I will not try to shroud this in euphemisms or flowery language, but throughout my first relationship, I was the victim of sexual assault on multiple occasions. The perpetrator was not some stranger or random man who I met online, but instead was the boy who lay in my bed every night.
I held this secret inside my soul for the entirety of the relationship, pushing it down to the bottom of my toes. Maybe I had made it up and my memory was ballooning from the actual event? Wasn’t it my fault? When I had laid there naked, part of me believed my body was his for the taking.
But part of me kept it quiet because I repeated to myself over and over like a mantra that it had not happened. That I was being dramatic. Years later, I still battle with myself for keeping quiet, and it is something I am still grappling with to this day. I isolated myself from my family and the little friends I had.
I told them nothing of what I was dealing with just by being with him. An all-consuming fear and panic was living inside of me every day, and I covered up this anxiety with anger and isolation. It was only an entire year after the events, and after finally breaking up, that I even mentioned it to someone. The words felt like glue as they clawed their way out of my mouth.
What I am trying to say here, is that I cannot describe this boy as a monster. Because, in doing so, I allude to an image that you already have in your mind: a stereotype of a predatory, old man, or maybe a group of lads drunk at a party. What I want to tell you is that most of the boys who commit these crimes are the ones we think we love. The ones we invite into our bed over and over again, and the ones we stay with long overdue.
This relationship was something I went through at quite a young age, and because of this I believed it to be an isolated anomaly — albeit a horrible one. But over the years that followed, my close friends, cousins, and sister, all told me similar stories. Stories of boys they had trusted, and believed they loved, who had made them feel like an alien in their own body.
Most of these kinds of stories never make it to court, or to the police; most don’t even make it out our mouths. Sexual assault within relationships doesn’t fit the wider narrative of what we understand violence to be. I have spent quite a lot of time trying to process those events that happened all those years ago and, yet, my hands still shake as I write this.
Whilst I have spent countless hours trying to work out why he did it, trying to pick apart his brain, I still struggle to put the events into a specific box. Stories like mine are never black and white. They live within a blur of boundaries that don’t reveal themselves to you until a random Thursday afternoon, when you’re hit with a wave of nausea, and you feel every drop of blood sink to the bottom of your feet.
Monsters are not those confined to the shadows. They sit next to you in lectures and invite you for a pint on the weekend. They are the boys you have known since you were six.
Over half of the cases of rape, or attempted rape, are committed by partners or ex-partners. Crimes like these aren’t confined to the outskirts, the social outcasts, the incels. They happen far too often and far too close to home, so why don’t we admit it?