For the longest time I felt like it was my fault. My fault for letting this man form a manipulative relationship with me, my fault for letting him groom me since I was 14 years old, my fault for not realizing he was just using me, my fault for being so lonely that I kept in contact with him for so long, my fault for needing attention.

And of course, my fault for taking the photos.

I found out I was a victim of what’s commonly called “revenge porn” in 2015, when a friend informed me that someone had been using my photos for a fetish Twitter account that shared links of fake profiles with my face and body on them. The account also actively encouraged people to share my images and make up horrific stories about them.

Through tracing the IP addresses of some of the images, we discovered they were posted by a man I’d been in a sometimes flirtatious off-and-on friendship with since I was a teen, who I was never physical with and had only met once.

At that point, the law for “revenge porn” in the UK had only been around for four months. It covers the sharing of images showing people engaged in sexual activity or depicted in a sexual way or with their genitals exposed, with those convicted facing a maximum sentence of two years in prison.

Should Women Trust Facebook With Their Nude Selfies?
theestablishment.co

Victims and others are able to report offences to the police to investigate, which I promptly did. But when a case officer came to see me after I reported this violation, and I explained to her in detail what had happened, her response stunned me.

“Well I guess you’ve learned your lesson now then.”

She treated my case as possession and distribution of underage images, believing that this couldn’t legally be “revenge porn” because I was never technically in a relationship with the man who did this to me.

After that initial visit, I sat on the sofa in a state, crying profusely and fearing for my safety, convinced I deserved to die. If the police didn’t see me as a victim, then who would?

It turned out, the answer was very few.

After sharing my story on websites like Elite Daily and Huffington Post, the onslaught of negative comments I received forced me to spend hours in bed, unable to get up. Many people agreed that it was my fault, and that if I hadn’t taken the photos in the first place, this never would’ve happened.

When my colleagues found out, they very quickly went from not understanding and not really caring to cracking blithe jokes. My manager even said that “it was as if she worked with a porn star now.” I quit that job a few months later, when my depression intensified.

My experience as a victim destroyed my life. It triggered severe depression, anxiety, and social anxiety. I no longer felt worthy of anything — friends, family, love, or life. I was suicidal.

My pain was rooted in the humiliation and degradation of the act itself, of course. But it also stemmed from feeling like I was at fault for my own victimhood. And so much of that, I think, has to do with the way my experience was framed.

My experience as a victim destroyed my life.
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What the courts and media call “revenge porn” is defined as “the sharing and publicizing of sexual images with the intention to embarrass.”

The dictionary’s definition of the word “revenge” is “the action of hurting or harming someone in return for an injury or wrong suffered at their hands.”

To contextualize this issue in terms of “revenge” is, plain and simple, to resort to victim-blaming. It says it right in the first word: This crime is something that somebody is doing in return for being wronged. The perpetrator, it’s implied, has cause to retaliate.

This framework plays into broader efforts to blame women for the violent actions of men. The refrain of she asked for it fuels those who dismiss women who are raped (her skirt was too short, she flirted too much, she should never have been in that situation), domestically abused (she was too obstinate, she should’ve left him), and on and on. This ideology can most recently be seen powering the “incel” movement, which suggests women deserve to be hurt for not offering sex to any man who wants it.

Like all those women unfairly blamed, I did nothing to ask for what happened to me. Nor did my experience stem from revenge. The story of my perpetrator was, instead, a familiar one: A despicable man did something despicable to me because he thought he could get away with it.

There is, moreover, nothing I possibly could’ve done to warrant his response. Even if there is a messy break-up, a scorned ex-lover, pain, hurt, anger, jealousy — that does not give anybody the right to retaliate via degradation, just as no one should ever have the right to resort to any violent act. (If somebody was to commit a murder because they felt betrayed by that person, would we call it a “revenge murder”? Should there be “revenge assaults”?)

Instead of acting like this act is some sort of tit-for-tat situation between attacker and victim, I ask that we call this crime what it is: image-based sexual abuse. Maybe that way more victims will come forward when this has happened to them, rather than feel like it’s their fault, and that they are too at blame to report it.

I ask that we call this crime what it is: image-based sexual abuse.
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Since sharing my story, many women (and a small number of men) have contacted me. Many have discussed how they, too, have been blackmailed by exes regarding intimate photos of themselves — some even felt unable to leave their current partner because their partners had threatened to share photos or videos if they left them.

