“She” Is Not A Rat, A Bitch, A Goof, A Slut, Whore, or Any Other Horrible Word You Can Come Up With

I am watching Good Girls right now on Netflix, great show about women trying to take their lives back by doing shady shit.

There’s a creepy grocery store manager who makes a comment about “girls like her,” and all I can think is….in 2021, there are men in this world who still think like this.

When I was surrounded by guys who did shady shit, I didn’t hang out with them because I had nowhere to go, I enjoyed their company, and at the end of the night, I went home, almost always by myself, rather happy with how the night had turned out.

Had a few drinks, had a few laughs, went home, got up, went to work, and lived my life.

And then I got gang raped again, and suddenly everything changed. Every conversation I had ever had suddenly had a different context, every person that I met suddenly had a different amount of influence on my life.

Suddenly everything that I thought was true, had a totally different spin on it. Today, (yesterday) I wrote a blog post about gang life and girls, and it got me to thinking, and so I started making phone calls about where I could find help if I was a girl wanting to escape a gang.

There isn’t anything. There are no verifiable programs across the province, to help girls and young women escape gang life, and for the few of us who have escaped, it’s exactly what they tell you it’s going to be in the rooms.

• Jails
• Institutions
• Death

When I came forward they called me crazy, they said I was psychotic, they put my journals in an evidence locker somewhere never to be seen again, and then they had me committed, repeatedly, until I stopped talking to them about it.

They put me on medications, they tried to deny my claims, and all these years later I am still here saying the same thing: There is no help for girls who are in gangs and want to get out.

And when they look like they might try to leave:

• They are beaten up and told they deserved it
• They are lied about
• They are gangraped
• They are forced to miscarry their children through violence because “they don’t deserve to have babies,” with the person they care about.

All these horrible things happen to girls who live in gang life, and many of those girls wanted nothing to do with it to begin with.

Here’s a list:

• I expected that when you said I love you, you meant it.
• I expected that when you said you would protect me, you meant it.
• I expected that when you said I was safe with you, you meant it.
• I expected that when you said you loved her, you meant it enough to not use her face as a punching bag.
• I expected that when you were warned that girl you were messing with, was not someone to be trifled with, you wouldn’t rob your boss and then blame her, because she chose not to be with you anymore.
• I expected that when the mother of your children has decided she’s had enough of your bullshit, you didn’t throw her under the bus and tell everyone who thinks they know her, that she’s a slut, or a whore.

I expected that when you decided to try and be a “gangster” you meant so that you could get OFF the fucking streets.

All these white and Indian men running around with guns across the lower mainland want so badly to be like 2Pac, Biggie Smalls and DMX, and the one thing that these three men are fucking dead.

I expected that when the province was dolling out millions of dollars for anti-gang programs, they were actually developing anti-gang programs that were doing something to help the women and girls trying to escape games.

When I was in a kid in the 90s, there was an underground railroad for women and girls who were escaping domestic violence situations, but as a young woman living in a city filled with gang violence, I have no idea how to contact those women if I want to escape.

I know that I am putting a target on my back by posting this, but let’s face it, I’ve been doing that since I started this website.

“The Most Famous Gangsters In the World Are Covers For The Most Dangerous Men In The World.” You don’t have to be famous to be a part of a gang, and you sure as hell do not have to be well known to be a threat to those around you.

I am so tired. And for years I thought it was depression, I thought it was anxiety, I thought it was fear, I thought it was all the things that come with having to spend the majority of my life just barely trying to survive, until I could become the person that “I” want to be.

I am finally here, in this place where I am looking down at the ashes of what remains of what I used to be, sorry for the long winded comparison but it works, and I am realizing that it didn’t have to be violent, it didn’t have to be evil, I didn’t have to spend every night of my life smiling when I wanted to scream, cry, and throw up at all the times men thought it was okay to sexually abuse me, in private and in public.

We were kids once, who were sexually abused by grown men, pretending to be the kinds of gangsters that kids are taught to be afraid of, and then we grew up, and then some of us tried to carve a life out for ourselves and others died in a hotel room with a needle in their arms, while the man they love rots behind jail bars.

Or worse, they are stuck with children, and I say stuck only because, men in gangs have a disgusting habit of getting women pregnant on purpose, in order to control them, not because they want to be partners or because they want to raise children, but because they want to make sure the girls cannot leave.

