RAJNI
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Please be aware that this particular piece includes graphic descriptions of sexual assault.
In both my hands, I have bags full of grocery items— a box of yogurt, fresh ginger, garlic, and other basic items I usually grabbed from the store. I’m walking up the stairs to our flat— our home. It’s a closed-off building with one set of stairs, spiraling upwards to about three floors. Only people’s main apartment doors serve as openings. I’m on my usual routine, touching the walls slightly with my fingers while climbing the stairs, when a man walks out from the flat door right next to ours.
I see the man coming out of our neighbor’s flat, an unknown man, I’ve never seen him in the building before. Our neighbors are a middle-aged couple with no children, who have lived there almost as long as my parents have. Since the stairwell is narrow, I stop climbing up at the intersection, where there is just a little more room for another person to pass you. So, I wait for him to pass me in that little 2’ by 7’ area. In ten more steps, I would have rang the doorbell to my home, for my mother to open the door.
But as he walks down, he pauses and starts to say something to me in Arabic. I don’t speak Arabic. But, I do know how to say “Ana mafi malum Arabic”, meaning “I do not know Arabic”. My father taught me this since it is the main language in the country. So when people try to talk to us, they would just leave us alone once they knew we didn’t know how to converse in their language.
But the man doesn’t leave me alone. He’s asking me some questions— I think? Like “where is your home?” And so I point to our home’s main door clearly in sight from where we are standing. He puts my hand down, lifts me up from under my arms, and I keep nervously repeating “Ana mafi malum Arabic” over and over again.
He lays me down on my back in the little area of the intersection saying something that was meant to sound reassuring, I think? He’s smiling. He puts his finger on my mouth so I stop speaking. The bags of groceries are set beside my head. He kneels in front of me and pulls my legs apart.
I’m just staring at him. My mind is so blank. Blank. I look into his eyes as he pulls down my pants, with which my underwear comes down too. Then he undoes his belt, his button, his zipper, and pulls the elastic of his underwear down, and something attached to his body pops out and becomes visible, what is that? I’m staring— remaining very still.
But he keeps saying something in Arabic, still smiling. Caressing my cheeks with the back of his hand. With his other hand he holds the attachment, I still don’t know what it is. Slouching over my body a little, he tries to push it into my body, the area where I pee from. I feel it and make a sound. I lift my head up, trying to see what he’s doing. He nudges my shoulder back down with his other hand, pinning me down. Where do I look? I’m forced to look at his smiling face. When I feel him on my pee-area, I whimper. He puts his finger on my mouth again. So I become quiet, again. He keeps rubbing his body attachment onto my pee-area, and he tries to push it in, but it isn’t going in, it just feels like a constant painful nudge. It goes in just enough where I know I feel something inside of me down there— like a plug? Like something you would want to take out because it feels uncomfortable, because it’s not supposed to be there. Does that make sense?
He continues to do this for what feels like forever, and then suddenly I feel some type of liquid inside my pee-area. It feels wet. Oh wait, do I have to pee? I think I have to pee. Because I feel like I’m already peeing! He gets up, pulls up his underwear, then buttons up his pants, buckles his belt and he’s done, he’s gone in no time.
Vanished.
I picked myself up, actually, I rushed. I pulled both my underwear and my pants up at the same time, grabbed my bags, ran up the next ten steps to my home, and rang the doorbell. I rang it frantically, without picking my finger up from the bell.
My mother opened the door, and yelled at me, “what’s wrong with you?!”
I rushed in, pushing her aside, threw the bags on the floor, and ran straight to the restroom, shut the door behind me and didn’t even have the chance to lock it. I had to pee— because I was already peeing.
As I was peeing, I felt relieved, that I peed mostly in the restroom and didn’t pee myself. But I did a little— how, and why? I knew how to go to the bathroom when I needed to.
Sitting there, on the toilet, I thought to myself, “Oh maybe, he had to pee, and he didn’t have anywhere else to go, so he peed in me because he knew I was going home”
“Wait, but he came down from my neighbor’s home”, I thought.
“Oh, maybe he has a thing about not using other people’s restrooms like me!”
“Or maybe their restroom isn’t working. Hmm, but ours is working, so why isn’t theirs?” A chain of thoughts flashed through my head. But I just used the restroom, and went about my life as if nothing had happened.
I was five years old. Five. Five.
I remember I mentioned it to my older sisters, but I could tell it wasn’t something we were supposed to talk about. It was easier to let it be. So I let it be, thinking, “Maybe it’s no biggie!”
Today—
I am twenty-five-years-old. I am no longer the five-year-old child who didn’t know any better; the child who curiously tried to make sense of what had happened.
In fact, the five-year-old girl who thought, “Maybe it’s no biggie!”, knows now— it is a big deal. It’s a huge deal. It was rape. That man came inside of me. But I was five-years-old then. How could I have known? At five-years-old, who could ever know?
That man, the unknown man— today, he is known. I know for a fact who he is. He is a pedophile. A predator who preys on young children. An abuser.
Pedophilia is very real, it is a very big deal and it’s traumatic.
It’s heartbreaking. Gut-wrenching. Unjust. Disturbing. Tormenting. It causes distress. It ignites trust issues. It causes pain— physically, emotionally, mentally. It causes paranoia. It causes me pain— it causes me paranoia.
It breaks you. It takes away a part of you that can never be returned.
Why aren’t enough people talking about this? Why did my older sisters dismiss it? Why couldn’t I bring myself to tell my mother what had happened? Even when I managed to, why was nothing done? Why was telling my father about this something seen as so “taboo”? Why was it so uncomfortable to talk about? Even if I had, why didn’t I know the names of those body parts to have the ability to speak out against what had happened to me?
Why was it something so stigmatized?
Why is it still stigmatized?
Why?
I still don’t know the answers to these questions. But I will spend every day ensuring that parents and family are the first educators about this to their children. They need to be.
I spend everyday, fighting so that others don’t learn what this is only after it has happened to them. So no one has to take years of growing up themselves, struggling through these emotions, trying to make sense of it. Because it didn’t make sense to me.
I spend everyday trying to figure out the answers to these questions so no one has to ask them in the first place.