Primary School - where my life went into a downward spiral - and why

I’m a 25 year old “black” woman. And for the sake of American reader’s culture I have to state that I was born female. I’m not transgender, I’m not transsexual, and I never have been.

I used to study at a Roman Catholic Primary school in North London.

There was 20-30 students in each class (nursery, reception, year 1, year 2, year 3, year 4, year 5, year 6) which was about 160 - 240 students. When I was there, there was less than 10 black students. Some classes didn’t have any. In my class there was 5 other black kids.

It wasn’t until about a couple of years ago that I realised how problematic those odds / ratios must have been.

I got bullied throughout my entire time there. Back then I mainly remember being bullied for wearing glasses / being short-sighted, tall, and my trousers not being long enough because it was hard to find ones that were my size. The bullying made me very shy

From year 2 (around age 7) people started bullying me for a whole different reason, a reason which I wasn’t even aware of until a few years ago as an adult, when a woman named Terri-Ann who bullied me even outside of school messaged me on Facebook, ridiculing me and telling me everyone thought I was a lesbian.

That was news to me, especially because I’ve never been a lesbian. And as a child in primary school I certainly wasn’t very clued up on sex or sexuality.

I wondered where she even got that assumption.

It’s because I was sexually assaulted my a girl in the school toilets when I was about 7 years. But until a few years ago I didn’t know that anyone else knew about it.

A few years ago 2 friends of mine was telling me about their experiences with having been sexually assaulted as children and they said some things that made it all click. They both know about my experiences with having been sexually assaulted. In one of my friends responses to my experience the things she said was as if it was obvious. Something like “it’s strange that something like that happened along with all the bullying and no one realised what had happened to you…” Which was a fair point,

But what my other friend said made so much more about my life click. She was telling me about her experience when she was abused by a babysitter as a toddler and she was telling me how the truth came out. She said she was so young that back then she ran to a family member, and just blurted out what happened, not even knowing what happened “because that’s what kids do, kids talk.” At that moment I realised, the girl who assaulted me must’ve run around telling people what happened. And given how horribly the students and teachers treated me, I don’t think she told the story right. But it’s like I said before about my friend, she didn’t know what was happening.

Even the girl who did those things to me - I remember her saying she saw her parents “having sex” and I said I didn’t know what that was. I didn’t ask her to show me. But she did it anyway. The copied what she saw her parents doing and she did it to me.

She obviously thought it was fine. But I didn’t like it at all. Even back then I just felt a grey cloud surrounding me all the time and I felt so sad and violated. When I was that young I was just told these were my “private parts” for peeing and pooping and I knew that going to the toilet was a private thing. My privacy had been abused. My privacy was gone.

And I was only 7 years old. My mother can’t be blamed for not having the sex talk with me at 7 year old. I wouldn’t expect anyone to have needed to.

But as an adult, one of sisters told me that because situations like that, which her and her kids knows a bit about because it happened to her kid’s classmate, she now makes sure her kids are educated enough about the privacy of their own bodies and that they need to tell their parents if anyone does things like that to them because it’s wrong. So very wrong.

I messaged the person who did those things to me, Danielle her name (and yes after all these years I’m naming names and the next part highlights why.) I asked her if she remembered what she did to me and I told her it really hurt me and messed my life up. She said oh well, it was so long ago, best just to move on and forget about it. And we left it there. Or at least, she did. That situation has ruined so much of my life to this day.

Even writing this, there’s that sadness again. I need to go cry.