I mentioned that topic several times, and now I want to focus on it. Child molestation was very widespread, and at the same time, nobody mentioned it back then and does not mention it now.
With me, it started when I was about eleven, and it would go on at least until I was fifteen, maybe sixteen, but the pick was during my pre-teen years. You would get on the bus or a train, which were very crowded pretty much all the time, so you had to swirl yourself into the crows just to stay in. And then somebody would start touching your private parts. And it will continue for the whole duration of your trip.
Why would you not dare to stop a molester? Because you are in a crowd, and everybody is touching everybody, and even if you look around, you can’t tell who is doing it to you. Actually, the only time in my life when I dared to stop a molester, the man was looking aside as if he was not even there, so I hesitated for a moment but then said: Hands! He quickly moved his hands away from my body and disappeared into the crowd. Also, it felt overwhelmingly embarrassing. You just couldn’t accuse an adult of doing such a horrible thing. And, of course, whatever happens to you, it’s all your fault!
Overall, nothing about sexuality was explicitly said, but somehow, by the age of eight or nine, you would come to the conclusion that there is something really bad related to your private parts (which, by the way, were never called “private”). If a boy happened to see your underwear (when you were playing together, climbing a tree, jumping a rope – and remember, girls wore dresses, shorts were rarely worn) – that was one of the worst humiliation you could experience. When you were at the overnight camp, your counselor would walk the bedroom, commanding everyone to have “hands on top of your blanket.” And it’s worth mentioning that my mom, like many other moms, did the same thing: coming to check on me when I was in bed and saying: where are your hands?
A word about male teachers. I was never molested by any of the male teachers, but as I learned later, some of my friends were. I learned it many years later because, once again, it was impossible to say it out loud. It meant admitting the shame, it meant that nobody would believe you, and it meant that “it was all your fault.”
The most horrific and never spoken about was the opposite effect. By the age of twelve, most girls would firmly believe that their worth was exclusively defined by how attractive they were to the opposite sex. By the time we were in the seventh grade, stories were whispered about some girls in our class who “had abortions.” We listened to these stories in horror, but at the same time with the strangest sense of jealousy: these girls were attractive enough for adult men! I am writing it, and I can’t make sense of why we felt this way, how we could think this! And that’s while we knew almost nothing about our bodies, including how you could get pregnant. Even though my mother preemptively explained to me that in a couple of years, I may start menstruating, she somehow managed to avoid an explanation of what exactly it was. I had my first period earlier than anybody in my class when I was just eleven, and I had no idea what was happening to me. My best friend had her first period three years later, and her parents explained to her and gave her a book to read. She gave this book to me, and it was only then that I learned the facts. It was a great trust crisis in my relationship with my mom, but not the first one and not the last one.
I don’t know how to finish this post. I do not know why nobody talks about it. Why do so many people talk about “happy young pioneers’ childhood, clean and pure and innocent” as if none of the things I described were there? I do not know whether these are the tricks the memory plays on people, forcing out the things we would rather forget, or that’s something else …
My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.
