Trigger warning: sexual assault, suicide.
At her lowest point Kellyanne Johnson chose to go to jail instead of having her mother pick her up from the hospital where she was recovering from a suicide attempt.
“I drove down to the big rock and I parked, and I took my cocaine, I had my scotch on the rocks I was playing Enya on my stereo, and I took my sleeping pills,” she remembered. “I guess somebody across the way in the apartments there had seen me and thought I was in trouble so they had called the police and then the ambulance came and picked me up.”
Johnson spiraled into drinking and using drugs after testifying in a sexual assault case against a doctor.
That, as well as other sexual assaults in her past that she hadn’t faced, are part of the reason for the what she calls her “bad behaviour”.
Though she is sober now at 59 years old, Johnson battles every day to deal with past trauma. And she doesn’t want that for anyone else.
“My grand daughter hasn’t been born yet but I will be damned if she says ‘me too’,” she proclaimed.
Last year Statistics Canada released a report about self-reported sexual assault cases in Canada in 2014. There were more than 635,000 incidents reported that year and 87 per cent of the victims were women. That is approximately 22 incidents for every 1,000 Canadians age 15 and older, with only one in 20 incidents of sexual assault were reported to police.
Despite crime rates decreasing in every other category, the rate of self-reported sexual assaults remained the same as the rate reported in 2004 and those who were assaulted as a child reported a rate of sexual assault that was two times higher than those who had not been abused.
At seven-years-old, Johnson was repeatedly assaulted by an adult she knew well.
At 12 she was at a classmate’s birthday party and once everyone had left, the adult at the party pinned her down, saying he wanted to feel her breasts against him and that if she screamed he would rape her.
Afterwards he threatened to tell everyone she had had sex with all of the boys at the party if she told anyone what he had done to her.
Johnson said she didn’t tell anyone about that incident until, at 30 years old, she told her mother.
“She said to me ‘you know, when I picked you up, I knew something was wrong’,” she remembered.
As a young teenager she was assaulted by three boys who took her out to a beach in Parksville.
As it turns out that place is still a trigger for her.
Last year her husband planned a Valentine’s getaway there and she spent the whole weekend fighting off panic attacks.
“Every chance I got I was crying my eyes out,” she said.
Later, in her teen years, she was raped by a boy she liked. She had been having sex with him every so often, but on this night she repeatedly said no because he seemed angry and she was scared, but he continued.
“If it doesn’t feel right then it is probably not right,” she said.
But at the time she felt like she couldn’t tell anyone, because they would say “you’ve already had sex with this person so….”
“You know what I said? ‘Oh, okay’,” she recalled, shaking her head. “That made sense to me…The damage it does to a child is so, so severe.”
Looking back, she wishes she had talked to someone about each of these incidents, because talking about it now has made a world of difference.
“I learned tools from my counselling, different tools to help with triggers,” she said.
Johnson hopes that the more people talk about sexual assault and denounce it, the less it will happen.
And for those who have already been victims, she encourages them to come forward in order to get the help they need to heal.
“We have to empower each other,” she said.