I Was Not Brutally Molested

The subtlety of non-violent control, or 'grooming'

Content Warning: This material contains explicit descriptions of childhood sexual abuse, as well as mentions of rape.

I was not brutally molested. I wasn’t hurt in any sense of the word. Not tossed onto the bed, nor pinned to it like a butterfly to a board. I did not cry, or wrestle out of his grip. In fact, my arms were entirely free of hold, and of any identifiable markings that could signal trouble. There was no force, no violence, and no tears either.

Sometimes, I was even free to say no; free to conduct negotiations and set regulations regarding the republic of my body. I could walk away at any point in time, disappear into the night. But I did not. Sometimes I came to him myself, offered up my flesh like a martyr to the rood. I paid the piper for this prudence years later, emptied all my pockets not of change, but of dignity, whilst buying milk at the checkout.

But at the time, contrary to my mother, father, or really anybody else, he answered the summons of my body with cast-iron certainty. I laid myself bare for him, seeking intimacy I knew I could only find in his spinous, imperfect hands. The very first time he touched me, I was sure, for once, that I was loved.

And yet, whilst the initial arousal felt sweetly pleasant, this sensation would quickly come to cloy the recess of my mind, consolidating into an anchor of such density, that my feet would not move a single inch from the ground for the remaining duration of the act. There I was, restrained not by his hands, but by the heaviness of my own small body.

When the moment was over, I would step out of the silence, and spring back into the flight of my fantasy, returning to the capture of butterflies or the garnering of flowers, entirely forgetting what had just transpired. Complete amnesia followed the complex succession of things felt, until it was the morrow, and I was in the same spot from before, sensing the familiar storm beneath my briefs again. Over and over, my memory store was denuded like the lowly peaches of Venetian cortigiane. Pealed, then penetrated, then tarnished, and lastly, made empty. 

I try to remember, but nothing comes. Nothing but the outline of his face, and the late afternoons of 2007 charged with both inertia and disarray. Somehow, looking back, I actually remember him with more precision than I remember my own parents, who manifest as blanks to me when I try to recall. Oftentimes, I thought of asking the sharp male-shaped point in the fog, “When will mama be here?" But the embryo of this sentence aborted on my tongue as quick as it developed, as I realised no one is going to come. 

He must’ve known before I did, knew how to be exactly who I was waiting for. 

Out of throbbing hunger, I welcomed his desires, and thus subjected myself to a life of utter misery disguised as pleasure. It was nice at first—the first few times I was suckered into sexual complicity through soupçons of confection and love.

The dolls, the candies and cake, the seemingly infinite store of kittens gifted to me, and me only. He took me to places I’d never been, which delighted me in particular. The attic I had begged my parents to open, the movies, the portion of my brain I had not yet awakened, the hidden alcove of my desires where the light never quite reached, the china cabinet that he’d opened just for me, where the sweets lay neglected like the child before them. It was simple magic for a girl like me, getting to live in the half-world of infancy and adulthood—a design whose cunning I understand only now.

Never did I see it back then, the seriality of every action, because I was a child, and because non-brutal assault is so artful. The whole ordeal is a hair-splitting subterfuge, organised to lower defences and forge closeness between not only a sexual deviant and a child, but between the deviant and the child’s ever-widening environment.

The whole world worked hand in glove with him, knowingly and unknowingly, some out of spite, some out of indifference, and others out of a desire to preserve the paradisiacal vision they had of him. The guilt and shame that was borne of these actions, and should’ve thus been experienced by them, was unfairly delegated to me. Even still, I carry on my shoulders the weight of this wretched world. Why? There’s many reasons. Grooming, collusion of society, stigma surrounding sexuality. But mainly, because the words are on my mouth.

Child and Sex in the same sentence. The iniquity is ​​irrefutable, the disgust obvious. Survival is mistaken for agency; silence for consent; me for a willing participant.

Everybody wants an uncomplicated scene: an overt extravaganza of villainy; an obvious white-lily victim. Except there is no violence to point to, no shattered glass or bloodshed, just me and the confession that, yes, I did take the sweets, and yes, I did agree to being touched. And yes, as sickening as it is, I did like it. 

But I was also three or four years old; perfectly confused and desirous of attention. How was I to distinguish hurt from love, when it was handed to me in the same wrapping? 

This horror is much too hard for people to understand. And it’s even harder for a child. That’s the simple tragedy—the ambivalence of it all.

“That’s one of the reasons it’s so confusing for children. Everybody wants to believe it’s like sexual assault and you’re being thrown up against a wall and being raped, and I have said for years, if the abuser is any good, you won’t even know it’s happened […] If the abuser is any good, he or she is going to make you feel like you’re a part of it.” 

–Oprah Winfrey, in ‘Oprah Winfrey Presents: After Neverland.’

In all this, I question if he was an evil master of a Catenaccio plot or just a sufferer subconsciously implicating a child in his crimes so he could sleep at night. Maybe he was confused as I was. Or maybe not. I still don’t know. The only thing I know is that I was not brutally molested, and somehow, that’s what’s so brutal about it.