I’ve given them as much advice as I can give, sending them helpful links to supportive websites like the Revenge Porn Helpline and Victim Support, and tried to lend an ear.

Most have expressed feeling isolated, believing they couldn’t tell their family or friends because it was embarrassing and shameful and their fault, fearing that others would judge them.

But it is not their fault, and it was not mine.

We are not the recipients of revenge porn. We are the victims of image-based sexual abuse. It’s time we be treated as such.

“Something softens me
Softens my desire
Something helps me breathe
Something spills out my pores as light
Something
Is like hope blanketing me
Something bleeds as me…”
– excerpt from ‘So the Second Thing I Bought Was a Mirror’ by Aisha Sasha John

I come from a culture where talking about most things are taboo.

(Insert trope about conservative Asians here.)

So when I first moved to the U.S. close to a decade ago, I was surprised by how easily the topic of sex came up in everyday conversation. And I had moved here from England, by the way.

I heard coworkers go into graphic detail about fetishes, brand-new friends disclose fantasies that I wouldn’t to my oldest friends, and get casually asked about my boudoir habits over coffee.

What wasn’t — and still isn’t — brought up, was money.

I’d get quickly diverted if I asked what a job would pay, shot down if I asked for more money, and told in the most (condescendingly) surprised of tones, what a “good negotiator” I was when I did.

But not talking about money only works for one set of society; cisgendered white men.

When womxn are considered impolite for asking for what we want, what we deserve, or what the white man next to us is making, we’re accepting a world where only certain people deserve to make what they’re worth. So they can be nonchalant about it.

I don’t need to tell you how power structures are dictated by money.

And I won’t insult your intelligence by reminding you that “women make XX cents to a white man’s dollar.”

But I will ask you this: if it’s polite to talk about that weird thing the guy you met on Tinder did in bed, then why the hell can’t we talk about how much money you make?

With love + solidarity,
Ruchika Tulshyan
Founding Editor

When Your Medical Treatment Depends On Your Race

By Cici Zhang

In a bone marrow search, most people try their families first.

But 70% end up looking for a match among strangers.

Because there are fewer minority donors in the registry, it’s harder for minority patients to find a match.

According to statistics, black people have a 66% likelihood of finding a matched, available donor in the registry. It’s 97% for white people.

As with everything, race matters as much in sickness as in health.

How ‘Fresh Off the Boat’ Upends The Asian BFF Trope
By Andrea Ruggirello

Growing up, when I saw any Asian woman or girl on TV, even as an extra, my head would snap to attention.

Even if I didn’t consciously think about representation at the time, the lack of Asian characters was obvious, and made me internalize our invisibility even more.

As a Korean adopted into a white family, the characters I saw on TV were some of the most intimate looks I had at Asian American family life.

Living in a mostly white neighborhood, my friendships mirrored those I saw on TV — friendships like Rory Gilmore and Lane Kim’s on Gilmore Girls or, later, Meredith Grey and Cristina Yang’s on Grey’s Anatomy; I, too, was the only Asian friend among a group of white peers.

Similar to the trope of the “sassy black friend,” the Asian BFF is an often-tokenized attempt to include a person of color on screen.

The Asian BFF rejects her Asian heritage, and the character’s identity revolves around attempts to emulate whiteness.

IF YOU LIKE WHAT YOU SEE, PLEASE CONSIDER SPONSORING A STORY FOR US!

What #MeToo Looks Like When You’re In Recovery

By Claire Rudy Foster

A woman’s treatment for addiction shouldn’t require her silence about sexual abuse.

The culture of silence and “anonymity” that surrounds recovery is harmful to women, and allows leaders, elders, and trusted community members to prey on women with little fear of repercussions.

There’s a commonly held myth that the wrongs committed before getting sober don’t count. Victims of harassment or assault are told to pray for their attackers, rather than report them.

Some are encouraged to “see their part” in the attack, or try to reframe sexual assault as a spiritual gift, a gateway to growth.

Noah Levine, a recovery leader who is accused of sexual misconduct said, “We all sort of have a different doorway to dharma or spiritual practice. Suffering is a doorway.”

For women, that doorway is often sexual assault.

What Happens When Four Anti-iPhone, Salty-Ass Texan Women Argue About Cats

By Andrea Grimes

They say that smartphones are tearing us apart. That technology is building walls, not tearing them down. That the internet makes us dumber.