Time and time again, girls see a cute guy, and they think “he’d be fun to hang out with,” and before she knows it, she’s dragged into a world that she wanted nothing to do with, she’s drawn into violence, and secrets, lies, and hidden guns under her bed, whether she wants to or not, and when the hammer comes down, some ass hat in a doctor’s uniform tells her that she sounds psychotic when she tries to finally tell the truth.

I am tired. I am tired of being a woman in this province, I am tired of being a woman in this country.

It’s made further difficult by the fact that I am not a super cop, I am not a super anything, I am simply a woman who is looking back at al the girls I left behind, wondering if they are okay, even though we weren’t friends. We weren’t allowed to be friends, and every time we tried, they went out of their way to tell lies, to make up rumors, and to say shit so that we would turn against each other, so that they could continue to have power over us.

For years the men who raped us as children got away with it, and they are still getting away with it, because it’s easier to say that “I” am crazy, than it is to say that we have a serious problem with gangs in this province, in this country.

We Canadian’s look to America a lot, and we judge them for their problems with gangs, with drugs, and with the “war on gangs and drugs,” we judge them for their active shooter drills and honestly I am wondering what the fuck for.

Every girl that I thought was my friend back then, was a person who was trying to protect their babies. They were trying to keep their children alive, they were trying to keep their children.

There is no God, or Goddess, or Angel that will pull you out, and the ONLY time the cops give a flying fuck about your survival as a woman connected to guys and gangs, is if you have information that they can use, to take down the men they are chasing, so that they can get their names in the paper.

And that’s a fact. You as a cop may not like it, but that’s a fact that girls in gangs in the western world deal with every single day of their lives.

We are stuck between gangsters who want to own us just so that they can say that they own us, and cops that will just as easily throw us under the bus in order to make sure that their cases are protected, and the few that say they want to help, aren’t really doing anything that pushes us forward or out.

What girls need when they leave gangs is:

• A safe place to go when we finally leave
• A support network of women who have been there who get it
• A job, and an educational program that we can take to help us move forward with a new life

I was lucky in that someone named Debra decided to believe in me, and gave me the money that I needed in order to take this Certified Cannabis Educator’s course, not everyone has that kind of support.

Not every girl who is a part of a gang, wants to admit that they didn’t finish highschool because they got pregnant by a guy who only stuck around long enough for the girl to be impregnated.

Not every girl is like me, who has the kind of mom that I have, who is willing to support them the way that my mom has supported me. Lots of girls are out there laying beneath the body of a man covered in tattoos, or none at all, wondering when it’s going to be over. When he’s going to be finished so she can curl up and hide her shame.

Not every girl wants to admit that those bruises she’s hiding aren’t from “rough sex,” but she’ll laugh and nod and call herself “wifey,” while internally screaming “GET ME THE FUCK OUT OF HERE,” because that’s what she’s supposed to do.

I am tired, I am exhausted, and I am just one girl. I need an army of girls, but there are very few girls who are going to put their lives on the line, to stand beside me, when they know exactly what that means for them and their lives.

And so I will keep writing about it, and I will keep talking about it, and I will keep sharing stories, because that’s the only way that anyone is ever going to know what’s really happening behind the surface of this horrible, awful, fucking town.

At least you know you’ve had every single opportunity to have the life you’ve wanted, even if you had to fight for it, so that you can look down at the rest of us, and pretend that we’re the problem.

The girls in this town are not the problem. It’s the Doctors, cops, lawyers, judges, and “mental health professionals,” who ignore our cries for help, right before going home to those half a million dollar postage stamp apartments in the sky, to look down at the rest of us with derision, because how dare we be dumb enough to be afraid to get our faces kicked in for not wanting to spread our legs for a guy in a gang.

This is a video made to sell a grouping of condo’s down the street from my house. Down the street from where once a month, grown men and women stand in line to apply for, or receive a check from the government, so they can make it through the month.

And every single month, there are gangsters sitting out there waiting to trade those checks for drugs, and vulnerable people hand them over because they want to get high to be able to ignore the fact that their entire lives were destroyed by gangs in this city. And while Doug McCallum might want to pat himself on the back, honestly as someone who lives here I can honestly say this town is full of bullshit.

Gangs are destroying this town, and they are destroying this town because before the men who are in gangs now were men, grown ass men came before them, and made children do horrible things to survive.

It’s time we start recognizing that fact.

Sending all my love,

Devon J Hal