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Childhood is for Christa Desir a sacred space, and she is passionate about giving her three year-old daughter Jo Jo (with whom she is pictured) and her one year-old son Julio the childhood that she herself lost, for Christa is a childhood sexual assault survivor.
She was four years old when she was separated from her family at a local shopping mall. "I remember being terrified when I got lost," says Christa today. "I walked out into the parking lot, trying to find our family car, and somehow that parking lot seemed so much bigger than it was when I was with my family."
"When a man in a pickup truck drove up and asked me if I needed help, I remember being so relieved. I didn't even hesitate to get in his car, and that is when I was molested. I don't remember much about how it ended or how long it lasted, I think it was about 45 minutes, but when it was over he dropped me off where he had found me and I ran inside. When I found my Dad and sister I was hysterical."
"The worst part is that I never said a word about what had happened. For a very long time, over a decade, I just blocked it out. Then one night in high school, when I was talking with my two best friends, one of them told me that her brother had molested her. That's when my own experience started to come back to me."
"Talking to my friends for the first time, and putting the experience into words, was like having a weight lifted from me. Just hearing someone else say 'that sounds like rape' when I shared my story, just knowing someone else had gone through something like this, was huge. For the first time, I did not feel alone."
"I still struggled, though. In my teens I developed an eating disorder and I became a 'cutter'. I also lost my ability to say 'no' to men - I became very mute and submissive. It wasn't until I met my husband, when I was 23, that I really learned what it meant to have a good relationship. I could talk to him, and one of the hardest things for me was that I never felt I could talk to my parents about what had happened, or everything that I dealt with over the years because of it. That silence made me feel so much more alone than I had to be."
"I am a mother now, so I know that it would be so hard for a parent to know that this had happened to their child, but I want my own children to be able to tell me anything. I want my own kids to trust their instincts and to speak up when something doesn't feel right. I remember that in the years before I was molested I was fearless, I had a huge amount of confidence - and that was taken from me at such a young age. It took a long time to get that back."
"And being a childhood sexual assault survivor can affect you sexually, because you come into your sexuality with this experience having shaped you. I know how lucky I am that my husband understands what I have gone through and what I am still going through. He loves me in a way that allows me to open up about my feelings, and I trust him completely."
"What else has helped me get through this? Talking! Especially to other survivors. Once I started to talk to women who had gone through this, I felt for the first time that I was part of a community. Other sexual assault survivors are like family - a different kind of family, but a family to me all the same."
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