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Bad Survivor Justice

So much of me is surrounded by a newspaper article.

It was 2000. My brother had been arrested, and I had no idea what for. No one told me. From the moment it happened, my mother has never spoken exactly what he did allowed, never. The only time the word *rape* appeared on her lips, was in 2009 when she asked me, ‘Did he rape you?’ and then, through my voice-stealing sobs, said, ‘It doesn’t matter what he did, you still have to forgive him.’

The word was never said before, and it would never be said after.

My first bit of knowledge into it would be the day we got the newspaper with an article about his conviction. My mother was furious. She seemed to forget that she never told me anything about what had happened.

“It’s not that it’s about my son,” she tried telling me. This was her repeated line; as though someone was questioning her, as though she was self-conscious about how furious she was that this article existed at all.

No, she insisted, this was about her son’s victim. Or rather, the mother of the victim. How could she do this to *her* son? How could she let the things that happened to him be so public like this? “She should be getting him help,” my mother said, “not putting it in the newspaper.”

What she told me he did: Kid stuff. ‘Things boys do together.’ A one-off, rather unfortunate, but understandable mistake. When she talked about it with others, she could always manage to tilt the conversation so that my brother sounded younger than he was, and this boy sounded older than he was, and what the person on the other end of these conversations heard was that my brother was a victim of an unfortunately hardline, statutory law.

But still, I didn’t know what he *did.* I don’t even know the name of the boy he hurt. I know roughly where they lived, but I also know an entire group of young children my brother was close to. And I was so dissociated myself, I could barely comprehend.

This is what these messages told me: don’t tell anyone. What happened to you wasn’t that bad. It was, after all, kid stuff. No one would think anything of what my brother did to me when he took me to my room. Moral people, fair people, correct people, would agree that the law was cruel, that it was so strange about thinking that silly little mistakes like this warranted such harsh treatment. If you talk, Bad Things will happen to your brother, and it will be All Your Fault.

And especially don’t tell your mother.

Especially.

I want to write a piece sometime about this. People have this vision in their head that predators come from families who had no idea what they were. That predators are monsters of their own making, hidden away from innocent parents. That they break down in a grief that their sweet, kind, wonderful child, was revealed to be so violent and cruel.

Maybe some do. But not mine.

I needed this newspaper article. I needed it, because no one had told me anything. Because when my mother told me, ‘It doesn’t matter what he did, you still have to forgive him,’ what he did to me was never spoken about. My brother lives in the pleasant shadow of lies, and my mother spends her days with a privacy curtain trying to make sure no one knows.

This newspaper article was hard to track down. For years I couldn’t find it. The archives weren’t online, and didn’t seem to have made it to any kind of digital database. I couldn’t even find copies in my hometown’s digital library resources.

And then: 2018. It was late, I was trauma-googling my brother’s name. I do that sometimes; I keep waiting for the day in sickening dread, where I find out he’s been arrested for doing something else. But this time—there was a newspaper article. From 2000.

I’d found it.

And I cried.

I cried all night. I cried until my stomach heaved and I had to fight not to throw up. I cried in fear, in rage, in grief, in pain.

I cried because no one in my family had never cried for this boy before. I cried because the walls of our house had been full of excuses and justifications. I cried because *I still didn’t know this boy’s name.* My brother and my mother had never let him have a name. I cried, because of course it wasn’t kid’s stuff, of course my mother was a liar, and of course she had lied about why this article existed: this woman hadn’t put her son’s trauma on display for fun and drama, it was right there at the end of the article: she hoped this would help other victims come forward. I cried because this mother had loved her son so much, and my mother had disparaged that love, all because she couldn’t stand the truth coming out.

In was March of 2018. Larry Nassar had just had his conviction earlier that year, and the metoo movement was still in its days when we rejoiced at this conviction. At the women whose voices were finally heard, who were finally getting justice. I fantasized about my own. About a culture shifting, that would allow me too to one day stand before my brother and tell him everything he’d done, everything he was. I could barely believe in fighting for myself, but god damn did I want to fight for this boy. For the boy of the family who dropped their charges. For all the kids I know my brother hurt, who have never said anything.

And it felt, for a brief moment, like I finally had a force of people on my side.

But that would, of course, change.

As my twitter timeline became filled with non-survivors writing ‘nuanced’ takes about how horrifying it was that we held these men accountable, as the language of ‘restorative justice’ seemed to take it straight from the predators mouth, where I first heard language like that, as I began to mute more, and more words, see more and more awful takes that put my mother’s words right back in my head—horrible, rape apologist words—I felt myself grow smaller as a survivor.

I wrote my book, no longer certain that I could write something like “my mother thought we were unfairly cruel to predators that what they did would follow them for the rest of their life” and have the people I had once considered part of my social circle agree that was fucked up. I lost my voice for awhile, unsure of where I stood; I could not give up my sense of justice, of rightness, but I felt now that I stood outside of everyone else.

I found that newspaper article on March 26, 2018. Three years to the day (I only discovered it writing this) I started hrt. I’m no longer the same small, scared survivor. If anything, I am where I was when I first started writing about it, when I first stepped outside the confines of my horrible predator-enabling religion: I’m a rogue survivor again. When I started my blog, I called myself a ‘bad survivor’: you better fucking believe it’s still true.

I’m not brave enough, not just yet, to scream out my brother’s name across the earth, though I want to, and I support every survivor who does. I am half-anonymous: I changed my name, I don’t mention the name of my hometown, but I’m not careful about these things. I bank on people’s laziness to do most of the work for me.

So this isn’t redacted because I think it keeps me genuinely anonymous; it’s redacted because most people aren’t going to do that work anyway.

I want to apologize to a boy whose name I never learned. I want to be able to reach out to any survivor of my brother who feels lost, confused, alone, unsure. I straddle a complicated line of wanting to offer the truth, and unsure if other survivors have found comfort in a narrative that I would be shattering for them.

I carry this with me all the time.

One day, I will be louder.

One day, maybe there can be some kind of justice. The ugly, terrible, punitive kind, that makes the world curl up inside itself in horror.

Because lately, it’s the only kind I want.

The Newspaper Article (trigger warning for child sexual abuse, obviously)