Not in my family. In my family, the presence of a goofy ole gal named Siri has fundamentally, and forever, changed us. For the better.

Every family has its special holiday traditions and quirks. Some folks all wear matching pajamas for Christmas morning, others all share a beloved pancake or latke recipe, or escape to their favorite skiing locale.

My family argues about facts.

Lead image: Unsplash/Olga Delawrence

Every day this fall, as push alert after push alert described another powerful man’s history of sexual abuse, I turned to the women.

To the stories of victims, yes, but also to the stories and work of women whose voices, over the years, had managed to transcend the forces determined to ensure their silence. Reading Maggie Nelson’s lyrical meditations on motherhood or Michelle Alexander’s unparalleled text on mass incarceration allowed me to live in a world where women could be the final voices dictating our culture’s conscience.

I was able to carve out a small world—a refuge, rather — away from the news’ daily re-traumatization. It gave me the strength to read these harrowing stories of abuse and focus on the power of bringing these experiences out of darkness, rather than succumbing to despair.

Among the women I chose was Anne Sexton, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and guiding light for the mentally ill. Her poetry pulses with confession and feminine rage, a welcome change from the disingenuous apologies and intellectualized discussions of pain that were permeating public discourse around sexual assault.

She won the Pulitzer in 1967 for her book Live or Die, which was released in 1966. At the time, she was only the tenth female poetry winner in the Prize’s 50-year history. Her poetry illuminated the powerful complexes within relationships and psyches during a time when Western culture was beginning to acknowledge the darkest parts of its own structure. Between the Civil Rights movements and the Cold War, with the horrors of the Holocaust still reverberating through contemporary life, the West was confronting myriad monsters of its own making.

Sexton’s poetry was marked by this same energy, but turned that gaze inward.

As a result, she also had the rare luxury of receiving cultural praise and support as she produced her work; Sexton’s power was not lost on her contemporaries. She was a true poetry star. Her poems themselves spoke of marriage, suicide, love, Sylvia Plath, and, perhaps most potently, about her daughter Linda Gray Sexton.

By speaking to Linda directly, her roles as parent and artist intertwine and we can read the powerful bond between mother and daughter. The mother as protector and shepherd; the daughter as an individual and psychic extension.

In one example, the poem “Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman,” Sexton writes:

“What I want to say, Linda,
is that women are born twice.
If I could have watched you grow as a magical mother might, if I could have seen through my magical transparent belly, there would have been such ripening within…”

Her poems to Linda depicted a mother cherishing her daughter and seeing her as a woman in a world that has a tendency to abuse them.

In another poem—”Pain for a Daughter”—she writes of an unspecified daughter. It is perhaps Linda or her other daughter, Joyce, or even just the idea of a child — and that daughter’s existential burden.

“Oh my God, help me! Where a child would have cried Mama!
Where a child would have believed Mama!
She bit the towel and called on God
and I saw her life stretch out…
I saw her torn in childbirth,
and I saw her, at that moment, in her own death and I knew that she
knew.”

Sexton is able to trace her daughter’s transition into the chaos of life as well as articulate her premonitions of what was to become a lifelong grief. The personal and intimate demonstrations of love in her work touched and invigorated me. Even when Sexton wrote about isolation and terror, her words served as a potent and tangible reminder that a depth of spirit and a courting of resilience could counter that fear.

But as I read more poems, I sought out Sexton’s story, and discovered she sexually abused Linda. The tender, passionate, and illuminating words I had carried so tightly in my heart was radiating from someone who committed one of the darkest acts of humankind. I reeled from the new information. My affection towards her poetry began rotting under my skin.
The story of abuse first became public in the early ‘90s. Sexton had spent a significant amount of time in intensive therapy and all her sessions were recorded. Dr. Michael Orne—the psychiatrist who made the tapes—eventually released them to Diane Wood Middlebrook, who included the information on the abuse in her 1991 National Book Award-nominated biography of Sexton.

The inclusion of the tapes elicited concern and outcry from the psychiatric community at the time. In a New York Times article leading up to the book’s release, a Columbia professor and expert on medical ethics described Dr. Orne’s actions as a “betrayal of his patient and his profession.”

In the Los Angeles Times, Dr. William Webb, an ethics consultant for the American Psychiatric Association at the time, said, “Unless you have the explicit approval of the patient, then you are essentially operating on supposition, and supposition puts at risk all future patients of psychiatry.”

