Opinion
When my eldest daughter was a teenager and started going to parties, I began to worry about her getting wasted and being vulnerable. She wouldn’t be so stupid, she told me in the confident way of a teenager. It might not be up to her, I said. Then, as I shared with her a story from my teenage life, she helped me realise something that I’d hidden from myself all these years.
My story went back to a night when I was 15 and went to a party with a girlfriend. Everyone else was a year or two older and from a different school – so I wanted to be liked by them. I had drunk too much and kissed a boy who was similarly drunk, before we both threw up.
But what I couldn’t remember was how later that night I had ended up with a different boy in the alley behind the house where the party was. We hadn’t been talking. We’d never met before. Decades later, I still wonder, how did he get me away from the party? Was he watching me and spotted an opportunity? Did he suggest some fresh air?
And then there was a doorway and a bit of concrete and him offering me two choices of what he was about to do. As a parent, I now recognise this as a “no choice” choice. It’s the same as when you ask a child if they want the blue socks or the pink socks. Either way, they put on the socks and you get what you want. And that’s what happened in the alleyway too.
After I don’t know how long, I heard someone calling my name. It was also the name of the pet dog at the party house and it took me a while to realise it was my girlfriend looking for me. I called out and we left the party for home.
It was at this point in my story that my daughter interjected: “Mum, you were assaulted.”
In the late ’80s it was considered by my peers that simply being present was consent. Now I suddenly realised that I hadn’t consented that night. I hadn’t been in any state to do so.
At the time, there had been a reaction to what had happened from those around me. In the language of the time, I had “gotten with” a boy from my friend’s school after kissing another one. The next day there was something about how she and others said the boy’s name that made me wonder if maybe he had a bad reputation. I can still hear the girls repeating his first and last name and see them giving each other a look, shaking their heads slightly. They were more concerned that the boy I’d kissed earlier in the backyard was a popular girl’s boyfriend.
Responses to the Cornell University case – by commentators and on social media – have been packed with people criticising an American college student for not calling her experience rape right off the bat. There were weeks between the night she’d arrived, drunk, at the frat house party and went upstairs with one man who turned into many, and her complaint to campus police.
It can take a long time to figure out what’s happened to the body you’re in – a body that is coping and learning from everything it goes through. The story you’ve told yourself and others can shift in unpredictable ways.
My experience was worlds away from what Cornell University’s Jane Doe allegedly endured at that 2024 party. There is no comparison. But women of all generations who look back on their experiences, and those of their friends, understand that we live in a world where consent should no longer be assumed.
In some ways I’m grateful. I was taken to an alley before there were mobile phones or chat groups and thank God for that. There weren’t drugs like ketamine around at my teenage parties either.
Yet it still feels like they are all around us, poking and grabbing without asking. We are angry and sick of it. Sexual assault and violence happens everywhere and reported rates are higher now than 30 years ago. Globally, one in three women is subjected to it in her lifetime.
Plenty of my friends have had the same experience of realising as mothers what happened to them as girls. There is language now for what happened then. But some of the text messages from the Cornell case show women still sometimes minimise and make nice to push away the potential trauma. Jane Doe messaged that she was “really open minded tho” days after the incident. “I got with someone at the party,” I told a friend back then.
Women have shared their experiences with MeToo and IAmJaneDoe hashtags again and again. Yet nothing changes.
I don’t feel traumatised by what happened to me. The shame is not mine. But it was upsetting to come to the thudding realisation that I’d been taken advantage of. Perhaps nothing will change until our attackers feel the same thud – not that they’ve been assaulted, but that they took what they wanted without asking.
Lucy Beaumont is assistant opinion editor.
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