No matter who you are, people think that they know who it is that you want to be, and they will spend entire lifetimes trying to convince you that you have to be the one thing that they demand you be, instead of the person you were born to be.
There are a lot of people who think they understand me, because what I call “rape” they call “sex”, but the thing that I’ve spent a lifetime learning to understand is that “rape” and “power”, words that we use to describe heinous crimes, do not often go hand in hand.
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein
There is not a survivor alive who doesn’t know who raped them, they know every detail that matters, and if the cops actually took the time to listen to the horror stories of survivors, they would understand that the one thing that every single survivor on this planet wants, is for it to stop.
It’s super easy to say “well he was abused to,” yes, but then he became the abuser. When you make the deliberate conscious choice to become the thing that the person sitting right in front of you is absolutely terrified of you becoming, then you’ve made a choice. You. Made. A. Choice.
Victims and survivors of abuse didn’t choose to be abused, even if a girl says “well I like rough sex,” that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true. Everyone likes sex better when it’s a little gritty, but that doesn’t mean that she wants to have her soul ripped out of her body by the trauma that comes with men and women choosing to hear the word “no” as “I’m just saying no so you’ll go harder and make it worse, because I really like it.“
When I was about 13 I went to a Backstreet Boys concert, and it was the worst concert of my life, largely because I couldn’t hear a damned thing and I fell asleep, and even there with my mom’s best friend sitting next to me, I wasn’t safe. Yeah she stopped it, but it still happened. A grown ass man grabbed my breast, while his daughter was sitting right next to him.
When we left we walked past the busses that would carry the boys to their next show and I thought “maybe one day I’ll be in a place where I feel safe.”
I’m still not there. I don’t know what it’s going to take, but what I absolutely know to be true, is that I am never going to get there by waiting on everyone else to realize that I am always right.
Less than 10 percent of sexually abused children are abused by a stranger. The younger the victim, the more likely it is that the abuser is a family member. Of those molesting a child under six, 50 percent were family members.
What the cops and statistics don’t take into consideration are the people who know their victims, because of the adults in the lives of the victims.
About 93 percent of children who are victims of sexual abuse know their abuser. –YWCA
There were a lot of adults that I had never met before, never even seen before, who knew my family, who abused me, purely because they knew that I existed, and sometimes that’s all it takes.
The idea that people are shocked when someone is identified as an abuser is absolute bullshit. People know, people ALWAYS know, but they choose not to say something because they feel the need to prioritize their safety over the safety of the children living upstairs.
I spent years trying to figure out why my downstairs neighbor would just remain silent when she heard things going on upstairs, and then it hit me, it wasn’t because she was a victim, it’s because she made a choice, a choice that made her a lot of money.
Sometimes all it takes is knowing that once the dust settles, those who know what they have to do, will do what they need to do, to make sure that victims will feel safe.
But if you are unwilling to sit and listen to the fact that horrible, awful, evil things, happened to a child, who became an adult, who found a way to survive, then why the fuck are you a cop?
George Floyd died because a cop decided he wanted to kill a man, he killed a man because he was a pathetic goof who had probably spent his entire life feeling like people, places, and things, would make him feel more successful, more powerful, but what does that word even mean?
pow·er/ˈpou(ə)r
in: Politics Law Military Religion Physics Sport Electrical Mathematics noun
- 1.the ability to do something or act in a particular way, especially as a faculty or quality. “the power of speech”Similar:abilitycapacitycapabilitypotentialpotentialityfacultypropertycompetencecompetencyOpposite:inabilityincapacity
- 2.the capacity or ability to direct or influence the behavior of others or the course of events. “she had me under her power”
verb
- 1.supply (a device) with mechanical or electrical energy. “the car is powered by a fuel-injected 3.0-liter engine”
- 2.move or travel with great speed or force. “they powered past the dock toward the mouth of the creek”
In the comic books when a person is deeply traumatized, or seriously abused, they get super powers, as if that’s some kind of compensation. In Spiderman’s case he got bit by a spider, in Ironman’s case he nearly died in a terrorist attack. Captain America took a serum. Dead Pool was nearly suffocated to death and on and on and on.
In the case of victims of sexual abuse, we either decide that we’re going to keep suffering because it’s really a lot easier, or we’re going to get the fuck up and keep fighting.
“Trust is like a mirror, you can fix it if it’s broken, but you can still see the crack in that mother fucker’s reflection.”
― Lady Gaga
I told someone that I trusted them once, because honestly it was the lie that I needed to tell that saved my life. Turns out that it was the act of telling them that I trusted them, that saved my life.
