Writing work

I've been experimenting a lot with the boundries of writing, learning about traditional and non-traditional journalism and it's purpose as well as ethics around this. Storytelling has always been deeply important to me as has the importance of recording using language. Both with my mentor (Rosel Jackson-Stern) and on my own I've been exploring my own stroies and stories that are most important to me in different ways. I have been researching and developing a feature article on what it is actually like to live in a safe house (having personal experience with domestic abuse and working in a safe house as well as friends in safe houses). This has been most challenging - finding ways that I can tell these stories in the way that honours them and those experiences (which challenges some traditional journalism methods. I also used my own very personal raw experiences as strories to explore writing in different ways (monologue, letter writing format etc.) This was easier than with other peoples stories.

I then have begun exploring how to take those stories off the paper through audio/visual/performance. How to tell these stories to different audiences in different spaces.

One of my writing pieces I'm currently playing with:

*Content warning rape and sexual violence*

I’ve known how unsafe I am as a girl, or as a woman since I can remember. I remember unwanted looks that didn’t feel right and unwanted touches that didn’t feel right from as young as six.

I remember who in our area and streets to avoid when I went to the sweet shop with my friends. There was the man with the stick who used to follow us, but he couldn’t walk very fast so we knew we could get away from him. There were men who watched us and burnt your skin with their eyes and made you wish your legs were covered.

Only last year I met someone in my local pub who came up to me drunk and said “you are from my street aren’t you? I used to watch you when you were little with those little white socks and your lovely legs out” with a twisted smile. When he said it, my body went cold and it made me want to throw up.

I am still shocked how openly people are sexual predators.

At thirteen, I did a paper round to make some money. The man who brought me the papers warned me about a convicted serial rapist who had been released from prison and was on my route. He recommended not to deliver to his house. I did that street and missed his house, but would see him staring out the window hiding behind his purple curtain watching me.

I remember when I was fourteen going to get booze from this shop where we knew the man would sell it to us but also knew he was creepy and it felt dangerous. We would never go in alone but take it in turns to be the one to pay - nobody wanted to be the one to give him the money as he would give you the change so slowly and stroke your hand in a way that made you feel sick. Later he was found out to be a pedophile.

I got upskirted at a festival at fourteen. I was sitting with my friend having a drink in part of the field next to the woods and I suddenly realised a man in his fourties had a video camera and was filming up my skirt from only a few metres away. I remember feeling frozen and physically sick at the same time.

I used to wear skimpy clothing when I went out in my teens, catcalling was daily. I thought that it meant I was hot and although it often made me feel very unsafe, it also made me feel attractive as I saw my attractiveness based on male validation as we are taught to believe it is. When I started going to clubs and pubs I had no idea that the acts that happened almost every time I went out were sexual assault. It was what you had to put up with if you wanted to go out. You were always groped in clubs.

In my area there was also a local predator called the “beast” that everyone knew about for a while. Who he was was unknown for a while but he committed nine attacks on different women and girls. We weren’t allowed to walk into town alone at night because everyone knew he was about. My dad didn’t have a car but insisted on picking me up from parties on foot so I didn’t have to walk home late. The “beast” finally got caught and admitted the attacks. It turned out he was a local firefighter.

I was raped for the first time when I was nineteen by a drug dealer I vaguely knew. I suppressed it for years but it made me get severe depression and anxiety. During that time I became reckless and experienced a whole many more incidents and attacks as I was vulnerable. I was groomed by a trafficker in London, experienced more sexual violence and was in an abusive relationship where I experienced partner rape multiple times. I was raped again by an acquaintance when I was twenty five. I was in a better place in life and this time because it fitted the idea of rape that people imagine (as there was violence, force and I tried to fight him off), I finally acknowledged abuse and then began to deal with all the experiences I had previously suppressed. It broke me down but changed my life.

I hadn’t realised how much I had ignored throughout my life. I have been spiked, followed home, chased by a man who tried to grab me and drag me into his car at night, chased up the stairs of my flat by a man with a metal bar and had to barricade myself in my own home, had men break into my house at night, been spat at, hissed at, locked in a room, locked in a house, hit, punched and thrown on the floor. All by different men. The amount of things that have happened to me is too long to write here or to even remember.

But what actually scares me most is the amount of ‘near misses’ I have had. The times where I was close to getting raped or even murdered, and escaped.

I have had to ignore the severity of these times in order to try to feel safe. The times I managed to protect myself are the times I forgot to acknowledge. Like all women.

When I started processing all of this and speaking to other people I realised it wasn’t just me. Yes I might have experienced what some people see as more ‘extreme’ forms of assault and violence but as I began working in sexual violence services I realised how common it is. It gave me so much rage. When I spoke to my friends I realised that out of all my friends only have two female friends who haven’t experienced rape. Most women I know are only just starting to recognise and see past experiences for what they were as they too suppressed so many of their experiences to survive.

I wonder how many women are still suppressing and not engaging in experiences of sexual violence and violations because it’s too hard or because when they tried they were shut down? I wonder how many men have not noticed how common this is and minimised or ignored abuse when they have been told about it?

Since the recent highlighting of male violence in the media many women I know have gone through trauma recounting past experiences and bringing up stuff that they had ignored for years. Every woman and girl I have ever met has multiple stories. Because of our perceptions of sexual violence it is impossible to see the scale of this problem as it currently stands, but from my own experiences and from others, I know it is far more serious and severe than we can see. We know how unsafe it is. I know I may be harmed again, and experience violence again.

Every time one of my friends is followed, touched, attacked I feel the weight of the unfairness and of the collective fear and pain we have to hold and hide.