AN OPEN LETTER FROM A TEENAGE GIRL

What's your least favourite thing about being a teenage girl? Have a think, I mean there's a lot to go through. There's the super uncomfy 'bras', the god-awful period cramps and even the constant underlying worry that you'll be next, that you'll be 'the one'. The One out of the 1 in 4 women who are victims of sexual abuse every year. The One who "should've been more careful". The One who wakes up to find that a video of themselves unconcious, half nude and raped has gone viral on social media. According to various sitcoms and cheap magazines, the life of a sixteen year old girl goes along the lines of like pink filtered web surfing, texting, lightning speed boy-talk and like the frequent sentence filler. The media prepares us for an adolescence of absent minded bliss; something I have yet to encounter and something Jada, the sixteen year old from Texas who's rape pictures went viral, will never see.



Now I know it might feel difficult to identify with a girl living thousands of miles away, so I'll alter your perspective a little. Jada is a girl, a young girl, just like you, like your friends or your cousins or sisters and (shock-horror) even like your mum once. A young girl who fell victim to rape, to public humiliation and to a lifetime of flashbacks and dreaded "are you the girl who"'s. Jada was offered a drink, passed out and was raped. 'Classic' school anti-drinking rape story right? Now we wait for the "don't drink what you haven't mixed" and "always stay in a group" and, well, you get where I'm going. Only Jada's torment didn't finish there. She woke to find a video of the rape viral on the internet, which led to the spread of a hashtag consisting of 'remakes' of the initial photo, mocking her. Remember being told that nothing can be completely removed from the internet? Jada's story is a lot longer than that awkward half hour in class, and so are the stories of every other young girl.

Let's take a moment to think of Jada in good old land-of-the-great-and-free America. Young, black, female Jada in the United States of America, land of the free - if you're white, male, cis and heterosexual, that is (bonus points for Christianity). I've already written about rape culture and the West, so now I'll write about rape culture and us. In search of more information on her story I searched the interweb and was faced with countless 'alleged's and 'supposed's, and I realised that no matter how much evidence is presented, sexual assault isn't ever taken seriously - and it doesn't matter whether you're Dylan Farrow or the girls being raped and slaughtered every minute in Congo. What the papers forget to tell us is that rape isn't over in a matter of minutes, that those who assault us will still probably roam free no matter what you tell the police, and that you will spend the rest of your life being punished for a crime you didn't commit.

On the bright side, we are prepped for this life of torment from an early age. By the time we're fluorescent adolescents it's almost engraved in our skulls that girls should stay in groups, that we should probably cross the street 'just in case' and acting like that could get us in some real trouble, if we're not careful. As girls we are warned against ourselves.We are taught to believe that our fate is in our hands, that whatever happens to us is, in one way or another, our fault. Our neckline was far too low, we shouldn't have had any alcohol, or maybe we were like Jada and were just far too conscious?

Today I sit on my bedroom floor and like millions of other girls I am One. The famous One of the 1 in 4 writing  this letter to all girls; the strong, the scared, the voiceless. No matter which position you are in, you matter - we matter.

Posted by Melissa