Publicizing the contents of Sexton’s therapy sessions was both unethical and illuminating. It contextualized her poems on depression, mania, and suicide and told stories of extramarital affairs. It also, crucially, revealed the abuse she committed against her daughter, Linda Gray Sexton, the very same Linda to whom she wrote that women are born twice.

It was also abuse that Sexton, at the time, didn’t believe was abuse. In Middlebrook’s biography, Linda explains a time when she attempted to establish boundaries between herself and her mother. Middlebrook wrote that Sexton “resisted the changes,” and “reported to Linda that her psychiatrist said there could never be too much love between parent and child.”

Linda lived as an avatar to Sexton’s desires.

The tender words I had carried so tightly in my heart was radiating from someone who committed one of the darkest acts of humankind.
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And yet, Linda is one of the people who believed it was appropriate to release the therapy tapes. At the time, she had already become her mother’s literary executor. She consented to revealing the truth of her mother’s past — including stories of abuse directed at her — to the world. She took to the New York Times Book Review to add context to why she chose to allow the tapes to become public. She spoke about the events not to shed light on her history of pain but, instead, because “these aspects would be critical to understanding her poetry, so clearly inspired by the events of her life.”

“Anne Sexton never spared her family — not in her art, not in her life,” Linda went on to say.

It’s her art — the confessional, depressive, feminine poetry — that also allowed American culture to keep Anne Sexton in the pantheon of poetic greatness despite the realities that unfolded during her life.

With every topple of an artistic great, with every revelation that a creative genius has used their power to abuse another, we lose something. But it is not just the joy of enjoying their art—which is where many people focus their grief—but the loss of the victim’s potential to create. And because the statistics of rape and sexual assault demonstrate how the danger predominantly affects women and trans and nonbinary people, the victims’ whose potential we lose are the very groups who remain profoundly underrepresented in art.

How many people have lost the opportunity to change the world—to shape it with their creativity—because an abuser had traumatized them and forced their dreams to give way to suffocation?

And how many people rationalized their own suffering because an abuser’s art served as justification to give up their own body, story, soul?

Linda speaks of her own abuse as cursory information to the real story, the genius of her mother’s words. She gives her own self away for the sake of a poet who writes at the altar of personal confession. The story of her life remains caged by the trauma she experienced.

In the aforementioned Times Book Review essay, Linda said:

“To speak publicly of my mother’s sexual abuse of me was agonizing. Yet as I read through the nearly completed manuscript, I began to recognize that — as with everything in my mother’s life — her daily life was inextricably bound to her work…The only way to transcend the hurt is to tell it all, and to tell it honestly.”

And yet, when she writes her own memoir in 1994, the story is of how she survived, thrived, hurt, and loved as Anne Sexton’s daughter. As much as Linda works and writes to rid herself of the pain, she is not free of its existential weight on her narrative. Sexton’s poetry may offer its readers freedom from isolation—and it may have offered Sexton herself freedom from some of her darkest impulses—but her work and her life controlled Linda’s long after she died.

Facing the realities of Sexton’s actions, I felt my heart selfishly and hypocritically grip even tighter onto the poetry I had read. It is far easier to reject the art of a man who so clearly takes up more space than needed. Rejecting one of a few women who managed to dominate a world intent on shutting women out felt like an act of self-inflicted pain.

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How many people have lost the opportunity to change the world because an abuser had traumatized them?
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When there is little room for the art of women or people of color, the exceptional artist who manages to climb to the top takes on an air of untouchability. We don’t want to examine our heroes.

Toppling a woman, however abusive she is, feels final. Like a death. Believing Sexton to be a voice I couldn’t sacrifice, though, and therefore ignoring her real-life actions, is a more vicious act than forsaking her. It reflects the scarcity mentality of a culture that props up abusers, and, more broadly, a culture that props up oppression.

Rather than looking to the countless other poets who have written work that could speak to me, I found myself wanting to justify her specific words in my life, as if they held some special power no one else could provide. I was operating in the zero-sum game oppression fools us into believing is the only way to live.

One of art’s greatest powers stems from making the invisible visible; the intangible tangible. But when an artist renders another person invisible, and their feelings intangible, the virtue of the art ceases to exist.

