Verbal abuse has happened to me several times, but there was one time which made a huge impact to me, and I’ll tell you what happened:
I was in ninth grade when I was first verbally and sexually harassed by my own teacher. I was accompanying my friend to submit their scientific paper to this teacher, our mentor, for research on a scientific paper. He revised my friend’s work and as he was about to sign it, he then shamelessly asked, “Can I use your chest to lean on, so that I can sign this?” I was shocked because it wasn’t something I expected coming from a teacher, especially a male one. So then I blatantly said, “What the f*ck?”
I told my mother about this matter a week after because I wasn’t sure whether it was worth the hassle or not. What made me realize that it was a verbal sexual harassment was the fact that people don’t normally say such thing like that to each other. So I decided to tell my mother and she later passed it on to my father. A couple of days later, I was summoned to the vice principal’s office. My mother and the vice principal herself were waiting for me. She asked me what happened, what else did he do, was it meant to be a joke or not, etc. Long story short, he got fired a week after that. I am glad the school did take this matter seriously, because I could not imagine something like this happening to the other kids.
This accident had made me grow even more aware of the possibility of being harassed. The sad truth is that no matter where you are or who you are with, the chance of being harassed is still there. I also learned not to easily engages with people I am not familiar with. When such thing like this happened to you, please immediately report them to your parents or your friends or to someone you can trust. I learned that it might seem like a joke people casually make, but a verbal sexual harassment is a harassment, no matter how weird it sounded.
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