To Speak or Not to Speak

This Week’s Bit of String: Crying at the Office

On Wednesday I woke from a nightmare just in time to get ready for work. I stayed in bed for a minute, horror seeping through me. But then the lesser stresses of sorting myself and my family for the morning urged me along, and the milder worries of roadwork delays distracted me from my greater panic.

At the office, an email awaited telling me how wrong my calculations were on a complex project that was new to my team. I’d had to find my way with only basic guidelines. The message, with several iterations in bold about how my work was incorrect, stung me and I fled to the bathroom. I could not stop crying.

Ridiculous, I thought. What an overreaction to a critical yet instructive email. That’s when I remembered my nightmare, and my surroundings began to resemble it. The wood grain of the door like 1980s bedroom panelling. The footsteps outside. Then I was really crying.

How could something from three hours ago distress me so much, when I’d been perfectly fine in between? Why didn’t I run out and get one of my lovely colleagues to help?

See Something, Say Something

On Monday I’d read an article about Terry Crews and his fight to be believed regarding a sexual assault he suffered. He continually faces speculation: “Why didn’t you use those big muscles to defend yourself?” “You’re not still upset about that, are you?”

It’s not unlike what Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford dealt with when she testified about her alleged assault from years earlier. “Why are you speaking up now?” “If it was so awful, why didn’t you report it to the police then?”

I’ve had my own experiences, at a younger age and with more trusted loved ones and without breaking away in time. It’s still not something I choose to talk about. The only reason I do now is to answer these questions—first, by flipping them around.

Crouching figure with the subtitle "Illumination"
Papercut art during Window Wanderland in Easton, Bristol

Would you tell someone? Honestly? When you cry, do you like people to watch? Do you want to be witnessed in pain, undressed, or helpless? When you suffer humiliation or betrayal, do you stride up to someone and let them know it happened, be it someone you admire or a stranger in authority? Congratulations if you answered yes to any of those questions. But I doubt many people are truly equipped to do so, especially as a child.

I can’t think of any other crisis after which we mercilessly interrogate the person who survived it. War veterans who hold down jobs and raise kids and reveal decades later the horrors they saw when fighting on the beaches or liberating concentration camps—I certainly hope they’re not greeted with, “Why didn’t you tell us this before? Why should we believe you now?”

When someone dies, we don’t issue their loved ones detailed instructions on how to respond. Have you cried enough? Have you lost your appetite and fasted?  You’re not going to step out of the house without wearing black, are you?

I know sexual assault is a crime and must be reported to protect others. But that perspective is lacking when you’re little. Furthermore, how does society reconcile its accusations of “Wait, that’s what you were wearing? Don’t you think you must have led him on?” with “How could you not tell? Didn’t you realise he’d hurt someone else?” When survivors are shamed for their clothing or behaviour, the incident is implied to be a one-off and there’s no one else to protect.

Calling for Help

It’s not just questions we face when coming forward. After we tell, there are executive decisions made over our heads, of which facility to send us to for “recovery,” of which people we’re now too damaged to be allowed near. And the assumptions that we’ll never be quite right, sometimes viewing us as so tainted by our experiences people presume we’d perpetrate them on younger children. And the vulnerability marking us as targets for other perpetrators.

If someone’s first response to me is, “Did you call for help?” the effect lingers, even if they recover with the standard offering “It wasn’t your fault.” By examining my actions first, they’re assessing my responsibility.

I understand where they’re coming from. They’re actually analysing themselves, wondering, “Would I scream?” When we hear a story, we imagine ourselves as the victim, not the aggressor, because most of us aren’t sexual assaulters. And when someone who hasn’t been through sexual assault hears from someone who has, they’re probably trying to reassure themselves they’d find a way out. When I read stories about genocide, I instinctively wonder, “How would I cope with this? Would I find a way to protect my family?” If I meet a Rohingya or Srebrenica or Rwanda survivor though, I’m not going to blurt, “Couldn’t you have just run away?”

The reasons people might not fight or call for help during a sexual assault are, I surmise, similar to reasons an entire group of people under threat of genocide don’t manage to escape. There’s trust in authority. We are happy to believe we don’t need help; we want to believe we can reason or charm our way through. Then perhaps there’s humiliation, as our rights or clothing are stripped away. There may be carefully planted ideas that no one is available to help. There may be shame and allusion to religious standards. Elizabeth Smart, once a victim of kidnapping and abuse, describes the effects of fear and shame really well. This article about her also has a great quote from survivor Natascha Kampusch on the subject.

Given our knowledge of history, surely it’s indisputable that hell-bent, harmful people exist. Say there’s a needy, greedy perpetrator versus a victim who’s either unsuspecting or has been hurt so many times they think the deserve it. In these cases, the former’s will to exert control overpowers the latter’s will to resist.

In my nightmare early Wednesday morning I went through it all over again, helpless and stuck. But instead of silently regrouping as I did in real life, in my dream I went to find my mother. She was sound asleep, and I crawled up next to her and made myself whisper what had happened. Because my subconscious knows, now, what you’re supposed to do. What everyone says you should have done. But I was desperately hoping she wouldn’t hear.

This was partly to protect her, partly to protect him, partly to preserve my reputation, partly to keep my secret which was the last semblance of control the trauma left me. Those are the reasons.

It’s like when I was hiding in the office bathroom. I sort of wanted someone to notice I was gone and offer a kind word—but I didn’t want them to see me crying. I mean, would you?

And then when the waterworks finally stopped, I went back to my desk and did a tonne of work without any wish to revisit it. I mean, wouldn’t you?

If you’ve had to face similar questions, or if you feel this has helped answer some you might occasionally pose, please do share.

3 thoughts on “To Speak or Not to Speak”

  1. So much rings true. It must be difficult to bring up what’s bothering you, out of the blue and in a work context. Perhaps writing this has been helpful?

    As a student, I managed the relatively minor trauma of someone following me for the one purpose of exposing himself and masturbating, by talking about it a lot. The idea that he was ‘a flasher’ made it seem funny to some people: ‘Why didn’t you poke him with your umbrella?’ etc. Luckily there were also people who understood how far something that happened so unexpectedly one Saturday morning when I was walking back from the corner shop could throw me off balance right before my finals.

    I think you’re very wise to indicate that when people are responding they are often rehearsing their own survival in that situation. What would they do? Surely there would be something. To admit that a person can’t always ‘do something’ at the time is to admit how vulnerable we all are. People want to feel safe and strong and so they tell other people that they have put themselves in danger or were too weak. In fact, it can take a great effort to speak up after the fact and go through it all again.

    If we admit that trauma could happen to any of us, then we can at least be ready to listen and try to support a person who needs to tell their story, even if the details are still too difficult to divulge!

    1. Thank you for your thoughts, Maria! Yes, I found it helpful to formulate a logical argument. And I definitely can imagine how your experience must have affected you, especially during finals. I’m glad you did have some people you could talk to, and that it helped.

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