A Painful Recollection

Anyone who has been reading the news knows about the Harvey Weinstein debacle taking place. The man sexually harassed, intimidated, molested, and assaulted women for years, with the industry covering it up, pretending it didn’t happen because he was a wealthy, influential man who held a lot of power in Hollywood, and even in the political sphere with both Democrats and Republicans alike. Yet, even at the time we saw all of those smiling faces, many people in those circles knew who Harvey was, they knew what he was doing to women. One of them was also engaging in similar acts towards women, though he would go on to become President of the United States.
Seeing these news stories, and so many similar ones that are on the local level, keeps throwing what happened in my childhood right back in my face. I don’t discuss this often, though some of you know since we’ve had private conversations about it. It’s not something I like discussing, but with all of these things going on, with the prevalence of so much of this taking place, here, on the internet, and out in the every day world in which we live, my mind just cannot handle dealing with all of this.
I try my best to do good, to protect the innocent, to fend off those who prey on them, and I do it for more than just wanting to do good. Now, my ability to do this is limited to the internet, because of my responsibilities, but even here I can do much good. So why do I do this good, aside from wanting to do the right thing?
It’s like this, and forgive me for taking so long to get to the point, because this is not easy for me to talk about with close friends, let alone people I may have never met, but this feels important enough to talk about, that it needs to be voiced. See, here’s what it is: when I was a child, I was sexually molested by a family member. It was not an immediate family member, but we are related by blood. I trusted them, and they used that trust to take advantage of me, to physically violate the sanctity of my person. To this day, I can remember everything that happened, and I remember it vividly, painfully. I don’t remember much before the age of 7, but I remember this quite clearly, and always will. As I grow older, as other memories fade, this one doesn’t. I felt so much *shame*, even though I had done nothing wrong.
There are other members of my family who have done such things, not to me, but to people I know and hold dear in my heart, and they have never said anything to anyone else other than myself. One of them was repeatedly molested when she was a little girl, well before I was born, and it brings tears to my eyes to know these men who did it have since died, or entered into senility, and will never have to pay for the horrible things they did to her.
So you can see why I take these things personally, not just for me, but for people I know and love. Every time I see stories like these, every time headlines read about some serial molester, whether of children or adults, my heart speeds up, my head starts swimming, and I can’t breathe. I’ve never sought help (not like I could afford it), nor have the people who have confided in me about what happened to them. In this country, there is inadequate mental health counseling for those who desperately need it.
So I self-medicate. I don’t do it with drugs, I do it with action. I watch for signs of abuse in children, in adults, doesn’t matter, I watch for anything that would indicate they are being sexually abused in some way, but since I’m not active in meat space as much, I have to take that task to the internet. When one encounters links or websites that promote something illegal, for example, something we all know as vile which I will not name here, report it. Images? Videos? Report it.
Even so, you may feel like you’re not doing enough. It’s not enough to report. We have to act to, to do something more productive, since reporting these sites is like playing whack-a-mole. You hit one, a dozen more pop up.
So I plan on donating to several organizations, and I ask you to do the same if you can. Together we can protect the exploited, and abused. Those organizations are as follows:
The Center for Missing and Exploited Children
https://secure.missingkids.org/Donate
RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network)
https://donate.rainn.org/
Just Detention International (Works to prevent sexual abuse against prisoners)
https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/JustDetentionInternational
Planned Parenthood (This organizations helps with all of the major reproductive needs of women)
Donate To Planned Parenthood Here
If you have any suggestions for an organization to be added, make note in the comments and I’ll add it here. We can put an end to this. There should be no need for anyone, whether they be man, woman, or child, to feel shame for what has happened to them, or to have to ever experience such a violation of their rights.