Part 42 – Hell Has No Fury Greater Than A Child Who Seeks Justice

***Trigger Warning – mentions sexual assault and elements of child sexual abuse

Hell Has No Fury Like A Child Who Seeks Justice

Life had somewhat gone back to normal after my first gynecological exam for everyone except me. I was angry. I was very angry, and there was some internal need that I had to square up with anyone for justice. Many times this meant expressing myself to others in a manner that made me seem a bit intense psychologically. I would meet my match a few times, but I would never back down, and I would literally fight to the finish.

Two Brothers And Their Sordid Games

Next door to my family lived an elderly woman and her family. Both our families were strangely interconnected in a way that never made sense to me. She had several adult children, and two of her children were related to my parents in what I perceived as strange ways. One of the children was a half-sibling to my dad, and another one of her children was a biological nephew to my mother. So there was a lot of interconnectedness between our families that made us oddly close. Leave it to me to be the catalyst to shed light on some of the craziness and dysfunction.

The elderly woman had several grandchildren that she also took care of during the summer months and after school. All of these children were supposedly my cousins. So I always wondered why two brothers found it of interest to want to play their sordid games with me. After all, we were supposedly family. Yet, I would come to learn that there is a lot of abuse within families too.

Children do play, but these brothers’ forms of play always carried undertones of sexual connotations that made me very uncomfortable. There is much to be said about child exploration, but there is a thin line when child exploration falls into dangerous territory. While I still lived on the innocent side of games like chase, hide-and-seek, and other made up games, these brothers often lived on the side of rough boyish games of imaginary gun fights and battles, but they also liked to play sexually suggestive games.

These brothers were children too – one my younger brother’s age and the other a year older than me. Any time they saw me, they were always trying to get me to play with them without my siblings around me, but I would never give them the time of day. When we were all so much younger, like ages four to seven, I played safe childhood games with them like chase, tag, hide-and-seek, tree climbing games, and motor car games with our big wheels and tricycles, I never wanted to play their imaginary games of mammas and papas.

After returning home from the summer after the sexual assault that occurred against me at age nine, I was a very different child. I no longer wanted to engage with anyone – particularly boys and particularly these cousins. Prior to the sexual assault, I had encountered a round of these brothers’ types and their type of play with some other neighborhood children, and I did not like their games. So I avoided these cousins and their friends and opted to play in my own yard. I already had a penchant for my own company anyway. So I did not mind playing alone.

One day during one of my angry bouts against my mother, I sat in one of my favorite hiding spots in a tree that I always climbed to dissociate via daydreams. I had not realized when my cousins showed up on their side of the fence watching me. When eye contact was made between us, there was a strange look in the older brother’s eyes that made my body flinch as if my body remembered an occurrence of a long-ago event that my brain kept under lock and key. The older brother motioned me down from the tree and over to the fence. I remember feeling annoyed to have to move from my spot, but I climbed down to see what he wanted.

“Why don’t you come and play with us anymore?” he asked me. “You’ve changed a lot. Everyone thinks so, and everyone around says that you think you’re too good for us now.”

Since returning back home from the summer with my aunt, I admittedly was a different person. I felt like a different person. I no longer wanted to play childish games. I wanted to be alone, and I wanted to be left alone. I had long been considered a weirdo since I could remember, but now I was a reclusive weirdo. I wanted less to do with people outside of my family circle even if I considered those people once friends. I had nothing against people. I just wanted my space, and I found that I needed a lot of space to myself. My life was just very different.

“I don’t think I’m better than anyone,” I responded.

But the older cousin was relentless on pushing the narrative that I thought I was too good to play with them.

“Why won’t you play with us anymore? You walk around here moping all the time. Maybe it’s the new weight you carry,” the older cousin said to me with a strange look in his eyes.

I was confused, but knowing the manipulative way in which my older cousin always worded things, I had a strange feeling that he was up to no good. I was right.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You have boobs now,” he said smiling sheepishly.

Listening to his words and the tone in which he spoke them sparked an annoyance within me, but it was the devilish gleam that sparkled within his eyes that made me feel the need to immediately shrink back from both my cousins. I suddenly felt vulnerable in a way that made me want to bolt and leave the scene. Although we were all standing on our properties separated by a fence, I felt that they were crossing an imaginary boundary against me via their presence alone, and I wanted to flee the scene.

