Unprotected. My therapist taught me that word. It soothed my soul. It was such a healing word to hear. Made me feel seen. It was so true. If I had been protected, my life would have been so different. I would have been so different. If we add this prism and look again, does it shine light on things I thought I knew and reveal the truth hiding in the shadows?
If I hit refresh and understand every way I was wronged as a failure to be protected, does that impact the storyline? Perhaps the harsh truth I have told myself for so long has nuance and detail that I have missed.
Unprotected. I love that word so much. I have taught it to other survivors. I will always use it to describe abused boys now. It is so apt and such a good word to use about yourself. I prefer it to survivor because it has the wrong built in — the wrong that was done unto me. You didn’t protect me. I was a baby, a toddler, a boy, a teen. You never protected me, and that was your job and my right.Survivor turns the spotlight on what I did to endure: I fought, I lived. It’s strong, but it can also sound like you’re the one carrying all the weight, like you were supposed to be superhuman all along.
“Unprotected,” though, that word drags the lens back to where it belongs: on the adults, the systems, the family that failed. It makes clear the crime wasn’t your weakness, but their neglect, their cowardice, their indifference. It exposes the betrayal.
It also reclaims your boyhood. You weren’t some tiny warrior meant to hold the line at six, or twelve, or fifteen. You were a boy, and boys are supposed to be sheltered until they’re ready. You weren’t. You were thrown to the wolves and then blamed for getting bitten.
What happens if you reframe events through that word? If I was unprotected, then suddenly the things I assumed start to wobble. How can it be my fault? I was unprotected. I was left to cope.
When I was six, I thought I had done something wrong and that you were just punishing me for doing wrong. But your fists hurt too much. Unprotected. I was supposed to be learning to read better and do sums, not worrying about the next attack and understanding how hard an adult can hit a child.
When I was twelve, I started to question your logic and think about fighting back, but these were weak, skinny arms of mine and I could never win that fight, so I stayed unprotected. I learnt to dodge and hold back tears and be a man. I learnt how to stand up but not stand up to you.
Unprotected at fifteen and knew I was never going to win because it defied logic and I was starting to think I might have to kill you. The only way out was to end you before you ended me
And when you entered stage left and started to claim my body for your own sexual needs, there I was unprotected — naked and available. The plot was different and the script was not quite the same, but the backstage area was oddly familiar and with the same dark corners of fear and uncertainty. Unprotected and adding a layer of damage that devastated everything it touched.
What if protection was a legal right for any child? The most basic requirement for them to get through childhood. If you remove it or damage it, then you pay the price, not the child. What if the child, any child, has the right to have that replaced.
Money, therapy, medicine, care, attention, a blanket, love. Protection. Just hand it over like food and water. Things they need to get them back to where they were.
Laws to protect, families answerable, schools and churches liable for how they protect and deal with children. If you are an institution, government, child welfare, courts, then you put the child in the centre of protection. If you leave them unprotected, if you ignore their need, if you walk on by. Then you will be held to account.
I am unprotected no longer.
But I will keep saying that word, teaching it, handing it like a torch to the next boy, the next man, who thinks it was his fault.
No.
You were unprotected.
That’s the truth that frees you.