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In eighth grade I had my first boyfriend. A week after we started dating, he tried to get me to kiss him but I didn't want to so I said no. That was a Friday. On Monday, I was waiting for my mother to pick me up from school and he pinned me against the wall underneath the stairs. He said he wouldn't let me go until I kissed him. I refused. A bunch of people walked past us at different times but they just gave us looks or laughed or spurred him on. Nobody thought to help me. I kept telling him no but he wouldn't listen. So he forced his lips onto mine and I froze because I was so frightened. Then he let go of me and smiled like he was happy and proud of himself. He said bye and left me there under the stairs, shocked and scared. I went back to the lobby and the secretary asked me if I was okay because apparently one of the parents saw me and mentioned it but nobody bothered to actually come and see what was going on. I didn't want to seem weak, so I told her I was fine and went outside to wait for my mother. To anyone who reads this, doing nothing does NOT make you weak. I was afraid and shocked, but I was not weak. Then freshman year I started dating a boy who was a junior. I was 14 and he was 17. Five months after we started dating, which was two months after I turned 15 years old, he asked me to have sex with him. I told him I didn't want to, and he said it was fine, but his entire demeanor toward me became mean. So I gave up, because by then I was a self-harmer for a long time and my body didn't mean much to me, and I was afraid that he might hurt me. We dated for six months after that, and in that time I had sex with him many times only because I was afraid he would leave me and I couldn't stand being alone because I already felt so abandoned (I had moved recently due to the death of my mother and lost all my old friends due to the move), and I was afraid that he might actually hurt me because he was short-tempered and often made me feel threatened. One week before our 1 year anniversary he dumped me through text saying he no longer loved me. Then he started telling all his friends I was a slut and a whore, and they all believed him and agreed. It really hurt because some of them were friends with me before that happened and some of them were even my friends first. So he turned some of my friends as well as his friends against me and they all spread rumors about me being a slut. I started self-harming again, dangerously bad because I had such a low sense of self-worth. They made me believe I was even more worthless than I already thought. When I started dating another boy seven months later, I felt like I was keeping a dirty little secret and actually felt the need to APOLOGIZE to him about my previous relationship because I felt so dirty and used. That relationship didn't last, neither did the next. I am currently single because I've realized that I'm not ready to be in a relationship after everything that has happened to me. It's been 20 months since he started those rumors about me, and even though people haven't gossiped about me in the halls for long over a year, thoughts of him still haunt me. But I have to be strong, because I have a younger sister who looks up to me and I have to be strong for her. If you think really hard, you'll realize that you have someone to be strong for, too. We all do. So stay strong and don't let someone make you feel weak or inferior or scared. Your body belongs to you and no one has the right to touch it without your permission. - Anastasia
Hi my name is Caitlyn and this is my story: I am currently in the 8th grade and I am 13. A few years ago I was raped by my mom's ex and his best friend. My mom never found out until last summer. In 7th grade I told one of my "best friends" about it and then it spread around the whole school like a wildfire. People were calling me "slut," "whore," "nasty," "gross," "useless," so I started self-harming. Nobody liked me. Nobody talked to me or anything. During last summer someone started a hate page on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram about me and it got back to my mom. She immediately called the police and they got involved so I had to go in for questioning and that's when I had to tell my mom. She was disappointed that I didn't tell her but she understood. Well, during the summer we ended up moving to a different county, hoping that it would help, but it didn't. It caught up with me. I get bullied every day and I cry myself to sleep. I cut numerous times a day (which no one knows). I just don't wanna live but I don't wanna give my bullies the satisfaction of killing myself. I have to go to court next week and face my rapists which is scary, but I have to. If they are found guilty (which they are) they will be sentenced to 25 years in prison plus more if they raped anyone else. I know this is nothing like your story which I am currently reading, but it's similar. The hate page is still up and the police are currently trying to figure out who started it and take it down and that's my story.
"It was a long time ago - 1972 to be exact. I was a freshman in high school, at my first house party when the parents were not home. I had had one drink (with almost no experience drinking) and was sitting in the kitchen talking with some guys, guys I thought of as friends. The subject of sex came up and I (stupidly) made the observation, based on ZERO experience, that it sounded pretty awesome. From that moment on I was a slut; and that moniker followed me throughout high school. It was a long, painful four years. My first name starts with an S so I was “S*** Slut” all thought high school. It was devastating, and surreal that I had gone to being someone who was terrified at the prospect of kissing someone to being a whore.
1988, Little Rock, Arkansas: When I was 10, 25 years ago, I kissed my first boy. His name was Ryan, he made me weak in the knees when he kissed me, and he told all the boys during 5th grade football practice that we had sex. My best friend believed Ryan, not me. A boy named Judson, also a fifth-grader, corroborated Ryan’s lie . He looked me right in the eyes, this boy did, and kept smugly repeating “I saw you, I saw you do it,” as I got more red-faced and kept screaming “No you didn’t! Why are you lying?! Why are you doing this?”
In 8th grade, it happened again, with a different boy. I have always wondered why I was picked to be lied about. Other girls kissed boys in 5th grade. Other girls did things too, didn’t they? I still don’t know why these boys lied about it. And I really don’t understand why people believed them, why it was so easy to believe such blatant lies about me.
I want to know what my life would have been like if that hadn’t happened. I feel like it changed everything about me.
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