Yet, I continued to stand before them because I did not want to be rude and give off the “I’m too good for them” vibe they already claimed against me.

Then the older brother suggested I make it up to them. “Why don’t you lift up your top and lower your bra so we can see your boobs!” I cowered at the thought. Then I shouted, “NO!” It was such a hard “NO!” that both my cousins looked upon me with great disappointment turned into anger.

“See, I told you she thinks she’s too good for us!” shouted the younger of the two brothers.

“I don’t think that!” I stated emphatically while feeling hot flames of anger rise to my chest, neck, and face.

“Then why won’t you let us see your boobs? No one will have to even know,” said the older cousin.

“Because I don’t want to,” I said. I was steaming over the fact that I even had to explain this.

“Fine, then! We don’t want to play with you anymore, and we’ll make sure no one else will play with you either!” said the older brother with the younger brother nodding in agreement.

“I don’t care! I don’t want to play with you disgusting creeps anyway! Get out of my face!” Then I turned to walk away, but before I could get far, the older brother ran across the fence opening into my family’s yard and grabbed me. He yelled for his younger brother to grab me too. “You’re gonna show us what we want to see right now, and you better not scream or holler!”

At this point, I felt triggered more by the onslaught of the older brother’s words before the harm of their actual attack. Then, something ignited within me to the point that I went ballistic. Somehow, I maneuvered myself away from their grasps, and then out of nowhere [it seemed] I turned towards the older brother and punched him as hard as I could hitting him in the eye. He fell backwards, and made a loud “ouch” sound while holding his eye.

Then I pushed the younger brother back while kicking him down to the ground at the same time. When I was done with them, I uttered what they would later recall to their grandmother as the most inciteful words anyone had ever said to them.

“Don’t ever touch me again, you pervs! Don’t ever let me see your ugly faces in or near my yard again!”

Both brothers were so surprised by my reaction, but I did not flinch. In fact, I remember my body heaving a great sigh. I felt very justified in my actions, and I was not at all concerned about a fall out even though I knew it would come. I simply turned away from them and went inside of the house. I remember vividly going into my room and having to calm myself down because I was so angry. All I could think was that they had a lot of nerve.

The Drama Afterwards

A few hours later, the phone rang. My mother answered. I already knew the phone call was about me. It was the elderly woman next door. She must have told my mother the brothers’ version of the story which I knew would not have been true. When my mother came into my room, she demanded to know why I had “hurt” my cousins. She claimed to have been very disappointed with me. Her disparaging remarks against me had me reconsidering that I was the villain and not the actual victim, but instead I sucked in my breath and said to her, “They got what they deserved … it could have been worse.”

“You will need to apologize,” my mother seemed to demand, “Your father will not be happy with you.”

“No. I’m not apologizing for anything. I didn’t do anything wrong. I was defending myself,” I retaliated. But my cousins had already told several lies. In fact, the scene they had depicted of me made me out to be the bully, that I had lost my cool and taken out my vicious anger upon them when they were simply being nice and trying to play with me. This twist of lies made me so angry that I wondered why I even bothered to respond to defend myself against their lies. My mother actually believed them.

When my father came home and heard the story, he told me I needed to apologize or else. “Or else what? Am I going to be punished for defending myself against them because they wanted me to show them my breasts? Never! I won’t apologize! Nope! I won’t do it, and you can’t make me! NO!” I was screaming at this point, and my dad stared at me as if to be in shock. I was screaming at my father – something my siblings and me never ever did, but in that moment, I was justified and was ready to take a punishment if I had to do so. My mother stood by staring in astonishment because I had not told her this part of the story. So she immediately voiced to my father that I had to be lying.

When my father relayed this story to the elderly woman next door while taking me with him to explain the situation, she did not believe me either. She believed her grandsons and called me a liar instead. I was stunned, and because I refused to apologize to her, she told me that I was no longer welcomed in her house. I was hurt. I really liked the elderly woman. She had made her home a refuge for children, but now I was the only child who could not be included in this. Although my dad felt bad about it, he told the elderly woman that he respected her for her thoughts in the matter.

