Silence
All my life I have been forced to be silent. Staying silent starting at age five as my body was used for the sexual pleasure of a grown man. He was my own father. He told me that if I ever told anyone then my mum would go away and never come back and that he would go away and never come back and that I would be left all alone and that it would be my fault. Terrified, I kept quiet. I was responsible to keep the family together, he told me. He said that all fathers have to teach their daughters how to be good wives when they grow up otherwise they would never find husbands to love them and stay with them, but nobody talked about it because it was a secret. A five-year-old listens to whatever their parents tell them, because their parents are God at that age. And so the years passed. A little girl, constantly being silenced into submission and secrecy, so that he could keep using me for his pleasure. Over the next year, I believed everything he said. I didn’t know anything else. Until