That education should start in pre-school, helping children to know what appropriate boundaries are and what to do if they are approached or abused.
When I started chatting online at RAINN last year, I was not prepared for what other participants were talking about in the group chat. There is always a waiting list. It can take hours to log in because so many people need help. After that first conversation, although I was immediately helped by reading what other survivors were saying, hearing my feelings spoken in what they wrote about being dehumanized, gas lit, gossipped about, victim-blamed, abused over and over again while the abusers laughed, and feeling trapped, I had not known that the chat is for everyone who needs support at any stage of abuse. Girls and women who had just been raped were signing in, describing their injuries, needing guidance from the moderator about what to do.
Over the months that I continued to sign in, and my feelings of numbness and absolute desperation started to dissipate from being in an ever-changing community of people whose varied experiences had many common themes, I was told about sex trafficking. I was told about girls being abused by their stepfathers, mothers' boyfriends and other relatives. Girls trapped in living environments where they had one abuser were passed around to his friends. Women locked themselves in the bathroom and slept in the bathtub with their babies because it was the only way to avoid being abused at night. Girls signed in while their abusers were outside their locked bedroom doors and jumped out their windows as the abusers broke the doors down.
Sometimes male victims also signed in. They were accepted although they're in a tough situation when female victims are writing about their anger and generalize about men; male victims really need help, too.
Particularly sad were the times when children and adolescents who did not have the cognitive or verbal skills to describe what had happened to them but who had some idea that it was wrong signed in. Sexual abuse is devastating for anyone; at least adults have a framework for the world beyond their immediate emotional and physical experience.
I'll never lend my support to the destruction of reproductive rights. Sex education is not a substitute, but it can save lives.
