ECNELIS:
SILENCE - Reversed
A Fight: Breaking the Silence and a Broken System
Let’s not mince words.
This isn’t just art.
This is a battle cry — against a country that fails you precisely when you need it most.
When I finally accepted everything last January, it wasn’t some quiet moment of clarity. It was a collapse. Forty years of pain crashed down all at once — every act of abuse, relived in forensic, excruciating detail.
What did I need? Therapy.
Someone to speak to.
What did I get?
A waiting list — two and a half years long. In a country that parades itself as progressive, that’s not just absurd. It’s obscene.
And then there’s the silence.
Say you robbed a bank — pulled off a Hatton Garden-style caper — and people would lean in. There’d be whispers. A Netflix deal. Maybe even a bit of respect.
But say you were abused as a child?
Silence.
Worse than silence — avoidance.
People shut down. Eyes drop. Voices falter. The subject is exiled from conversation, not because it’s unimportant — but because it’s too important. Too uncomfortable. So we pretend it didn’t happen. And that silence? That hush? That’s where abusers thrive.
Even my own family, the ones who should’ve shielded me, chose silence. They saw. They knew. They did nothing.
Their refusal to act — their deliberate inaction — is a microcosm of what society does on a grander scale: protect its own comfort over a child’s reality.
If it had been murder, robbery, drugs — we’d be dissecting it. There’d be debate, documentaries, fascination. But child abuse?
We look away.
And in doing so, we shield the abuser.
We deepen the isolation.
We multiply the damage.
This isn’t just a statement. It’s a reckoning.
This is what I’ve made from years of pain: something that won’t shut up.
Something that demands attention.
Because if we keep silencing survivors, we become part of the mechanism that lets abuse flourish in the dark.
So let this work be what it’s meant to be:
Not decoration. Defiance.
A challenge to a system rigged against the truth.
A punch thrown at the culture that romanticises everything but this.
Let this be the start.
Of naming.
Of unmasking.
Of refusing the hush.
No more silence.
No more complicity.
No more.