As we trailed back to our house, I told my dad that I did not respect her thoughts in the matter because she was defending “two pervy creeps,” to which my dad responded, “It’s not nice to call people names. They’re your cousins.” I think that all was on my dad’s mind was the fact that the brothers’ father, who was also my mother’s biological nephew and his very good friend, would not be happy to hear of these events. My father seemed to want to believe that I might have been lying too, and I believed that he hoped that was the case, but he stood by me anyway.

In the end, the boys were no longer allowed to interact with me in any way. Their father did not want to believe my version of the events either, but he accepted what I said because of the nature of things he knew that his sons had been exposed to since he and the boys’ mother were no longer together.

However, the boys’ mother would hear of no such thing where an apology by her sons was concerned. So she stopped them from visiting with their grandmother, the elderly woman, for a very long time. She also stopped speaking to me specifically. In fact, anytime I was around her vicinity, she would talk extra loudly about me to others and how I was a child who should not be trusted because I was a liar.

Before I knew it, what I had said and done to this mother’s sons to defend myself spread like wildfire within our small community, and I was ostracized without these people ever knowing the truth and the complete story. Instead, I was viewed as a troublemaker and branded a liar, and these names falsely labeled upon me would have a lasting negative effect that the community would have no idea of how I would be affected even years later. My life would all be but destroyed as I was banished from having the “love” I needed from even family members in this community. [But more on this later.]

The Sister And A Sad Twist Of Fate

Needless to say, the sister of the boys wanted to beat me up. She even came to the elderly woman’s house and attempted to coax me to the fence while I was outside in the yard. She was much older than me – already in high school, but my being an 11 year old did not seem to matter to her. I knew that physically I was no match for her.

Yet, I was not really a match for her brothers either since they were both bigger than me too, but I still managed to make them cry. So, it came as a surprise to the sister who certainly thought I was bold when I walked over to her and stood only a few feet away from her as she angrily grimaced at me from across the fence.

“I don’t know who you think you are, but you had better never put your hands on my brothers again! You owe them an apology. We are your cousins!” she said.

I said, “Then you’d better teach them never to put their hands on a girl. They told everyone what I did, but they left out the part that they were trying to make me show them my breasts! So I meant what I said to them, and I did what I meant to do to them. I am not taking anything back, and I will not apologize. If I don’t wanna be touched, then they should not touch me. This is my body, and no one has the right to touch my body if I don’t want them to.”

The sister said, “They were only playing with you!”

I remember yelling at her so hard that I thought the veins within my neck would pop. I was ragingly angered by her response. I couldn’t believe she was actually defending them.

I responded back nearly in tears, “THEY WERE NOT PLAYING! They are sorry suckers that owe me an apology. THEY OWE ME AN APOLOGY! What do I have to be sorry for? I was minding my business! I’m not sorry for anything. They touched me! They grabbed me! They were trying to force me to do something I didn’t want to do!”

The sister’s response was even more incredulous to me when she said, “Sometimes you just have to let boys be boys! Deal with it!”

For whatever reason, her words to me … those very words she spoke to me … spoke volumes to me, and I knew intuitively that she was either ignorant or choosing to be ignorant about what I perceived as her brothers’ volatile and sexually deviant behavior. A chasm between our families had now been formed, and from that moment, the relationship I had with those cousins was severed for a very long time. In fact, many other children and adults within the community sided with her sentiments … that “boys would be boys and I should deal with it” mentality.

I felt hated for a very long time because I had shed a more visible light on problem behaviors by defining what really had taken place after the brothers were exposed in their lies. Yet, instead of dealing with the boys and their behavior, I was ostracized and maimed as the outcast. I was the scapegoat to bear their ugliness instead of them bothering to reflectively look at their own behaviors. If I was not already the black sheep in my own family, I might have cared more for what people thought of me, but hell has no greater fury than a child seeking justice.

It is unfortunate, however, that the sister of those brothers was sexually assaulted not long after this situation. Although my own brain had locked away the remembrance of the sexual assault that occurred against me, I felt a strong desire to connect with the sister as if to render her my condolences on what I knew was a loss of the life she had always known prior to sexual assault.

