The #MeToo movement has given women the courage to tell their stories of sexual assault. Now an adult with daughters of her own, Amelia recalls a double violation that took place when she was just 17.
Amelia was on vacation with her mother, and she went to a club and danced with Trevor, a man she knew from home. They had even gone out once. When Trevor offered drive her to her hotel, she accepted. Her mother had her own ride home.
Amelia says: "We were on the highway when all of a sudden he turned off the road. The area seemed to be deserted. I let him kiss me. But then he started to go further. I'd been raised in a religious culture whose tenets forbade any form of sex before or outside of marriage. I'd also been warned by my mother that if I ever let a man touch me below the neck I'd be punished severely by God and I'd wind up in Hell. She told me about girls who had been stoned to death for flaunting the rules.
"Beside all that, I was a virgin and very modest. I truly believed in saving myself for marriage. I struggled with Trevor, but he wouldn't stop. He told me not to bother screaming because we were twenty miles from town and nobody would hear me. I screamed anyway and fought him even harder."
Trevor finally gave up and drove Amelia to her hotel. At first she didn't tell her mother that she'd nearly been raped.
"But the whole frightening incident preyed on my mind to the point where I couldn't eat for 24 hours and had a hard time sleeping," she says. "It was then that I finally told my mother about it, just to get it off my chest."
Amelia's mother called her father. She says: "He had always been a very distant man verbally, psychologically and in every way imaginable. He never spoke to me except to reprimand me when I displeased him. He never showed me any signs of affection. Although we'd lived under the same roof for 17 years, he was nearly a total stranger to me."
When her father heard about the assault, he jumped right in his car and drove to Amelia and her mother. To comfort his child? To confront the perpetrator? To bring him to justice? Hardly.
Amelia says: "He stormed into our hotel room, in a towering rage. He said that it's no wonder I was nearly raped — I was a tramp. That lie was a million miles away from the truth. It was as far from the truth as the Earth is from the sun. I'd never hated him before, but from that moment on I started to hate him. To accuse me of something I was innocent of was the depths of depravity. It felt like I was being nearly raped all over again."
Have you ever been sexually assaulted? Send your tale, along with your questions, problems and rants to [email protected]. And check out my e-books, "Dear Cheryl: Advice from Tales from the Front" and "I'll Call You. Not."
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