BREAK THE SILENCE

Olivia Petter was made to feel she should ignore an incident with a stranger in a dressing room, but after bureaucratic hurdles and a police investigation, she finally felt vindicated

- 

Like most women, I didn't want to report what had happened to me at first. I was embarrassed, ashamed, and fairly certain it was not worth the fuss of escalation. After all, I was probably being melodramatic. I'd emerged free from any signs of lasting damage. And far worse things had happened to other people. Maybe I'd overreacted.

This was the stream of consciousness that ran through my head for several days in the immediate aftermath of the incident. All of those thoughts told me to do the same thing: say nothing, get over it, and find a way to move on. But that’s not what I did. And because of that, a man was convicted of the criminal charge he deserved. And in what is an all too rare result for victims of violence against women of any kind, my feelings of violation were vindicated by a court of law.

Last year, a man walked into my changing room while I was trying on dresses at Selfridges. I wrote about what happened at the time, detailing how I'd initially clocked him staring at me on the shop floor while I was standing in front of the changing room curtain, checking how one of the dresses looked in the mirror. It freaked me out, but I thought nothing of it until a few minutes later, when the same man opened the curtain to my changing room as I was trying on another dress. Thankfully, I was mostly clothed and facing him as I had been about to exit and ask a shop assistant to help me tie the dress up from the back. Had he entered seconds earlier, I would’ve been almost naked, facing away from him, and in an arguably far more vulnerable position.