To pride an artist’s art over their human interactions is the pinnacle of self-absorption — it privileges that in which we see ourselves, rather than the empathy to see another human being. Before letting go of Sexton’s work, I was claiming my feelings of reflection and connection took primacy over the suffering of another human being. But the accolades for and popularity of Sexton’s poetry means she wasn’t alone in her feelings, and in turn, neither are we; as such, we do not need to identify with an abuser in order to legitimize our psychic realities.

Looking to an abuser’s art denies any other work the opportunity to move us, affect us, and change our lives. It is communing around something with hatred at the center of its core — hatred for others, hatred for ourselves — and keeps culture trapped in a horror of its own making.

Sexton’s story is ultimately one of destruction; she died by suicide at age 45.

Her abuse towards others was inextricably linked in her own irreconcilable pain, and it’s possible her art really was enough of an emotional outlet to prevent an earlier suicide or further abuse towards others. But to elevate it outside the realm of humanity and separate it from the hands that created it implies that the art itself is worth both Sexton’s mortal anguish and the anguish she embedded into the life of her daughter.

It implies that art in general is worth the pain, suffering, and abuse that may exist in its orbit. In reality, the exchange is the opposite; life is what makes art worthwhile, not the other way around. Art exists for humanity to propel itself into power. Keeping abusers in power pushes humanity further into the shadows.

Are you a man who has been outed as a sexual harasser or abuser? Are you a man who is reading about all these rich and powerful men being brought down by their past transgressions and hoping and praying that the gross shit you did that violated the humanity or autonomy of another human being won’t be brought to light? Are you a man who is right now swearing that you’ve changed, that you are not the foolish man you once were and you are appalled by your past actions, but also you remember them differently, but also you’d like us all to be able to move forward?

Are you a man who has sexually harassed, abused, or assaulted someone and you do not want to be that person anymore? Are you a man who wants to genuinely move past the wrong you’ve done?

There is a path forward, past denial and scandal and shame. There is a path to genuinely being the better person that you want to be. I’m writing this sincerely. I’m writing this because sexual abuse and assault is so very common in our society that chances are, someone I know and love and respect is reading this and knowing that they are guilty. I’m writing this because if we don’t find a way forward, this will keep happening. Even if you never harass or abuse or assault another human being again: If you don’t try to make this right, this will keep happening and you will have helped to enable it.

When You Can’t Throw All Men Into The Ocean, What CAN You Do?

Are you ready to get started? Here are some first steps you can take.

1. Stop calling your victim(s) a liar.

Don’t slander them, don’t ignore them, don’t try to intimidate them. Don’t try to get your buddies to vouch for how you would absolutely never do anything like this. When you hurt someone, and then tell them to their face that you didn’t hurt them, you are hurting them all over again. Do not make your victim carry this alone.

2. Don’t wait to be accused.

If the person you harmed has not come forward publicly yet, do not just wait in terror for them to do so. Do not force them to take the risk to their reputations, careers, and peace of mind that victims take when they come forward with abuses against them. If you can first come forward to the person you abused in a way that would not add further harm to them, do so. And then be honest with others. If you harassed someone at work, go to your boss and to HR. Come clean with your community. Come clean with your sons.

An important note: Unless you have the permission of the person you harmed, you absolutely must protect their identity and any personal details of what happened that might cause further harm to them to hear or to have their community hear. Anything you do must place the wellbeing of the person you harmed as a top priority. A simple statement of, “I did this, and it was a violation of this person. It was not okay and I’m very sorry” is a good start.

3. Pause before immediately saying what a better person you are now.

Oh, you just got called out for sexual harassment or abuse but you’re a better person now? How much better? Better because you aren’t harassing or abusing people anymore? Better because when you think about what you did you feel bad? How much better of a person were you before someone had to be brave enough to publicly discuss the pain you put them through? How much better of a person were you when they were carrying the pain of what you did every day but you got to pretend like it didn’t happen? You might be on the way to better, but you haven’t earned the right to make any public declarations of reform yet. Keep reading.

4. Understand exactly what you did.

If you know you did something wrong but part of you is still thinking, “this wasn’t really that big of a deal,” then you need to take some time and do some research. Research how sexual harassment impacts victims. Research rape culture and the lasting effects of sexual abuse and assault. Listen to survivors. Listen to them and respect their ability to interpret what happened to them and the impact that it has had on them. Believe them.

