The first time I was sexually assaulted by a man, I was 11 years old. I was on a school trip and a stranger pulled out his penis and started masturbating in front of me. I didn’t understand what he was doing and ran away, frightened and confused. I never told anyone because I thought I would be the one in trouble, and perhaps for good reason. When the same thing happened two years later, on a school trip to Germany, the teachers told us to “stop wearing your skirts so short”.
When I was 13, there were men in their twenties hanging around the school gates, waiting for their “girlfriends” to finish class. No one seemed to think this was odd and certainly no one stopped it. By 14, I was getting used to being leered at in the street, hollered at from cars, and groped by men I didn’t know in public areas. I didn’t tell anyone because I knew I’d be told to “just ignore them”, or change how I dressed. This was just what men did and everyone seemed to accept that.
By 15, I was being groomed by a married man in his thirties, and I didn’t tell anyone. I knew so many other girls my age who were also being assaulted by grown men that it was just monstrously normal. Not that we really understood that we were being abused. We told ourselves that it was “cool” and that we were being “grown up”. Sometimes, I look at the baby faces of my friend’s teenage daughters, who are the same age now that I was then, with their braces and acne, and am sickened at the very idea that this could ever be “grown up”. I learnt fast that men were predatory, but that the attention I was receiving was my fault for not avoiding it.
In the intervening 30 years, I have been assaulted, stalked, harassed, flashed at, punched, groped, cat-called, and coerced into sex by men. Sometimes by men I didn’t know, but also by those I did and whom I trusted – but my experience is not unusual. Every woman I know has been sexually assaulted and/or harassed by men, often starting in childhood. You just learn to lock it away and try to move on without ever really addressing it. If you’re a man and you don’t believe me, ask the women in your life how old she was when she first felt sexualised by men.
I’d like to think that things have changed since I was a young woman, but a 2022 investigation by UN Women UK found that 97 per cent of women aged 18-24 have been sexually harassed, with a further 96 per cent not reporting those situations because they didn’t think anything would come of it.
Recognising that virtually all women have experienced sexual abuse by men was the entire point of the “Me Too” movement. While progress has been made when it comes to acknowledging the sheer scale of victims, we are still resistant to accepting the corresponding number of perpetrators who are committing these assaults, and this is where the real work needs to happen. If almost every woman has been a victim, then that is a lot of abusers. And while it is “not all men”, it is a lot of men, and the dangerous ones don’t come with badges on. In fact, most the time, they come with smiles and offers of friendship.
Last month, CNN exposed a website where thousands of men posted content about drugging and raping their partners. This wasn’t on the dark web; it was easily accessible via Google. It was reported that the site “had around 62 million visits in February alone”. The reaction online was predictably outrage, but there were those who responded by minimising the claim and scrambled to point out that 62 million visits does not equate to 62 million men and that visits to the host website did not mean the same number were in the chatrooms where men raped their unconscious wives. As if it makes it better that it was only tens of thousands of men.
It was disappointing, to say the least, especially as the report was clear that they meant website visits, not individuals in the chatroom. Alas, this kind of deflective pivot is all too common in the reception of these kinds of stories. It is a soothing mechanism that allows people to distance themselves from culpability and to cling on to the idea that sexual abuse is not a systemic issue, rather than really let it in and acknowledge the scale of the problem women and girls are facing.
Such a position functions much like the defensive “not all men” cry that often follows the exasperation women collectively express in the wake of such cases. It interrupts and then highjacks the conversation. It centres the hurt feelings of men, while diminishing the full horror of what is being discussed. Even when there is culpability, we still see the pivot to avoid genuine accountability.
We can’t keep minimising the scale of the problem by flinching when it comes to holding men to account. Because it certainly feels like it is all men. I hope the men I meet prove me wrong, but I don’t fully trust any of them. I wish it wasn’t the case and it might be difficult to hear, but that’s what I have learnt over a lifetime of terrible experiences. When you don’t know who the abusers are, it may as well be all of them. Does it matter that it’s not all men when I am walking home alone at night? When I am being advised not to go running after dark, or on how to use my keys as a weapon?
All the men who ever hurt me were surrounded by male friends who either laughed it off or turned a blind eye. Women have done enough to raise awareness – men now need to have these conversations with one another. Call out the behaviour of friends when you know they are wrong, speak up when you see abuse occurring, and do it when no one else will see you do it.
Sexual abuse is a systemic issue in our society and overwhelmingly the perpetrators are men. I understand the kneejerk reaction to distance oneself from such horrendous statistics, but such a response only perpetuates the problem. As long as we keep being surprised and pretending abuse isn’t part of every woman’s life, we aren’t having the conversations we need to in order to stamp it out once and for all.
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