LONDON -- An Oxford University student who was sexually assaulted on a north London street has written an open letter to her attacker, telling him she won't be scared and insisting "this is a fight you will not win."
Ione Wells, 20, published the missive on the university newspaper Cherwell's website as part of a campaign aimed at ending a culture of victim blaming under the hashtag #notguilty.
She's since been "overwhelmed" by the response.
Wells, who studies English at Keble College, was allegedly assaulted by a teenager who followed her on her way home from Chalk Farm tube station in north London on April 11.
The attacker put his hand round her mouth, pushed her to her knees and banged her head against the pavement before kicking her and grabbing her breast, she says, but was scared away by a neighbour.
He ran off and targeted another person before being arrested by the police.
Two weeks later, Wells published the open letter.
"You did not just attack me that night. I am a daughter, I am a friend, I am..." #notguiltyhttp://t.co/kZjJaS4Qqi pic.twitter.com/LOmjUquEFH— Ione Wells (@ionewells) April 26, 2015
"I cannot address this letter to you, because I do not know your name," it begins. "I only know that you have just been charged with serious sexual assault and prolonged attack of a violent nature. And I have one question:"
When you were caught on CCTV following me through my own neighbourhood from the Tube, when you waited until I was on my own street to approach me, when you clapped your hand around my face until I could not breathe, when you pushed me to my knees until my face bled, when I wrestled with your hand just enough so that I could scream. When you dragged me by my hair, and when you smashed my head against the pavement and told me to stop screaming for help, when my neighbour saw you from her window and shouted at you and you looked her in the eye and carried on kicking me in the back and neck.
When you tore my bra in half from the sheer force you grabbed my breast, when you didn’t reach once for my belongings because you wanted my body, when you failed to have my body because all my neighbours and family came out, and you saw them face-to-face. When CCTV caught you running from your attempted assault on me… and then following another woman twenty minutes later from the same tube station before you were arrested on suspicion. When I was in the police station until 5am while you were four floors below me in custody, when I had to hand over my clothes and photographs of the marks and cuts on my naked body to forensic teams – did you ever think of the people in your life?
Wells tells her assailant that it's not just her he attacked. "I am a daughter, I am a friend, I am a girlfriend, I am a pupil, I am a cousin, I am a niece, I am a neighbour, I am the employee who served everyone down the road coffee in the café under the railway," she wrote.
"All the people who form those relations to me make up my community, and you assaulted every single one of them."
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She tells the person that the letter isn't really for him after all, but "all the victims of attempted or perpetrated serious sexual assault and every member of their communities."
She then says that, just as Londoners got back on the Tube the day after the 7/7 bombings, refusing to be cowed by terrorists, she is continuing her life as normal.
The letter continues:
My community will not feel we are unsafe walking back home after dark. We will get on the last tube home, and we will walk up our streets alone, because we will not ingrain or submit to the idea that we are putting ourselves in danger in doing so. We will continue to come together, like an army, when any member of our community is threatened, and this is a fight you will not win.
Community is a force we all underestimate. We get our papers every day from the same newsagents, we wave to the same woman walking her dog in the park, we sit next to the same commuters each day on the tube. Each individual we know and care about may take up no more than a few seconds of each day, but they make up a huge proportion of our lives. Somebody even once told me that, however unfamiliar they appear, the faces of our dreams are always faces we have seen before. Our community is embedded in our psyche. You, my attacker, have not proved any weakness in me, or my actions, but only demonstrated the solidarity of humanity.
Tomorrow, you find out whether you’re to be held in prison until your trial, because you pleaded ‘not guilty’ and pose a threat to the community. Tomorrow, I have my life back. As you sit awaiting trial, I hope that you do not just think about what you have done. I hope you think about community. Your community – even if you can’t see it around you every day. It is there. It is everywhere. You underestimated mine. Or should I say ours? I could say something along the lines of, ‘Imagine if it had been a member of your community,’ but instead let me say this. There are no boundaries to community; there are only exceptions, and you are one of them.
The Cherwell paper is asking for articles on the themes of assault, victim-blaming and community as part of the #notguilty campaign and to "establish a strong force of community overriding misdirected victim characterisation." Authors are encouraged to email [email protected].
Several high profile Twitter users, including singer Alison Moyet and actress Nadia Sawalha, have expressed admiration for Wells following the publication of the letter.
When I can catch my breath @ionewells I will blow it into your sail. A letter to the man who sexually assaulted me http://t.co/pdq80FLb8p— Alison Moyet (@AlisonMoyet) April 29, 2015
RT @ionewells your beautiful ,courageous letter moved me to tears, a pinhole of light in the vast darkness of ignorance ...#notguilty— nadia sawalha (@nadiasawalha) April 29, 2015
Wow - what a wonderful community. YOU have all proved my points about community in your support. Thank you! Let's do this! #notguilty— Ione Wells (@ionewells) April 28, 2015
A 17-year-old boy, who can't be named for legal reasons, has pleaded guilty to a charge of sexual assault and will appear for sentencing at Highbury Corner Magistrates' Court on May 6, the Evening Standard reports.