This is for that scoundrel
Last night, 18:21. Annabelle and I are walking by the metro station. I'm scrolling unsuspectingly on my phone when Bel suddenly - for her - quite aggressively yells: ‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING, IDIOT?!’ I look up and see a guy walking away, already graying. ‘Bel, what happened? What did he do?’
She stands as if nailed to the ground. I see her expression shift from surprised to indignant to disgusted to angry. Fire in her eyes. ‘He grabbed me right by my breast,’ she screams. ‘He WHAT?’ For a moment, we stand together in shock. It's broad daylight and you can't even walk by the Henk Sneevlietweg without some uncouth jerk touching you. ‘HEY, DO YOU THINK THAT'S NORMAL?’ I shout back at him, now also indignant. He looks back and responds with: ‘Whores!’ Something deep inside me wants to run after the guy and give him a huge slap to the head, but another part of me realizes that this guy is clearly not right with this kind of behavior. For all we know, he could suddenly pull out a butterfly knife from his back pocket and then you're left there with your tough act. So we keep walking. Cursing. Angry. And I'm not even the one who was assaulted.
We eventually get on the train to Utrecht, doing an extensive rant about the incident on the Amayzine group chat when a colleague says: ‘Did you call the police?’ Uh, no. We hadn't done that. It didn't even occur to us. Is it really so bad to think that this is ‘not serious enough’ to call the police? I mean: no one was injured, right? At most, quite indignant. But isn't unwanted touching in an intimate area just a criminal act? Shouldn't we be immediately on the phone with the police to report descriptions of this creep before these kinds of jerks grab more girls on the street? Exactly. Bel still makes a report to the police. Whether they can do anything with it, no idea, but at least it feels like a bit of justice. I'm annoyed that I didn't take a photo of that rotten face.
According to Rutgers (the knowledge center for sexuality), one in three women in the Netherlands has been assaulted at some point. And whether it's light or serious, it's damn not normal. Why do so few women file a report? Why should we stay silent? I really understand that you think ‘nothing will come of this’, but is that always the case? It's a shame, because this way there are likely to be more rather than fewer perpetrators. Meanwhile: how often are women called whores? How often are we hissed at by jerk boys on the street? What possesses you anyway? How sad are you? Lack of attention, an unfulfilled sexual need, male coolness among each other? I don’t care. You're disgusting. Sad. And we won't take it anymore.
What do I want with this story? I actually don't know. To warn you, I think. If you ever get touched against your will: file a report immediately and hope they catch that bastard. Don't trivialize this problem, like we did yesterday at first. It doesn't matter what kind of clothes you were wearing that day, it's never your fault. You don't provoke this. Go protest. Scream, kick, yell, even take a self-defense course and stand up for yourself. And dirty little man from yesterday, you're lucky I didn't take that photo, because you can bet it would have been at the top of this article. Jerk.
