Reply #157: It's hard to talk about it. There will be some "oversharing" in my post. Avoid it if you want. [View All]

[Lyric]

If it's an officer that I don't know personally, then I tend to distrust them. I am not uncivil, and I do not badmouth or confront them, but I will go FAR out of my way to avoid them. The idea of having a police officer in my house scares me and upsets me. I feel invaded, and I feel that my safety is in jeopardy.

When I was fourteen years old, I had a horrific experience that has scarred me for life. I was the babysitter for some nice people (I'll call them Bob and Rachael) who lived two streets over in our mobile home park. Bob and Rachael had neighbors who were vicious, evil people. They were the type of religious people who give out Chick tracts instead of candy at Halloween, who stood at the school bus stop and preached hellfire to children trying to get off the bus and go home from school. They had kids that didn't go to school, and also didn't appear to be homeschooled. They were very strict with their kids--they weren't allowed to play with any of the other neighborhood kids, and we ALL saw the parents beat the children with belts right out in the yard more than once. Bob wound up calling Social Services to come investigate the house because he felt that the living situation over next door was abusive, and he also suspected that the kids weren't being educated.

He was right. They had applied to homeschool the kids, but weren't actually teaching them anything but the Bible. Their kids were traumatized, uneducated, and brainwashed. They lost their kids for about a year and a half and were forced to take parenting classes and enroll the kids in a local Christian academy later.

Anyway--because they were evil people, they decided to retaliate. They called CPS on Bob and Rachael, claiming that THEIR kids were abused. CPS investigated and found nothing. Because nothing came of the CPS call, the evil neighbors decided to try harder in their effort to ruin Bob out of revenge. They called the cops, claiming that they had seen Bob and "his teenage babysitter" (a.k.a., me) having sex through the front window of the house. This was absolutely untrue, but it set off a horrific chain of events.

I came home from school and found my mother crying, asking me "Why didn't you tell me?!" I had no idea what she was talking about. Nobody would talk to me. I was forced into a police car with my Mom, and taken to the station downtown to be "interviewed." When I got there, I saw Rachael sitting in the waiting area, crying her eyes out. They swept me past her and into a room with a water fountain, a table, and some chairs. They sent in a female police officer to "interview" me, and she proceeded to ask me the most horrifyingly embarrassing questions ever. I denied it all, of course. Then the bitch got nasty. She said, "If you don't want to admit to this, we have ways of proving it without your help." I said, "What?!" She said, "We can take you to the hospital and the doctors can tell us whether or not you're still a virgin." She said it threateningly, as if *I* had done something wrong.

I was a damned smart kid, but I was terrified. I sure as hell wasn't going to admit to something that wasn't true, but I was also horrified and traumatized at the idea that I could be forced to lay down naked in front of a doctor and have him "examine" me in my private area for such a purpose. To a young teenager who was confused and embarrassed about her changing body, and who had never had a pelvic exam before, that was the most horrific thing I could ever imagine. I was shaking in terror, crying, humiliated. Nobody would tell me ANYTHING about how this happened. She told me that if I didn't confess, that some other little girl would get raped and it would be all MY fault. She told me I'd go to hell. She told me that all my friends at school would think that I was a whore if I didn't admit to it. She yelled at me for HOURS, but I maintained that I had no idea what she was talking about, so she eventually threw up her hands in disgust and walked out of the room. Of course, I was not taken to a doctor. They couldn't do such a thing to me, and they damned well knew it--but *I* didn't.

I found out later about the neighbors being the ones who filed the false report. As I got older, I learned more and more about the process and I found out that such behavior toward a supposed "victim," ESPECIALLY one that was a minor, was absolutely unconscionable. My mother was an uneducated poor woman from a trailer park--she had no idea how to deal with police. She had no idea what our rights were. She had no idea that anything they'd done was wrong. She thought that because they were police, they could do whatever they wanted and we had to sit there and take it.

Well no fucking more. I am still enraged at what happened to me. They took advantage of the fact that we were poor and uneducated, and likely wouldn't know to complain about their behavior. They treated ME like I'd done something terrible, threatened me, humiliated me, traumatized me--a 14 year old girl who was supposed to be a victim! I don't know what they did to Bob, and he was kind enough to never tell me the details, but I'd imagine that it was much worse than what I got. Obviously, I had to stop babysitting for them. They were afraid to hire any other teenagers, and they couldn't afford daycare, so Rachael had to quit her job and stay home. Bob got fired, even though the charges were dropped. They had to move to another state to start all over, because everyone in our community thought that he was a guilty man who'd "gotten away with it." But those SAME people who thought that HE was "guilty," ALSO blamed ME! People called me a whore behind my back. My best friend's Mom made her stop talking to me. It was horrific.

And then the next year, my Dad was murdered and we moved to Virginia. It was only then that I was able to go back to being a somewhat-normal teen, but I was depressed and suicidal over everything that happened to me, and I spent a month in a mental hospital after trying to kill myself when I was 16.

Those evil asshole neighbors were the ones that really started all of it, and they bear most of the blame, but I will never, ever forget the way I was abused by the police officers who were SUPPOSED to be there to protect me. Did I mention that these are the SAME stupid cops who, along with the prosecuting attorney, pled out a man named Rodney Doman for his third DUI? If he'd have gone to jail, he'd have been in prison in June of 1999 instead of a free man who was able to murder my Dad.

No, I will never forgive, never forget, and I damned sure won't ever trust again. I know, intellectually, that there are "good" cops, but I don't think I will ever be able to stop myself from feeling fear, suspicion, and distrust when I am forced to interact with a police officer. This is also why I don't trust CPS. I witnessed how easy it is to use them as a retaliatory weapon against someone who was just trying to protect a couple of innocent kids. I have never told that full story anywhere else before, but I felt like today was a good day to confront it and deal with it. It's damned painful to dredge all of that up, but I am tired of being told that *I* am a bad person because I don't automatically like and trust cops.

In my situation, would YOU?

Never again.