may happen to them or someone they live.
The only difference between them and me is that I refuse to be silent because as I said there are worse things than death, and I’ll be damned if I ever, ever, let another man touch my body ever again.
It won’t fucking happen, because I’m not a victim, I never was, I was a student who sat back and watched as people tried to systematically destroy themselves by destroying everyone around them, and now that I am “awake” from the trauma, I don’t have the luxury of staying silent.
Your daughters aren’t the only ones in BC that are in danger. Every single girl in this province is subject to this kind of behavior, every woman in BC knows a guy in a gang who but for the grace of God has left them alone, so far.
Unfortunately too many men and women in this province forget that there are more survivors in Surrey, British Columbia, then there are abusers, with more entering our city every single day.
I don’t know if my words in this post have inspired the women of Surrey, British Columbia and beyond to stand up and fight back yet, but I genuinely hope that I am a part of the movement that stands up to fight back when others are ready.
It’s not fair, we shouldn’t have to live life like this, we shouldn’t have to live in fear of being tortured by emotionally immature sociopaths because they have more muscles than us, or guns. We shouldn’t have to fear that we’re not safe in our own fucking homes, because of the threat of violence.
So you decide Surrey, stay silent and let it keep happening and fight back, I’ll support you whatever you decide.
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall
Loud Mouth Brown Girl 