Content warning: sexual assault

A response to Shannon Burns on childhood sexual assault

In the late 1980s, around the age of 11, I hit puberty with the force of an 80-tonne road train. I became the third-tallest child in my primary school and grew exquisitely painful adult-sized breasts whose entire surface was livid purple scar tissue. When I started high school, at 11 going on 12, I looked old enough to be allowed to buy cigarettes at the milk bar down the street for the year-ten boys who were old enough (the smoking age was then 16) but didn’t look it. Despite my school uniform, adult men began to follow me in their cars. Despite my school uniform, adult men began literally to leap out of bushes to accost and proposition me. I wish this were hyperbole. It was sometime in this era—the impossibility of knowing when is scalp-crawling all on its own—that my stepfather began to entertain the fantasy that he and I should have a sexual affair.