Brittney Frey is 2014 Ohio State alum and a public interest lawyer based in New York. Credit: Zachary Rilley | Lantern File Photo.
Brittney Frey is a 2014 Ohio State alum and a public interest lawyer based in New York.
Most of us won’t be in the news or ever see the inside of a courtroom. Most of us won’t report to the police or initiate a lawsuit. The systemic silencing of individuals who experience sexual violence is larger and more pervasive than any scandal in Ohio. Sexual violence remains to be a systemic and widespread public health issue in Ohio and across the country. Every time a new #MeToo case is in the news, I reflect on all of us, the majority of the state and the nation, who are still suffering in silence.
The HBO film, “Surviving Ohio State,” asked, “how did the Richard Strauss story happen?” It occurred in a culture that silences sexual abuse. We ask the same tired questions when another scandal breaks.
How did this happen?
How did no one know?
How did no one tell?
People did know.
People did tell.
I told my mom about the sexual abuse that I experienced right away. I heard her and my former stepfather arguing loudly until late hours of the night. But he stayed in our home for the next 10 years. While my brain was still developing, I learned two things – what happened to me was wrong and I was not worthy of protection. Because the abuse became normalized. The people who were supposed to protect me didn’t. And as a child, I was powerless.
“Do you know how old I was? The first time.” I asked my mom in my early 30s over the phone, slowly pacing my Brooklyn studio. “You must have been eight because I was pregnant with your brother,” my mom replied. “I didn’t know what to do. We just signed a mortgage. I told my dad and my sisters. My mom knew. No one offered to help. My sister had that huge house we could have stayed in. She never offered.”
No one in my family tried to initiate a conversation with me about the abuse. Holidays continued like normal, like nothing happened. Like nothing was still happening.
I started to disassociate from my world. I shut off. Powered down. This created the ideal conditions for the abuse to continue. And it did. I don’t remember much of my childhood because my body and brain were focused on surviving. And my grades reflected that. In my early 30s, I requested my school records from kindergarten to 12th grade. The file began with suspension letters and grades that were near failing: C’s, D’s, some F’s. There were many letters from concerned teachers saying that I was not ready for the following year. They consistently expressed that most of my assignments were not turned in and my grades demonstrated a lack of understanding. The signs were all there. Something was happening at home. But no one ever asked me about that.
After I told my mom, it never occurred to me to tell anyone else. I knew on some level there was no point– I told an adult. Nothing changed. Telling again felt dangerous. I learned it was safer to survive in silence than to speak and risk everything.
I wasn’t in a space to deal with my childhood until I turned 18 and moved out of my childhood home. I was 22 when I told my first therapist at Ohio State who said “what happened to you was a crime.” Those words opened the door to my journey of finding healing and accountability. The word crime, and someone from the outside world recognizing and saying out loud that what happened to me was illegal carried a tremendous amount of weight. I started to slowly crawl out of the shell pushed deep inside me and began to look around for safe spaces and people to share my life and story with.
Silence permeating every facet of life isn’t unique to me. We repeatedly hear the same stories, told in different voices and languages.
We hear them again.
And again.
And again.
Survivors of sexual abuse are forced to live in two worlds– our actual reality and the normal world that at times, feels like a performance for survival. Silence shouldn’t be the status quo. We shouldn’t be asking the same tired questions of how no one knew and no one told.
Children tell.
Adults tell.
Wrestlers at Ohio State tell.
People did know.
People do tell.
We can no longer afford to look the other way for the sake of keeping families together or wrestling teams winning.