This same person is someone that I have loved since I was fourteen, and the reason that I loved them, was because I had a dream, and like all little girls I thought that dreams were based in factual reality.
Children in particular, come to this planet expecting that the adults that they are surrounded by are going to take care of them, because what choice do we have really? There is a boy down hall who I love like…well like I would if he were my own son. He told me he trusted me once, about two minutes after spitting at his mother, and I had to explain to him why that wasn’t okay.
There is an argument to be made for the fact that maybe because of how she was failing to care for him, she might have deserved it, but the truth is that no mother on the planet deserves to have her child spit on her, and the only reason a child spits at their mother, is because that particular child doesn’t have the words to say “be better.“
I hate to admit it, I really loath to say it, but we have got to start teaching our children how to defend themselves. As a kid I really wanted to take self-defense classes, but not a single self defense class in the world is going to stop someone when they’ve drugged and beaten and raped you into submission.
So what’s the answer? Better locks? Cameras on and in every corner of the house? An army of cops standing by for every potential victim in the city to make sure that every house on the planet is safe? Sure that army might works once, but what happens when it happens again?
How many times are cops going to stand by and make sure that every adult who is afraid of her childhood abusers is going to be arrested the moment they identify themselves as a rapist who raped a child?
It’s not going to work forever, and so the only way to make sure that no one feels safe to abuse people is to make it as uncomfortable for them as possible.
Men and women who rape, do so purely because they feel powerless, they feel weak, and they want to make sure that those they abuse feel the same, and so we have to continue talking about the things that we’ve been through.
In the 90s when everyone was talking about PTSD in soldiers, no one was talking about PTSD in victims of sexual abuse, and now it’s like “oh that’s a thing? I never knew that.”
BECAUSE WE DO NOT TALK ABOUT SEXUAL ABUSE.
We don’t talk about it because we have no way of signaling to each other that we are fighting the same battles.
Stigma, Depression, Isolation, Fear, Misery, Shame, Guilt, and all the things that come with the fact that you survived and other’s did not.
The fact that you survived is not a bad thing, it feels like a bad thing because BEFORE the abuse you know exactly what you want to do, and how you want to do it, and then you get thrown off track by the fact that you have been abused.
Often times when this happens, it’s largely because of people who THINK they are trying to help, when in this particular reality, all they are doing is making things worse, and then going out of their way to ensure you never knew they were trying to help. They gaslight you into believing that you’re crazy, when in reality you know exactly when, where, who, and how.
I’ve been watched a long, long time, mostly by abusers, this website was my answer to that. I figured if my abusers were going to continue to stalk and harrass me while refusing to let me get the evidence to prove it, because of how careful they THOUGHT they were being, I was going to put myself out there so that even if the people at CTV wouldn’t listen to me, or the RCMP, or the fucking Mayor’s office, at least those of you who read this blog would.
When I say that Loud Mouth Brown Girl is for everyone, I do mean that’s for Brown girls, mixed race girls, Asian girls, any girl across the world has been abused, but at the end of the day it’s mine and no one else in the entire existence of life, gets to claim it but me.
That being said, to all of the people who stepped up this past week to try and show me that I was completely out of order, that I didn’t know what I was talking about thank you. Thank you for reminding me that I am exactly who I want to be, and no matter how many times you try to take my place, or tell me that you “need receipts to prove it happened,” I know it happened.
If more than 20 years ago when cops crashed through my backyard to find a guy breaking into houses had waited another 15 minutes, they would have found the men who showed up after to rape me for hours on end for days and weeks out of a year I barely remember.
15 minutes would have made a huge difference, and the reason that they didn’t have15 minutes to wait, is the exact same reason that a few years later when I tried to report a sexual assault, I inadvertently walked into the house of the husband of the person who set it all up, after being abused by a group of men I was specifically told to wait for.
What I went through, what I talked about on Big Red’s podcast Life in Red, recently, was the kind of shit that most CIA agents couldn’t survive, but I am 38 years old and I am still here. BECAUSE I am still here, I know very well what it means to “survive,” and while other people who see my life think that I am merely trying to get from one day to the next, the truth is that I am back on track now, BECAUSE I made damned sure to protect myself.
That’s what it means to be a survivor, we protect ourselves at any and all costs, purely because we know damned well no one else will until they have to.
Make sure you don’t have to. Talk to your children about sexual abuse, talk to your kids about measures designed to prevent abuse from happening. Go the fucking Dollar Store and pick up some window and door locks, and for the love of Christ, make sure that your children know that they don’t have to spit on you, to get your attention.
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall
Loud Mouth Brown Girl 