Much of my adult life, I’ve been involved in the movement against sexual violence. For years, I carried a beeper one weekend a month as a volunteer for a victims’ support organization. I’ve sat with rape survivors in police stations and hospital emergency rooms, helping them sort through the questions of whether to undergo a rape kit examination and file charges. As a journalist, I won a statewide award for my reporting on intimate partner violence. On campus, students who’ve endured sexual assaults and abusive relationships confide in me fears that they are ruined, that no one will want to date them, that they will never feel desire again. I have said, too many times, the words: “It’s not your fault.”
So from the time my daughter was very young, I emphasized that her body was her own. No one should touch her if she didn’t want to be touched. I expected my experience would prepare me for her adolescence, when questions of consent and boundaries would become a lot more pressing and complex. But, as I’ve emphasized throughout my book, First Love: Guiding Teens Through Relationships and Heartbreak, true readiness comes not only from your awareness of a problem, but also from reckoning with the messages and wounds from your past.
When my daughter was 13, she spent an evening on my iPad, messaging frantically with her friend, whom I’ll call Dakota. Dakota had been hanging out with a close male friend of hers since childhood and a few of his friends. While the friends played video games in the next room, the boy held Dakota down and grabbed her breasts and genitals, even though she’d told him not to. She sent my daughter screenshots of messages from the boy, who begged her not to tell anyone. Dakota was worried she would get in trouble for being alone with a group of boys. After I read the message chain, I urged my daughter to encourage Dakota to tell her mother anyway.
“She told her,” my daughter reported the following morning. “They went to the police and made a report.”
“The police?” I said. Going to the police seemed like overreach for what had struck me as a misunderstanding the girl’s parents could help her sort through.
It took weeks for me to see the situation for what it was: This girl was sexually assaulted. As a mother reading Dakota’s distressed texts, my first reaction was denial: They were too young, it was too soon for what happened to be that big of a deal. I wanted to hold on to the innocence of my daughter’s peer group. Both victim and perpetrator had played at my house, gotten rides in my car, and danced at my daughter’s Bat Mitzvah. When I was a teenager, sexual assault was routinely excused with the explanation that, as my father would say, “boys can get out of control.” I knew that I’d done the right thing in prompting my daughter to urge the girl to tell her mother. But I initially didn’t take the account seriously enough, even though my daughter trusted me enough to tell me.
The case was scheduled for a Family Court hearing. My daughter and I submitted a long printout of the text exchange as evidence of what happened. She prepared to testify as a “prompt outcry” witness, a term for the first person the victim tells about a sex offense. I bought my daughter a high-necked black dress to wear to court. We met Dakota, her mother, and a group of supportive friends in the parking lot of the faded Family Court building in our local county seat. All the girls were also dressed modestly in black, following the same unspoken wardrobe rule of bleak propriety.
In the end, no one had to testify. The boy, wearing checked Vans and white jeans, admitted to several counts of forcible touching. At one point, his mother, a woman I’d had several pleasant chats with over the years, half rose from her seat, her hand up. She called out, “Wait!” as if to try to stop him, but he continued. To what extent did she believe that her son had done something wrong? Or was it a momentary impulse to rewind to the boy he’d been before that night and somehow prevent him from all of this?
The boy was sentenced to two years of juvenile parole. When I said goodbye to Dakota, I hugged her, looked into her reddened eyes, and said, “You are making a difference.” Her bravery was an awakening, though I remained plagued by the thought: What if I’d been her mom and my first instinct had been to minimize what happened?
One of the biggest challenges for parents in responding to the reality of adolescent sexual assault is that we can’t always readily see through our pasts — what happened to us, what we did, what we were told, what the world condoned — and what we want to believe about our children.
This doesn’t excuse anything. It only underscores that sometimes the work parents need to do can be deep and complicated before we can see our children’s lives without blinders. I was an educated and aware parent and a woman who, in my professional life, investigated the reality of sexual assault without flinching. But I had also internalized messages from my upbringing. I needed to understand that my first instinct wouldn’t always be the right one. I would have to check my reactions and question any urge to minimize news of sexual “drama” from the young people in my life.
Simply put, I would have to respond as if it mattered.
Excerpted from First Love: Guiding Teens Through Relationships and Heartbreak. Copyright: Lisa A. Phillips (2025)
