s.eve_n🐶🔞

Story from before I transitioned; I was 22 years old, leaving my apartment to go play basketball when I heard a woman scream in the parking lot. I ran towards the sound and found a woman in her 40s lying on the ground in tears [Jane Doe]. As I helped her up, a man walking away from her yelled at us, “There’s your help!”. He was her husband. She proceeded to open up about the abuse that she suffered regularly from her husband. It was horrifying. I begged her to call the police with me. She didn’t want to. She was terrified what he might do. I didn’t know what to do. She showed me some photos. Her husband had put her in the hospital some months prior. He knocked all of her teeth out. Her face was swollen beyond recognition. Then, she told me that her husband had said to her before he threw her to the ground that night that he, “should have finished the job”. At this point I realized that this woman was going to die if no one did anything. She wouldn’t let me call the police, but I got her contact information, and I drove straight to the police station to file a report. I was about 45 minutes late to basketball. All of the guys asked me where I had been and I told them this story. I expected the response to be something along the lines of, “Wow. Glad you did something”, or “That is so terrible for her”. Instead, I got blank stares and general confusion as to why I would get involved. No asking if she was okay, what the police said to me, just “oh…. okay”, “why?”, or nothing at all. Months later I got a call from a detective who told me that Jane’s husband was on probation, they had started an investigation, and asked if I would testify in an upcoming probation revocation hearing. I accepted. I wore a suit to class that day since I had to go to the courthouse after and I wanted to look as professional and credible as possible. A couple of guys asked what the deal with the suit was and when I told them there was no response. Just, “oh”, and move on. I was the state’s only witness. Jane was too afraid and traumatized to testify. At the end of it, he had his probation revoked and went back to jail for 2 years. The judge called me back in when the proceedings were over to thank me. At the time, I thought, “isn’t this what anyone would do?”, but I now know this was a rare occurrence. I got a text from Jane about a year later. She moved out of state and reconnected with her kids. It seems like life turned around for her. She thanked me for being the first person to actually do something after seeing something. I will never forget this experience, as it shattered my perception that most men care about violence against women. It’s not that the men I told were happy that this woman had been beaten; to be happy would require that you care. It was total disinterest. A non-issue that shouldn’t be brought up. So when men say, “not all men are rapists and abusers”, I believe you. Not all of you are. But nearly all of you will walk away from it if getting involved would cause you even a minor inconvenience. Just because you don’t beat women doesn’t mean you’re one of the “good ones” if you’re indifferent when it’s another man doing the beating.