LeanOnUs

My sexual abuse began when I was a mere first grader and continued to the end of my second grade year. He was a young man my mother had entrusted to walk me home from school since she could not afford the luxury of being a stay-at-home mom. We lived in an urban apartment building filled with single mothers, like mine, who often left their children home alone. To them, it was better to leave your child alone while you go “win the bread” than to stay at home with them and live limited by the confines of public assistance. My mother would never have left me with a babysitter because you simply couldn’t trust people to hold your child’s best interest at hand. There were a lot of sick people in the world, so keeping me home alone was her way of protecting me from them. After meeting another single mother with a son in middle school, she found a solution to her problem. Surely, she felt she could trust him to be a companion for me and keep me safe as I made that block and a half journey home from school every day.

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I began to form a deep relationship with him and a brotherly bond. I trusted him, because that is what small children do. They trust the world around them and idolise the people they look up to. Him being older made me, I look up to him. The naivety of a child is what makes them precious to many members of society but for a predator, an innocent child without proper protection, is like blood in shark filled waters. My ‘blood’ was seeping into the waters of danger in great quantities as each day my trust grew stronger and the opportunities to capitalise on them multiplied. Finally, on a day when our parents were just in the next room, the molestation began. It began with games and strange touches that led to sexual acts. No one ever forgets the first time. The images never leave your mind of a first sexual experience, stolen years before sexuality should be awakened and turned into something perverted.

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