With the news at the moment, surrounding the murder of a thirty three year old woman who was walking home alone at night, and the conversation around women’s safety and the fear we get when in the company of men, or whilst being alone, it has brought back very distressing memories from a time in my life when I felt extremely vulnerable.
I was sexually assaulted when I was twenty years old. It happened in a budget hotel chain in London, by a member of staff, who knew exactly what he was doing and abused his power to carry out the acts he performed upon me without my consent. I have no idea whether I am allowed to speak about what happened online, which is the main reason I have stayed quiet on the subject for so long, but I figured if I don’t use specifics and I keep things vague, it cannot be against the law to tell my story, to try and come to terms with what happened to me all those years ago, events which I have played over and over in my mind, and discussed with countless therapists over the year, events which still to this day have a huge impact on how I feel towards men, how I act in their company, and how I see myself. My low self esteem started in my early teens, after another incident, which I will not focus on today, but which equally scarred me, but I really started to feel uncomfortable about my looks, how I am perceived by others, since this attack happened.
I was working for a company during my placement year at university, and one of the jobs we were doing happened to be in London. There was a big celebration happening during the two week job, and some of the staff were put up in a hotel so that we could go out and have some drinks with the other staff who were local, without needing to get back to the South West late at night. I was staying in a hotel room with a friend who also worked for the company, and we were excited, getting dressed up and heading out to a bar with the other people we worked with. I had a crush on one of the people who was out with us that night, and drank a little too much to gain some courage to talk to them so, by the time my friend and I got back to the hotel, I was more than a little drunk and needed my sleep.
I went to bed but got up a few hours later once the drink had worn off and I worried that I had embarrassed myself in front of my manager, who was also staying in the same hotel. I made the stupid decision to try and find their room to apologise. Needless to say, in my still confused state of mind, in a strange hotel where all the doors looked the same, I soon realised I was lost and wondered the hallways worrying about how I would get back to my room. My saviour came along a few minutes later, the hotel night porter, who had been there when we got back from the bar earlier that evening. I was grateful when he said he would take me back to my room, never questioning how he knew instantly what room number was mine, when I had myself forgotten.
I won’t go into detail about what followed, but the way he acted so confidently, the feeling of being trapped, of not having the strength or the courage to stop what he was doing, that has stayed with me. It haunts me. After he had finished, he took me back to my room, wrapped in a duvet, and I didn’t say anything to my friend who came to the door and let me in, just got myself into bed and curled up into a ball. I did speak the next morning though. I rang my manager and told him everything, and he asked me if I wanted to go to the police. I will remember what he said next for the rest of my life. He asked if I was sure, because they may not believe me, and that it may not get taken to court.
I still insisted I wanted to report it, and the police came. Two male officers sat me down and asked me a barrage of questions about what had happened. They asked how drunk I was, there was a handy chart for me to point at the number that corresponded to how much I had drunk, whether I could remember the rest of the night, what I was wearing (and took the short pyjama bottoms and vest top with them for evidence). They didn’t ask how I felt, they didn’t reassure me that they would get justice for what had happened to me, they didn’t even appear to take me seriously.
The member of staff was suspended pending investigation, and I went back home to Bournemouth, via my friend’s house in Southampton for the night, where I was called by a female member of police staff to debrief me on what had happened. She told me that the chances are it wouldn’t go to court due to lack of evidence, and that I should be prepared for this. I was absolutely destroyed by what had happened to me, my confidence shot. I ended up jumping straight into a relationship with a much older man, which was not the right decision at all, and just meant I didn’t process what had happened to me fully, focussing on this new and exciting long distance relationship I found myself in instead.
As everybody had warned me, several weeks later the case was dropped before making it to court. I was told that the amount of alcohol I had consumed must have impacted my ability to recount the night’t events accurately, and my testimony could not be trusted. The reasoning behind this? The police had obtained the CCTV footage from the night and, although the man had been clever enough not to carry out the acts on me where there were cameras, it apparently showed me being with him for an extended period of time, which I had not mentioned. It also showed me coming out of a hotel room, that was not my own, and the duvet that I was wrapped in when I got back to my room was not the duvet that was on the bed my friend and I were sharing. I was left shell shocked by this information, unable to process what this meant, whether it pointed towards him doing more to me than I could remember.
They hadn’t taken DNA from me at the time, they had just tested my clothing. I was horrified by what could have happened, that I could have blocked it out. I couldn’t sleep for months, I kept trying to remember what else happened, but I simply couldn’t and it has been a constant stress for over ten years now, not knowing. The member of staff most likely got his job back, once the charges were dropped, or got a similar position, able to carry out the same attacks on others, if he so pleased. I am left feeling on edge when in a man’s company alone, even if it is a friend of my husband, who I trust, I still have that moment ever so often when I wonder if he might choose to attack me, because he can, because I am vulnerable, because I had no idea it was going to happen the last time.
I have come a long way since the attack, and I have worked hard in therapy to overcome a lot of the trauma, but it still stays with me, affects me to this day. I think one of the worst things is not knowing what happened fully. That is what wakes me up in the middle of the night. That is what makes me hold my keys tighter in my pocket when I walk alone, even in the middle of the day. You just never know when it might happen, and that is terrifying.
