[I will be talking about sexual violence (including SA perpetuated by and against children, without explicit description), violence (also including children), death, and various consequences of trauma (derealization/depersonalization, flashbacks, recurring nightmares) here; outside of violence, nothing is specifically described. Proceed with caution]

I never picked up my driver's license. It sits on my desk right next to my laptop as I'm writing this but I never picked it up. My mother drove me to the capital of our county but the moment I saw the county office, I just left my body entirely, and when I came back, we were already home and my license was in my pocket.

It took me a long while to even remember why I disappeared like that. More than a decade ago, when I was still a teen, I went on a school trip to the county's office, and that's where I got assaulted by one of my schoolmates, underneath the school bus parked right in front of the building, with others watching and smirking as I tried (and failed) to stay present and fight back. After I remembered, it came flooding all at once. All of the emotions of it. I can still feel all of that touch and the air gets knocked out of my lungs because it's the summer heat again and I'm surrounded by countless people staring at me, taking my suffering in as fine entertainment, doing nothing to stop it. Sometimes it seeps into my nightmares and I wake up drenched in sweat with my jaw clenched so tightly my teeth hurt and a tear in the corner of my eye.

Not great, right. It doesn't happen often, but still, not great.

With that memory unlocked, others followed. I remembered even older memories of culturally permissible consent violations coming from my own family, and the ways in which other children, endlessly curious but still not understanding much, harmed me without fully understanding that what they've done went deeper than "regular" violence. I suddenly understood why I felt so nervous when someone stood right behind me, why I can't be touched in certain ways without freezing, why some scenes in romance novels and movies never felt romantic to me.

I'm scrolling through my social media in an attempt to turn myself a little bit more brainless because I'm tired of thinking for today. The algorithm brings me my usual salad of gay and transgender memes with a nice popculture sauce on top. But between the lesbian lettuce and trans tomato, it shoved a couple of raw bits of meat still oozing with blood and myoglobin: the Cornell case, the Epstein files, random conservatives getting arrested for sex crimes. And out of all of that, it leads me swiftly into videos of shirtless cis men flexing their muscles, posing with their guns, hitting the everloving shit out of a boxing bag or a mannequin.

"Kill all abusers"

"Give me a gun and 5 minutes with the Cornell 7"

"Kill all abusers"

"Training so I can kill a sexual predator in case I encounter one"

"Kill all abusers"

"That's what I'd do if you touched my daughter." Shot. Another shot. Another shot. Perfect bullseye. Torn target.

"Kill all abusers"

I watch, and I watch, and I watch, and I feel reality slipping away from me again. Noises get louder, audio gets trendier, muscles get bigger, damages get more severe. Another man poses, grins, shoots, kicks, punches, postures, begs, begs, begs for approval, I am not like the other men, look! In a hypothetical scenario where you get sexually assaulted, if it ever happened within my eyesight (which it almost never does1), I would dropkick a guy! I would unload a whole magazine into him! You can watch as I turn him into a bloody mess, look! More violence, watch more violence, doesn't my violent behavior comfort you?

I imagine the county office again, and even though I'm aphantasiac and my mind's eye is blind, I can almost see the building which haunts me in my dreams, and I see that man, that tall, muscular man, bearded avatar of masculinity with his eyes hidden behind a pair of sunglasses, raise his rifle and shoot a teenager standing underneath it. No, I see a firing squad of shirtless men, all ready to shoot, and they fire upon everyone: upon my schoolmates, upon my family members, upon children which are less than 10 years old, and they do so with such glee, with such pride in themselves.

It doesn't make me feel better at all.

That overwhelming parade of "protective men" comes from the same place a parade of sexual predators they're meant to fight off comes from: the desire for power. Both "protectors" and predators are salivating at the thought of having a class of unprotected people they can hurt, except nobody ever stops to ask why "protectors" are so eager to hurt others. When they hold a gun making a tough face to the camera, what are they thinking about? The videos make it clear: their hands itch to pull the trigger and see someone's head burst open, or to make contact with someone's nose, and be hailed a hero for it.

But what comes after the violence?

The videos never say that. They end with a shot of a shredded target, or a ballistic skull oozing fake blood, or they loop endlessly in a flurry of kicks and punches. That's great. Hypothetically, if you were there, after you were done massacring my teenage schoolmates right in front of me, what would you do with me? Would you hug me? Would you be able to convince me that the blood on the county office wall isn't my fault?

And you may say: I wouldn't kill a teenager or a child. And to this I say: why not2? Are you telling me my trauma doesn't need to be avenged? If we are, indeed, killing all abusers, what's stopping you? "They didn't know better"? "They're so young, they still have a bright future in front of them"? "They never learned that no means no"? "Surely they didn't mean to do that"? "Maybe they were abused themselves and that's why they're doing it"? I thought there are no excuses. Are you killing all abusers or not?

It's never about the victims, or the survivors, if you prefer (I don't). It's a fantasy about killing without consequence. It's about dominance over other men. It's about a strong cis man killing in the name of those they perceive as women and girls because they are too weak to defend themselves. A man is strong and violent and the only thing that can stop him from harming a tiny weak woman or child is a stronger and more violent man, and the one to rule them all is the strongest and most violent man, who hopefully knows to not harm women and kids; wonder what happens if he doesn't. Why do we never see those protectors vowing to kill cis women preying on boys? Because, in their minds, women aren't a part of the hierarchy of violence but rather objects to be perpetually saved. Showing "how I'd kill a woman if she touched my son" just doesn't have the same ring to it because, again, women are too weak. Harming one isn't hard, you can just do it with ease.

Does that sound familiar to you?

I don't know why I'm writing this. I don't even remember writing half of this. I'm half numb again and barely gripping onto the reality while an invisible hand touches me just like a real hand did by the county office all of those years ago. I wish I could say I'm writing from a place of rage but I don't even feel mad. I wish I could say it's educational but it feels too angry and personal to be that. Maybe it's a vent piece, maybe it's just me screaming because something was stolen from me and so many others, and the public wants to fill the void it left behind with blood and gore instead of helping that void close.

I never wanted anyone to kill. I just wanted someone to shout, to distract the crowd around me, to ask me if I was okay afterwards, to reassure me it wasn't my fault, to let me know I should talk to someone about it, to go with me to the teachers so that I can have someone to fall back on when my words fail me. None of that ever came my way. I only ever admitted what happened to me here and in poems, a decade after it was done.

And if you were hurt like me — if you're a victim, or a survivor, or whatever other word fits you best — you can wish for all your abusers to suffer. You can wish for them all to die. Hell, you can scream it from the rooftops if you're able to, and I want you to be able to say this without fear. Those are our traumas and our feelings, after all, and we should be free to process it all however we want, and we should be able to feel whatever we want about those who hurt us. I don't want anyone who ever hurt me to die but if your abuser dies and you're happy about it, I'll celebrate with you.

But still, we need to ask ourselves if those who swear to protect us have their eyes only set on violence; if, for them, we are only an object to protect and be left as soon as the threat is over, if their "support" relies on being seen as inherently weak3 and non-threatening. Because the removal of a threat is one thing — coming to terms with what happened and healing from it is another.

If you are eager to apply your fists to faces but can't clean and bandage a wound, do you even care about the wounded?