Sergeants Mess
I learned not to flinch.
Not when the belt landed against my bottom, always in the same place, always measured, always controlled. Not when the sting settled into my skin, deep enough to ache but never enough to show to the world. That was the point - to leave the marks where no one would see, where no one could ask.
I limped between tables, serving men who found amusement in my pain, who decided when I was allowed to walk and when I wasn’t. Until one day, I could no longer move, my body refusing to obey - so they found another way to break me.
The indoor firing range.
They tied me at different lengths, laughing as they forced me to hobble between targets. The shots rang out, slicing through the air, whistling past me with sickening speed. Were the rounds real? It didn’t matter. The terror was.
And when they tired of their game, they took the rest.
I shut my eyes, but the smells remained. The damp stench of army gear, sweat and dirt from the training ground. The sharp bite of discharged rounds, the bitter taste of fear lodged in my throat. These things don’t fade. They cling to you, sink into your skin, wrap themselves around the darkest corners of memory.
They never leave.
The Diary
I was never supposed to remember.
They counted on fear to keep me quiet. On exhaustion to wear me down. On isolation to make me doubt myself. But I refused.
Instead, I wrote.
Every attack. Every vehicle. Registration numbers. Colours. The smells, the places, the dates. I captured it all, 287 entries of undeniable truth, a ledger of their crimes that they could never rewrite.
And later, when the world tried to question, when justice wavered, that diary stood firm. Because I was not the only one. Others had been trapped in the same nightmare, and my pages - my proof - became theirs, too.
They thought they had won. They thought they had buried the truth beneath years of silence, shame, and fear.
But they were wrong.
Because the truth was written. And I never let it go.
This is just a snippet of my life as a child and it is traumatic to recount the horrors I went through and no one will ever understand the impact it had on me which I relive every day. We - all child victims - are prisoners in our minds for the rest of our lives and there is no escape but occasionally temporary relief until you close your eyes again. Do not ever believe or tell yourself that counselling and therapy will help, it wont! The damage is done, the trust is gone, difficulty in forming relationships is always there and NO YOU DONT BECOME AN OFFENDER that is just an excuse by people who are simply looking for an excuse to carry out sickening depraved sexual urges. I am not looking for sympathy and my story is no worse that any child who has been subjected to grooming and sexual abuse, what I want is for people to wake up and help form a bond that cannot be broken and stand together to stop this trade.
You are out of excuses.
If you think this isn’t your fight, you are wrong. If you turn away because it’s uncomfortable, you are complicit. If you stay silent, you are part of the problem.
Do you know what it means to wake up screaming, trapped in the memories of a childhood stolen? Do you know what it means to feel filth clinging to your skin, to hear laughter as you are stripped of your dignity, your safety, your humanity?
No, you don’t. Because you are comfortable. Because you get to choose whether to care. But children do not get to choose. Survivors do not get to forget. We live with it. Every day. Every night.
And the people who do this? They walk free.
They reoffend. They laugh at lenient sentences. They know the system protects them more than it protects their victims.
This stops when YOU decide it stops.
When YOU refuse to look away.
When YOU speak out.
When YOU hold the system accountable.
When YOU stop pretending this is someone else’s problem.
Because the next child screaming in the dark could be yours.
Do something. Or accept that your silence makes you no better than the monsters who did this.