It Was Never About Justice
Content Warning: Mentions of Child Abuse and Police Reporting
A few years ago, I walked into a police precinct and told my story.
I told the story of a child, abused, traumatized, and silenced. A little girl who spent hours locked in a closet, cold, hungry, and afraid. A girl whose innocence was taken before she even knew what it was. A child exposed to the darkest parts of humanity at the hands of the very people who were supposed to protect her.
I didn’t know exactly why I walked into that precinct on that cold, snowy day. But I remember what I said to the detective: “I want to make sure another child doesn’t get hurt like I did.”
We shared a quiet, melancholy smile. Grief lingered in the space between us, for the child I was, and the child I never had the chance to be.
“Me too,” she said.
There are things I will never forget about that day. The children’s books in the corner of the waiting room. The metal flowers on the wall of the interview room. The olive green pants my detective was wearing. The faint scar near her right hand. None of it makes sense, and maybe it isn’t supposed to. Memories like these don’t follow rules. They float, untethered. I don’t want to place them. I don’t want to claim them. I don’t want them to exist.
I never wanted to sit in that police station, fighting to break a silence that should have never been forced on me. I never wanted my family at the end of the sentences I spoke. I never wanted to be a child of incest and abuse.
But I didn’t have a choice.
Maybe I walked into that precinct because, for a moment, I could choose something.
I could choose to protect another child’s ability to dream. To imagine. To wonder. To create. To explore. To find beauty in the ordinary and joy in the mundane. To simply be a child.
So much had been taken from me, but this felt like something I could take back.
Sitting in that small interview room, I felt, just for a moment, the dreams I held as a six-year-old come to life. Not as something distant or imagined, but as something real. Something powerful.
So I told my story.
Not for justice. Not for closure. But for her.
For the six-year-old who believed in something better. Who held onto hope in a world that gave her every reason not to.
I needed her to see that her dreams were worth holding onto. I needed her to have one moment of victory in a life that tried to break her. As the interview ended, my detective looked at me and said something I will never forget:
“Little girls don’t stay little forever. They grow up to be powerful women with powerful voices.”
I never thought I would make it out of that closet. But the six-year-old in me kept that dream alive.
And in that moment, I understood why I had walked into that precinct.
Every day I survived led to that one.
So I told my story, not so others would hear it, not for justice or peace, but because that little girl, and all the children still daring to dream, deserve to see those dreams lived.
And if my story can help even one child hold onto their dreams for a moment longer then every moment I spent holding onto mine was worth it.