By Kylie Kinsella

Photo by Volkan Olmez

You can’t believe that this could happen.
You can’t believe it’s been going on for so long.
You can’t believe the evil lurking behind the silver screen.
You’re disgusted and shocked and telling everyone you’re appalled.

But I recall a time when you didn’t believe the ones you claimed to know,
to trust,
to love.
You didn’t believe that this happened.
You didn’t believe they’d been doing it for so long.
You didn’t believe the evil lurking in your circle.
Maybe you forgot, but I assure you
we remember.

We’re the ones you threw away. We’re the ones you spit on.
We told you we were hurting,
we were breaking,
we were dying.
You asked us what we did to make them hurt us,
what we did to make them break us,
what we did to make them kill us.
You saw them with the gun and our bloody body on the floor,
looked at it
then called us liars.
Said it never happened.
Said we made it up.
At the funeral you called us names,
wrote slut on the coffin,
ate the free food and then said we only did it for attention.
We know you’re not an ally.
We know you’re not a friend.
These predators are an evil we can see,
we can feel,
from which we can even heal.

But you,
you’re the evil we can’t see,
we can’t feel,
from which we never heal.
Because the rapist loads the gun
But you’re the one who makes us hate ourselves so much
we pull the trigger.

To the culture of sexual violence we’re forced to exist within and to all of those who victim blamed us when we begged for help, we never should have had to beg, you always should have cared.

Kylie Kinsella is a 23-year-old writer and language teacher living in Madrid, Spain. She hopes to get her MA in Sexuality Studies at Dublin City University and to teach teens Comprehensive Sex Ed. She has a beta fish named Eleven (yes, Stranger Things) who definitely should be taking fish Prozac.