Dear 6th Grade Teacher,
You messed up.
TW: Childhood sexual abuse
Why do I write about this stuff? It’s admittedly unpleasant. Because right now, at this very moment as you read this, there are children being sexually assaulted and no one is doing a damn thing about it, even if they know it’s happening. I write to increase awareness among adults and, yes, to push adults to do the right thing if they know a child is being abused, even if it’s ‘uncomfortable’, or ‘inconvenient’, or any of those other bullshit excuses that we use to look the other way when we should be stepping in and doing something meaningful.
Read on.
My 6th grade teacher was the first person I told about the stepmonster’s middle-of-the-night visits to my room when everyone else was asleep. I wrote about it in my class journal, our required daily work. I thought that if anyone could help me, she could.
I adored Ms. K. She was pretty, had jet black hair, and wore fashionable clothes. She was a veteran teacher who was tough as nails and didn’t tolerate any bad behavior. She was one of the many teachers who would, in the late 1980s, leave a responsible student in charge of the classroom so she could nip down to the teacher’s lounge for a cigarette in the afternoon. She was modern and exciting to me, and taught in an interesting way. I remember feeling very…