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You might be on the way to better, but you haven’t earned the right to make any public declarations of reform yet.
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5. Face the consequences.

Do you deserve to lose some friends? Yes. Do you deserve to lose some respect? Yes. Do you deserve to lose your job? Yes. Do you deserve to go to jail? If you assaulted someone — yeah. If your teenager was stealing from work and got fired for it, if you were a halfway decent dad you’d likely tell them to be glad for the opportunity to learn from their mistakes and to realize that actions have consequences. Well, what you did was worse, way worse — even from a business perspective. Even if it was “just” sexual harassment. You stole the productivity of the person you harassed, who from then on had to try to do their job and deal with your gross ass at the same time. You likely made anybody else who was aware of what you did feel unsafe, which contributed to low morale and higher turnover. You made your employer look bad. You spent your work hours playing grab-ass instead of doing your job. On top of just being very shitty and abusive you wasted company time and resources and you deserve to be fired for that.

If you ever want young men to believe in personal accountability you will take these consequences respectfully, gratefully even. Yes, it does indeed suck if you will now find it harder to feed your family but understand that YOU DID THAT. You, not your accuser, not your employer, not an “angry mob” on the internet. You did that. You did that to yourself and your family and your community. Apologize to them for what your actions have brought and know every day that you are not the victim.

If you don’t face any of these consequences, consider yourself a lucky beneficiary of a society that doesn’t give two fucks about sexual abuse and assault victims, and know that you did absolutely nothing to deserve such luck.

On Spacey, Weinstein, Milo, And The Weaponization Of Identity

6. Use your power for good.

Hey, remember how you felt so powerful and entitled that you were pretty sure you could sexually harass someone and nothing would happen to you? Remember how you were pretty sure that you were so well liked and respected that nobody would believe sexual assault accusations against you? The power that you had in order to be able to do this gross shit? It’s power you can use to actually stop this gross shit.

Hey, you hold the careers of other people in your hands and that makes it really easy for you to tell a woman that you’d ruin her if she spoke out about your sexual harassment? It’s literally just as easy to tell the dudes you work with that you’d ruin THEM if they sexually harassed women.

Man, people really like you and look up to you so you have the perfect shield for your past sexual abuses? You also have the perfect platform to start talking about your struggles with toxic masculinity and encouraging other men to do the same.

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The power that you had in order to be able to do this gross shit? It’s power you can use to actually stop this gross shit.
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Are you the dude who all the other dudes try to impress with their sexist jokes? You can be the dude who says, “hey man, that’s not cool.”

And if you for one minute used your power (and even if you’re an unemployed dude looking around his studio apartment saying “what power,” trust me, you have some over at least one person in your life) to harass, abuse, or assault someone and you are not now using that power to fight the harassment, abuse, or assault of others — you are not a man changed. You are a man with a debt that you must pay.

7. Do not expect forgiveness.

Yes, you may be doing this to be a better person, but it does not mean that others have to see you as a better person. The things we do cannot be undone. We must find other ways to get as close to making things right as we can, but if you’ve harmed someone, you have no right to expect to be seen by them or anyone else impacted by you actions as anyone other than the person who harmed someone. You have to live with what you did as long as they do.

This does not mean that you have to beg for forgiveness for all eternity. It means that you will have to find a way to move forward while also carrying that burden with you. It will remind you of why your work now to fight the culture that makes sexual abuse so prevalent is so important. It will remind you to not be complacent, to not abuse your power, to resist the lure of toxic masculinity. It will fuel your fire to reach out to other men you care about so that they, too, will not harm others and have to carry around the harm they caused forever.

When Forgiveness Isn’t A Virtue

And to some people — to a lot of people — you will likely be seen as a better person, because you will be a better person. But you will never have a right to expect or demand that.

We have a serious sexual abuse and assault problem in this society, and as a perpetrator of some of that abuse, you have an increased obligation to help fight. You are not alone. There are millions of men around the country looking at their past behavior and wondering what they can and should do about it. You can help them follow the right path by taking the first steps yourself. This is not easy. This open accountability for the wrongs you’ve done is very painful to go through. But it’s nothing compared to the pain you’ve caused your victim(s) or the harm your silence does to society by continuing to uphold a culture that makes this abuse so easy.

You can never erase this, but you can repair some of the damage done, and the damage your inaction is currently doing. You can be a part of the solution. And you have to be. You owe it to your victims. You owe it to us all.