It was my first time away from home- an anxious but bubbly freshman in high school, I was traveling 6 hours away to attend a leadership conference.

The first "leader" I found made my skin crawl. To everyone else, he seemed like an average, ordinary 17-year-old boy. My discomfort around him wasn't shared by anyone else in my group, so when all the other seats on the fancy charter bus were taken, I convinced myself that the bad feelings I had were all in my head; I needed to just suck it up and sit down next to him in that last row. The result was an hourlong, torturous nightmare that left me feeling dirty, used and paranoid.

No one made any motion of stopping him from his slow but thorough invasion of my body. This was NOT how I pictured my first interaction with male genitalia: my hands forced behind my back, and then down his pants, moving further and further into unwanted points of sexual contact. I thought no one knew, but an anonymous tip notified my group leader when we arrived at our destination. Knowing someone else shared in my torture was disgraceful and horrifying. The boy was ejected from our group and sent home with a slap on the wrist from the program director.

Um, hi? What about me? I was scoffed at by my group members- told I was making a big deal out of nothing, and I should consider myself "lucky" that I wasn't fully raped. Oh, I'm lucky? Because feeling unsafe at every turn is lucky. Never trusting anyone again is LUCKY? Losing crucial relationships and becoming physically detached wasn't lucky.

I was miserable for months until I realized that what happened to me WAS real, and no one could make it any less legitimate or upsetting. Time has healed the emotional wounds, and I realize I WAS lucky- too many women have these atrocities continually inflicted upon them, without even the most minimal of interferences to stop the pain. I escaped with minor scars, but even those are reminders of things that never should have happened.