Did my working class accent mark me as unworthy?

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I wrote the follow piece a whole year ago and it’s taken me this whole time to get the courage to post it.

Content Warning: Sexual Assault

It’s June 2021 and OFSTED just released their Review of Sexual Abuse in Schools and Colleges, covering the frequent routine of sexual harassment in schools. Their definition includes sexist and inappropriate name calling, online abuse, up skirting, rape jokes, sharing nudes, pressuring to perform sexually, unwanted touching and other forms of sexual assault. The report found that nearly 80% of girls had experienced sexual assault, and 65% had experienced unwanted touching.

I have one thing to say. Me Too.

I’m approaching my 30th birthday. I’ve been out of school nearly 15 years. In that time and the time before me, countless girls have been sexualised, groped, man-handled, judged, violated. Me Too.

The relief I felt, because sexual harassment experienced by girls IN SCHOOL was finally being talked about, drove me to tears. Quiet tears, tears of relief, of anger, of mourning, of pain. Quiet tears shed in the bathroom alone, tears not shared with my partner, tears for myself, tears for those who came after and before, for those who also experienced violations at the hands of boys. These boys… boys whose parents didn’t teach them how to treat girls, boys who weren’t held accountable by their friends, boys who weren’t corrected, disciplined or taught by teachers, boys who were not given proper education on consent, boys who were told they could have the fucking world, boys who took whatever and screw the impacts it has on girls, boys who felt entitled to our bodies, boys who lied to avoid consequence, BOYS. Boys who grow into men. Despite my relief filled tears, my eyes sting with anger. I am angry. I am angry enough to speak. Me Too.

Although I can recall more than a handful of times I experienced sexual harassment at school, there is one haunting moment that I carry like rock. A moment I buried deep through adolescence because it threatened to drown me if I looked too close. A moment I only recently let resurface. I have held this moment in adulthood, let it wash through my memories fingers as I repeatedly examine it, trying to create an alternative ending, trying to give myself a bigger voice, trying to undo the years of damage that moment gave, trying to relieve the sickening wave of nausea and white hot anger as Me Too flickers through my thoughts.

When I was 15, just as I was starting to explore my body and my sexuality with other people, I was sexually assaulted at school.

Not only was I sexually assaulted at school, I was sexually assaulted in class.

Not only was I sexually assaulted at school, during a history class, I was assaulted in presence of a teacher.

And not only was I sexually assaulted in the presence of a teacher, but that teacher did NOTHING. Did nothing even though I spoke up, spoke out, and tried to defend myself. Did nothing except to threaten my education by sending me out of the room. Not only did he not protect me, not only did he punish me for speaking out by shouting at me for causing a disruption, he also empowered a fuckbag boy and reinforced his violent behaviour. The punishment for continuing to speak up would loose me some of my education, I would loose that lesson. I would be labelled the naughty kid. All while the boy escaped consequence.

I’ve always been loud, always spoken out, always neglected authority. So when the fuck ugly boy sat in front of me started leaning back in his chair to squeeze my knee, sliding his filthy fucking paws up my leg to tickle my crotch, I had no problem, batting him away, bending his fingers, kicking his chair, smacking his head. I had no problem, after the teacher told me off for doing such things, brashly explaining why I was doing them. But, after being told to shut up and stop disrupting the class or face being sent out the room, I fizzled to nothing. My boldness and defiance contracted into shame. In 2 seconds flat, my emotions ran from powerful and unapologetic and fell into broken pile of submissive, dejected defencelessness. I had exposed my vulnerability to the whole class and as consequence I was somehow the one being judged. I could feel the eyes of class mates, with their accusatory stares, labelling me a slut, hussy, whore. The boy turned around and looked me square in the eye, his face so wrought with smugness I nearly vomited then and there. His face said, you are mine, your body is mine, I can do what I want and you can do nothing, you are powerless and I am powerful. Me Too.

When I examine this memory, this moment, I want to scream, I want to throw shit across the room, I want to grab every male teacher by the face and squish their eyes out of their heads. I want them to feel my rage as it eviscerates their bodies, their eyes. I want to remove their sight for good, because of the ignorance they offered to me and other young girls like me.

