Send us your sexual assault story

It started with one Tweet.
“Women: tweet me your first assaults. they aren't just stats. I'll go first: Old man on city bus grabs my ‘pussy’ and smiles at me, I'm 12.”
Blogger Kelly Oxford used the explosive release of the Hollywood Access tape, in which GOP Presidential candidate Donald Trump brags about sexually assaulting women, to start a national conversation about an exceedingly difficult subject. She told The New York Times she didn’t expect much of a response. But in less than a week, more than 1 million people tweeted their stories. “The result has been a kind of collective, nationwide purge of painful, often long-buried memories,” the Times wrote.
Pamela Chergotis, managing editor of The Chronicle and The Pike County Courier, is starting a conversation locally with her own experience (below). We invite you to share your own story, which you may send to her directly at pam.chergotis@strausnews.com.
You do not have to identify yourself. If you do, you can ask Pam to keep your identity confidential, if that is what you wish.

I was sexually assaulted when I was about 8 or 9 years old.
I was playing with my friend Barbara, who lived in the apartment building next door. Her father came into the kitchen, where we sat with our coloring books, and offered to swing us between his legs.
Barbara went first. Her father caught her from behind, his hands gripped tightly around her tiny rib cage. Back and forth she went, like a weight swinging from a pendulum. Her father lifted her nearly to the ceiling and back again, as his own head dipped between his knees. Wee! Wee! Wee! he said with each swing.
Then it was my turn. Wee! Wee!
It was fun. My hair whipped back and forth.
The swinging slowed.
For what seemed like forever, Barbara's father rubbed his groin against my backside. I'd never experienced anything remotely like this before, and didn't know what it meant. But I was scared and flooded with an entirely new feeling: disgust.
I wanted to break free but froze instead. When he finally let me go, I left the apartment as quickly as I could. I made an excuse, like my mom expecting me home, or something like that.
It was a secret I kept until adulthood. I knew what happened to me was bad, so bad, that I would lose the companionship of one of my favorite playmates if my parents ever found out. But I never went back to Barbara's apartment. And the next year, her father died, of cancer. I felt so sad for her, but relieved too. I'm still relieved he was taken out of the world before I understood more completely what he did to me.
As I grew older, and as other childhood memories faded, that one never did.