A story by anonymous from 2024
It’s an unknown world for people who have never had to go through it. It’s hidden and shameful. I was so young and I didn’t know there were other people I could reach out to. The people around me, my sister, brother and my mom, were also going through it. We were all dealing with it. We were in it together, but separated and unable to give each
other the support we needed.
We were very impoverished. Our home didn’t have running water or septic. We had to go get jugs of water for the house. We would go out in the woods to gather firewood in the middle of winter to heat our house. In this way, I was already separated from everyone else. My father had physically abused my brother so badly he was taken away by the state. This amplified our distrust of any support we may have been eligible for. In order to keep the rest of us, my mother had to divorce my father when I was seven years old. We would still spend weekends with our father, every other weekend or so.
During one of those weekends with our father, me, my sister and my brother were hanging out at the house. Up the road there was a party going on where my father and his new wife were at. They were drinking, doing drugs and anything else you can think of. He and his wife, my stepmother, got into an altercation and he ended up beating her. We didn’t know this had happened as we saw our father walking up the road. He was visibly distressed and we didn’t know what was going on. We didn’t know this was a common thing that happened.
When he came into the house his hands were covered in blood and he smelled of alcohol and was talking about how the cops were going to show up. I had never had any interactions with cops before but I knew we didn’t want the cops coming. Two cruisers showed up and three cops walked towards the house. My father went outside with his hands up. I don’t know what happened, if he was talking to the cops in a rude way or put his hands in his pockets, but the cops grabbed him. They flipped him around and slammed my father to the ground. Us kids were all watching. The cops hauled my father away and left us kids alone in the house.
My older sister is three years older than me but developmentally delayed, which made me the sibling responsible for everyone else. Her and I were alone in the house with our five year old brother and our half-brother who was still a baby at the time. I gathered my siblings, we bundled up and went out to hide in the woods where we stayed until my step-mother came back.
And I get it now. He had physically beaten his wife. But, from that moment on I completely distrusted cops. We expected abuse within our home. We expected domestic violence and neglect. But we didn’t expect the police, who are supposed to protect us, to be people who also commit acts of violence. In that moment I saw the cops as bullies and knew they were not going to protect us. They were doing the same things we expected them to protect us from.
My father was in and out of prison all the time at that point. I remember visiting him in Warren. I was fifteen one time when he got out of prison and I went to stay with him. He was having a party and I went to lay down to avoid what was happening. He came into my room intoxicated and molested me. He told me it was a secret and not to tell anybody, but I did. And I finally saw cops from the other side. They actually protected me this time. My father was arrested and went back to prison.
There was a lot of mental manipulation within our family, understandably, with how much abuse was happening. There was no accountability within the family, it was always assumed he’d come back. He went into prison and he came right back to the family. I never pushed it for him to have more time in prison because I had it in my head that our family was good and the cops were bad. This time, when he was released and came back we were all living in his home. We were too poor to find any other place to live so we lived with him.
But when he got out this time, I left. I moved into a camper. I was sixteen years old at the time, living on my own in a camper. And it was great for me. I was finally able to get out. I was away from it. I didn’t realize how many barriers I had to put up and how many survival methods I had to use until I didn’t need to use them anymore. So it was good.
I’ve been through a lot of counseling and I’m at the point where I can talk about this but it still makes me nervous to share too much. Intellectually I know the cops are good, more or less. They mean well, but I still have that fear that I wrestle with. Because of my experience as a family member of someone incarcerated, I am extremely fearful of being incarcerated myself. The very thought of breaking the law scares me.