I want to hug the child that I was, the child who wasn’t listened to, the child who was punished, the child who was threatened and violated whilst trying to soak up every sentence of her education. I want to squeeze her so hard and tell her to continue being loud, continue to fight… punch that boy, kick and bite and twist his fucking balls until he screams and the teacher drags you from the room screaming FUCK YOU! I want to tell her thats it’s ok to be violent in the face of violence being done to you.

I wish I had done this, carried on kicking up a fuss. I wish I was sent to the head teacher. I wish I was able to say, a boy fucking touched my without my consent and now I’M being punished. But I didn’t. I didn’t have the language, consent in the context of sex was not part of my vocabulary, and the teachers threat was enough to silence me. He got a free pass to continue what he was doing. And so I was quiet, I avoided that boy ever since, shuddering every time I’ve seen him after, and every time I heard of girls, including friends, going to his house for alcohol and getting fingered. Was consent an issue for them too?

I am ginormous with anger recounting this memory, but 15 year old me who had been sexually harassed and then ignored and silenced by a teacher… she felt small. The squashing of my voice and lack of action, left me thinking I had done something wrong, that I was the problem and other than me there was no problem… For years I felt that, despite the memory being accompanied by sickening feeling and a high level of discomfort. It’s only in recent years that I recognise how fucked that situation was and what it means. OFSTED reported that sexual harassment has become normalised for young people in schools. This normalisation isn’t new, it existed since I was at school 15 years ago, and I’m sure probably existed for generations before. I am not speaking lightly when I say these experiences are enabled by the adults around children.

And amongst all this bull-crap I can’t help but wonder… How much did my accent and my class contribute to not being listened to? Now, after years of living in the south west, south east and overseas, my accent has diluted into plain English, nondescript to any particular area. Perhaps if you listen hard enough and you know your accents well enough you WILL hear the occasional tell, in the way I pronounce certain words or the slang that I use, that I am midlands born. Back then, 15 years ago, sat in that history lesson, I had a strong and scrappy midlands twang. The elocuted “He’s touching me under the table” would have sounded more like “‘’is tuchin’ me unda tha taybull’. Did my accent mark me as unworthy, mark me as troublesome? My accent definitely marked me as other, marked me as a working-class outsider in a class room of locals where perhaps only the lack of a recent haircut and scruffy shoes would have been the biggest tell of a working class home. I can’t help but question, is it that all girls are disposable and unworthy of being listened to, or was I, with my working class accent, apparent lack of shame and willingness to expose my situation to the WHOLE class, just easier to ignore and dismiss than the other girls?

I consider myself lucky. I fucking hate that I am writing that. Lucky. But I am, because this experience didn’t go any further. Perhaps I fought too much, perhaps I wasn’t such an easy target after all, perhaps it was just an opportune moment taken by a horny teenage boy and nearly getting caught made him think twice before trying some else with ME… Either way, I didn’t encounter any further violations from THAT boy.

The OFSTED report found that girls reported most sexual violence occurred in ‘unsupervised spaces outside of school, such as parties or parks without adults present, although some girls […] also experienced unwanted touching in school corridors’. So my question is, if this boy had the audacity to violate me in the presence of a fucking teacher, and GET AWAY WITH IT… what behaviours was he presenting in these other ‘normalised’ environments? I didn’t experience any further harassment. But did anyone else? DID ANYONE ELSE?

Yesterday, I read Does class impact the way we have sex? by Beth Ashley. Although it is primarily about the differences in consensual sex and sexual experiences between social classes (an interesting read btw), she does highlight that working class women are more likely to be assaulted.

Reading this sentence sprang me back to the experience of sitting in that class room. That experience stole joy from me. Men steal joy from women all the time. Not just the boys and men who harass us and assault us, but those who enable others and those who do nothing too. The process of writing this was cathartic and reading it back, I think it holds so much power, to be able to talk about this issue and put into the world what happened to me but relate it back to a class issue, because class structures steal joy, in so many ways. As Beth Ashley writes, working class women are more likely to be violated and middle-class women are more likely bought up in stricter environments with less sexual liberation (not comparing the two, but they are both examples of joy stolen by a system of patriarchy and reinforced by class structures). We need to include class in the conversations of social justice more, because without it we only fix half the problems that steal joy and don’t create intersectional joy for everyone.