I have spent a lot of time this week dreading talking about this, but knowing that I absolutely must talk about the deluge of revelations about sexual assault in the news, including a woman accusing Judge Roy Moore of sexually assaulting her when she was fourteen years old. Having written a book in which a grown man has sexual contact with a fourteen-year-old girl, I don’t get to take a pass on talking about this.
To have this conversation requires me to ask you to accept that I am simultaneously two contradictory things. I am a woman who has been sexually assaulted, as an adult and as a child, but I am also a woman who at the age of thirteen had a loving and consensual relationship that involved sexual contact with a man more than a decade older than me.
I will never argue that relationship wasn’t illegal. Of course it was. He knew better. Hell, I knew better, but thirty years later, I have no regrets. Quite the opposite, I have very fond memories of a relationship in which my consent was respected in a way it has never been since. It was my first sexual experience, and I got exactly what I wanted, and was never pressured into doing things I didn’t want to do. In fact, that relationship taught me about the importance of consent and about my right to refuse anything I didn’t want.
Despite my personal feelings about my relationship, I will never suggest that it shouldn’t have been illegal. There’s a reason I wrote a novel in which the man involved in such a relationship goes to prison. We need age of consent laws to protect young people from predation. While I felt capable of consenting at thirteen, most thirteen year olds are not. We need the laws to be black and white, even as a whole lot of gray exists in the world. We also need to enforce those laws, but for that to happen, we have to listen to victims of sexual assault and believe them. The laws are meaningless if we don’t listen every time.
The first time I was assaulted as a child, I told exactly one person. That person didn’t believe me. I didn’t tell anyone else. The second time it happened, I didn’t tell anyone, because I had learned that no one would believe me. This has been my experience as an adult, too. People refusing to believe me when I say I wasn’t a victim at thirteen. Police officers explaining to me at nineteen that I hadn’t “really” been raped. The second time I was raped as an adult, the only person I told was a counselor at an abortion clinic. She was literally the first person who believed what I had to say.
I tell you all of this to acknowledge that my personal experiences and the novel I wrote are troubling and problematic. I write these kinds of books, because they reflect my lived experiences.
I tell you all of this to affirm that when someone tells me what has happened to them, my default is always to believe them. I would rather learn later that my faith and compassion were misplaced than fail to offer them in the first place. If we truly want to protect people from sexual harassment and assault, the first step is to believe that these things happen. And they happen without regard for whether the accuser has a “troubled past” and without regard for whether the accused is liked or respected in their field. If we’re tired of people coming forward ten, twenty, thirty years after the fact, we have to make it possible for people to come forward immediately. That starts with listening and believing.
Bryn Greenwood 
Wow — thank you for sharing. I’m sorry (almost) no one believed you.
It’s the thing that haunts me, knowing how many children must be out there in the same situation. Knowing that we still have a culture that enables sexual abusers.
I, too, am sorry no one believed you. It’s the way the world has been. And, I am hoping that it’s beginning to change.
It’s the thing that gives me hope in the midst of all of these devastating stories. Maybe we are finally turning the tide, so that people can be believed instead of dismissed.
Regardless of your experience, consent and age is tricky. Because you’re right, not all 13 year olds are at the same maturity level, and those who aren’t mature enough to consent need protection. But it also really sucks to be the 13 year old who has lived a life that forced them to grow up a lot sooner, and therefore does have the maturity to make those decisions, but not be allowed to. But there have to be laws and they have to pick an age, I just don’t know what that age should be. Or perhaps there should be an age range that is questionable and require some sort of psychological assessment…but then no matter what we do, the system finds a way to screw us.
I’m sorry you weren’t believed. It kills me that this is so often the case. Trust automatically falls to the accused rather than the accuser. And there are so many other ways that those around us are complicit. When I was assaulted at the age of 18, there were a lot of people over when he started getting aggressive and it was clear where it was going, and people left rather than help me. Naturally, I didn’t report it. If no one would help me when I was pinned underneath him on the couch, if no one cared enough to intervene when I was begging him to get off of me and stop, why should I believe anyone would do anything after the fact? Plus, I chose to be there, I’d been warned, I hung out with a rough crowd, so it was my fault really, wasn’t it? That’s what I knew would be thrown at me. So it never shocks me that victims are rarely believed, that the numbers are as high as they are. It shocks me when I hear about people stepping up. How sad is that?
I believe you. I’m sorry you had to go through that. That your word didn’t carry the weight it should have. And I agree that we should default to believing accusers and supporting them. And recognizing how very brave it is for them to speak up at all.
I hate that you were in a situation where the very people who should have helped you abandoned you instead. And then people act surprised when victims of sexual assault don’t report it, as though the world is ever eager to believe us, even when there are witnesses. I wish I knew what the answer was, though I do think it would be helpful to have federal guidelines on age of consent, age gaps, sex offender registries. The fact that such things are decided on the state level makes it all more confusing & I believe harder to enforce. Of course, we’re still struggling to reach a point socially where we value children & women. We’ll have to cement that before we can solidify a system that believes them. Hope you’re well.
I can’t lie, I was really confused when I was reading the book and a bit uncomfortable thinking about a grown man having feelings for such a young girl. I’m sorry you had to go through that. I think I matured at an older age, too. Even today when men force me to kiss them or touch me it makes me uneasy for days. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy! I think everyone has different views and we’re all entitled to them, but so far the book as been really good!