To my mother’s surprise, I asked permission to visit with the sister. She talked to my dad who talked to the sister’s maternal grandmother. The mother, however, was adamant that I was not allowed anywhere near her children, but eventually, the sister gave in to my request after “Mother”, the woman who had been my aunt’s best friend and knew of my own experience with sexual assault, somehow got a word to the sister that made the sister more receptive to seeing me.

Now, I was never much of a talker, and I was highly introverted, but when I visited with the sister, I sat with her in silence, and expressed myself to her by simply holding her hand. I remember the first time that I held her hand, her eyes reddened with tears that would not fall, and somewhere within the walls of her that refused to release the pain she felt, I felt it for her. It was as if I knew even though I did not know.

For some reason, I felt deeply connected to her. She had been severely beaten and raped, and I always made it a point to never rain down any negative feelings upon her. I never wanted her to feel shame or be ashamed that I knew anything about her. I just wanted her to know that I was there and that I cared. So, I visited with her a few times a week until she returned to school.

Strangely, neither of us ever ever spoke of her experiences with the sexual assault. In fact, we hardly ever spoke at all. If the sister knew of my experience with sexual assault, she never said anything to me about it either. We simply sat in silence as if to share something that was known beneath the surface.

The man who had attacked the sister was still very visible and lived just two houses up the street from her. To my knowledge, the attacker never suffered any consequences. It was the sister’s word against his, and because of this, her mother refused to allow her to even press charges. Instead, the attacker was treated as the victim who’s name needed to be vilified while the sister was treated as the one who had somehow encouraged his attack by being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Although I spent time with the sister, we actually never ever talked much at all. Instead, she watched soap operas as I read through comic books, but I never left her side. Her other grandmother always saw me as a delightful visitor with peculiar ways, but I was the only child or visitor that never asked the sister any details about what happened to her. To be honest, I was never curious enough to want to ask any details. Somewhere inside of me, I did not even want to know. Yet, I felt great empathy for her and a longing just to be there for her if she needed me. (I think about this now, and I cry because of what I remember her saying during one of my last visits with her.)

During one of my last visits with her before she returned to school, she said something to me that was rather jarring. “Do you remember telling me that you would defend yourself if my brothers ever touched you again even if that meant getting beat up by me?”

Interestingly, one of the symptoms of trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder is short-term memory. After any significant trauma, I have found that I forget even those incidents that were triggering of anything connected with sexual assault for me. My mind had a tendency to categorize my experiences and file them away. If those experiences were in any way remotely connected with the past of my trauma, then those experiences were easily forgotten. If anyone mentioned something that happened to me, I was truly unable to remember. It was almost as if the event had never happened to me.

So when the sister began talking about what happened with her brothers, I drew somewhat of a blank until I was able to attach the fact that her entire side of the family was no longer speaking to me or associating with me at all. Needless to say, when the sister reminded me of the situation, I recall staring blankly at her but listening intently.

She continued, “You said that you were always going to defend yourself … that you would not allow anyone to touch you without your permission … and that you would fight if you had to. I remembered your words, and I remember how defiant and fearless you were even though I threatened to beat you up. You are so small, but you are so fearless. I was so mean to you, and I want you to know that I’m sorry. I should have believed you. I do believe you now. You have a lot of courage because you still came to see me when I could have shut you away. You still came to see me even though a lot of people hate you right now. My mother still doesn’t want anything to do with you after what you said to my brothers, but now I know they told a lot of lies. They are the liars and not you. You’re the only one who has come to see me and never wants anything. You’re the only one that never asks me to tell you anything that happened to me even though I know you know like everyone else. You just always come and sit with me. You don’t even talk, and it’s nice. It’s nice to know that someone’s here for me just because of me. “Mother” told me that you would understand and that we share something in common. She was right. I wish you were my age. We could probably be best friends.”

Hell Has No Fury Greater Than A Child Who Seeks Justice

I sought justice for myself against my cousins – the two brothers, but in the process, family connections and friendships were never the same again because of it. Even now as adults, those brothers still regard me with indifference, but their sister and me hold a unique bond, and we have been endeared to each other ever since. Even though it has been years since we have talked, we have managed to stay connected through social media. She has no idea what those moments with her meant to me. She was but one of the people in my life who’s strength and determination to live beyond trauma encouraged me. I also gained the understanding that hell has no fury greater than a survivor who seeks justice.

Stay tuned for more posts.