The #metoo stories in forgotten places
In 2008, at 50 years of age, Claire shot herself dead in her backyard in rural Mississippi, where we both grew up. Claire (not her real name) was one of my best friends from sixth grade until the end of high school. Her suicide was the result of several crushing events, but the one that created a life of anxiety and unhappiness was the sexual abuse she suffered years before.
Her #metoo story and others like it must be told by victims and their families and friends — not just in big cities like New York City and Los Angeles, but also across the country in rural and small urban areas — to help women and girls who struggle with the aftershocks of sexual harassment and abuse today.
To date, this movement has been led by women with social media platforms and high-profile jobs. We need to fight to extend it to ordinary women lost in society’s cracks, including those who fell so far down they took their own lives. Research tells us as many as one in three women who are raped contemplate suicide, and more than one in 10 rape victims actually attempt it.
One summer when Claire was 15, a school official began sexually abusing her in the school book room. She told me and two other friends about this secret relationship the day it first happened. It went on to last a year, and took place in several places in and around the school.
Over that time, she cried most days and became very depressed. We begged her to tell other school officials and her parents, but she was afraid. She told us not to tell. As I remember it, while she did not know how to explain why she had grown to care about her abuser, she did know she would get in trouble if any of us “told on him.”
This conversation, of course, was long before we knew anything about nondisclosure agreements that coerce many professionals into silence; the physical and emotional hold the school official had over Claire was just as effective. He focused on fear, not monetary settlements.
Claire came from a workingclass family of several sisters. They were all beautiful and smart. None of them, though, became writers, actresses, producers or models. They didn’t seek highpowered jobs or work on Capitol Hill.
Claire was a nice girl who wanted to marry and have children. A short time after the school official tired of her, she escaped high school by marrying a senior boy.
We never called what had happened to her sexual harassment or abuse, much less rape, but that is what the school official did to this young girl. It ruined her life.
After she quit school and moved away, we went to the school official and told him it was his fault she left home and school. We said we hoped he would never try anything like that again. Over time, he disappeared.
Meanwhile, Claire came back for senior graduation. We all ran to give her a big hug inside the gym. She had left her husband, but we didn’t get to see her that much after the divorce.
Our time together lessened. She lived through both good and bad times that I won’t share here, but the school official had built a deadly, emotional path that ultimately led to her death. Whether at age 15 or 50, no one was prepared to help her — not her family or friends and not her teachers or work colleagues. She did not let them, and we did not try hard enough.
Today we all are reading articles and watching news reports about the sexual harassment and abuse of women in politics and in the entertainment and media industries. It’s important that we focus attention on the rich, powerful and well known, and the women whose lives they leave in wreckage.
But we must not forget the suffering of the everyday women working at supermarkets and department stores and real estate agencies, and young girls attending schools and churches who carry the memories of sexual abuse and harassment from their past as well as their current lives.
These are stories we have to work harder to hear, but they’re even more important to tease out.
We need to encourage women and girls to speak, publicly or privately, to law enforcement, their friends, teachers and ministers — whether their predators are rich and famous or working class or poor.
Women, all women, have to learn how to call out those who abuse them. They have to learn how to protect themselves, so that they never come to believe suicide is the solution.