Ispy is 14 years old and is on holiday in Italy with her biological father and her 12 year old brother.
Pretty much left to their own devices, Ispy and her brother roam the complex day and night while their father is in the bar, and doesn’t come back to the chalet most nights.
Her brother took this photo and later this evening they were hanging out in the playground with some other kids they had met.
Two boys encouraged Ispy to go with them out of sight while her brother played with the others. They said they had something to show her and she went along.
On that night in those clothes and white knee high socks, Ispy was sexually assaulted. One of the boys put his hand in her shorts and touched her vulva, he put his fingers inside her. She didn’t move, didn’t scream and didn’t fight. She tried to tell her father that something had happened and spent the following day in bed. He did nothing and the impression was given that he thought it was her own fault. Guilty and ashamed Ispy buried the event away in a deep dark crevice of her mind where it sat dormant until it was triggered.
This was a suppressed memory which surfaced having watched the TV show Sex Education in which Aimee was sexually assaulted when a man on a bus masturbated and ejaculated onto her. This story line made Ispy reflect on sexual assault and what it means.
Ultimately it is any kind of sexualised behaviour directed at a non consenting individual. Sexual assault can be anything from using inappropriate sexualised language in the presence of someone else that makes them uncomfortable, to multiple rape situations.
One of the reasons Ispy’s father may have disregarded her experience is because he too was a perpetrator of sexual assault on her.
For a period of 3 years he would watch her when she took a bath. Developing ever more complex variations on the same theme of peeping Tom behaviour. Presumably this was to gain sexual gratification but Ispy didn’t understand what was going on at age 12 when it started. In time she figured it was wrong but only acted when the daughter of her father’s girlfriend became a target of his behaviour. She told her mother in the car one Saturday when she was collected to visit for the weekend. Her mother stopped the car and wept.
‘I believe you,’ she said. ‘I believe you because he did it to me too but I never believed that he would do it to you’ She had left the family when Ispy was age 11 and was now remarried and had another child.
The relief at being believed was intense. Once realising it was wrong what her father was doing, she was unable to tell anyone as who would believe her? In fact this fear was well placed because although her mother believed her, her father managed to convince the male social worker that it was a story made up by his jealous daughter who had been made to give up her bedroom for the ‘new girls’. Ispy had broken her silence because she wanted to protect the other girl and somehow managed to explain everything to the social worker supported by her mother.
In protecting the new girls she triggered a situation so impossible to bear that she had to leave the family home and her younger brother and move into her grandparents house until she left school.
https://www.victimsupport.org.uk/crime-info/types-crime/rape-and-sexual-assault/
IspyDystopia 