Justice?

You never really understand until it happens to you, the trauma that leads to sleepless nights the bruises that never quite seem to fade. The abuse you receive being called a liar having to face the friends and the family. You hear the similar stories on the news or the incident that happened at the nightclub down the road and you watched tv programmes try and portray the storyline to increase awareness and help those in need. You watch it all, and listen to the stories all with the constant thought "this could never happen to me" you say it until it does. Then you forget about the stories that you heard trying to empathise with the victim because now you are the victim and like so many others it’s your story, it’s your voice that needs to be heard and the repetition of trying to get people to understand why you feel the way that you do. You are now the one in the position who is trying to convince people that you are not the liar, that what you are saying is the truth. You no longer have to pretend to understand because now you do and the sad part about it all is that you shouldn’t have to understand because it never should have happened to you.

Now, you sit and you remember every small detail and relive every sad event of what occurred that night, you listen to the tv update the world of the court trial going on because it’s made the news, you struggle to understand how you were asking for it, you listen to the stranger in cafes sat behind you, forming their own opinions on the matter knowing full well that on that day they were not even there and they are strangers to you. People start the argument of "she was asking for it" thinking that what you were wearing was too provocative and begging for the attention of a male, making you come across that for one night you wanted a quick rustle in the sheets and that the reason you are making a "bold acquisition" is because you regret coming across as too easy.

The thing is people are so quick to take their opinion and shove it in your face, because they know that the truth in what they are hearing is too heartbreaking that it’s occurring in the world, they want to tell you what happened that night in hope that it saves you from the heartbreak of it being true. Those people that tell you how to feel don’t know that every day you are forced to remember the day that it happened and the night you spent in the shower scrubbing yourself clean in hope that it will remove the fact that what you just went through happened. They pretend and they try to understand what you went through and try to relate to how you are feeling, and it’s okay that they don’t because you were that person once, you were the person that didn’t understand. But now you are the girl that was raped. I was the girl that was raped.

My story isn’t one that you're not going to want to hear or one that comes with justice so that I have peace in my world, no it’s one of heartbreak and torture, where the victim becomes the villain and the hero is the one who committed the crime. I was just a girl who laughed and cried but now I’m the girl who made the newspaper stands sell out because the headline on the first page was the update of hottest topic of the next couple of months, I was the girl that people whispered about, I became the girl who had to ignore people’s opinions. I was no longer who I was. I became the raped girl, the girl who "that" happened too. I was the girl that no longer had a name, it was replaced by bitch, slut, whore and the most painful name of all liar.

We hold the pain of what happened with us forever, we harbor the memories in our mind and we are branded with the bruises and the cuts that will remind us about the time we lost all control and was forced, pushed and ordered to do something that was against our will. I could throw statistic’s and numbers in your direction about the number of rapists that are freed because there is not enough evidence or how they have "future potential," but that won’t help, will it? As victims, we have to live with the truth that our stories will remain locked away because of the fear that we will not be believed. My story is not a winning story, like so many others out there. I will remain a victim of a double sexual assault but I won’t let that create the person that I want to be. I will not be called "the bitch, the slut, whore or liar" I will be me.