Inspired by a real survivor’s account

Part I

In my second year of uni, I was the happiest I had ever been – I had the most amazing friends, and was pursuing my dream course at my first choice university in Penang. Perhaps what I loved the most about the whole affair was the breathing room I had since I was away from my conservative parents. They were alright at the time, but they could be a bit over-protective of their only daughter – although I did not realise just how much until it was just a bit too late.

I made the most of my freedom, and by then I was busily but contentedly juggling part-time work, volunteer work with NGOs, and my studies. I met my (now ex) boyfriend, J, a well-known activist who was a few years my senior, on Facebook. He took my side in an argument in the comments section of a contentious post, and I messaged him first. We hit it off and met for coffee in Georgetown, one thing led to another and we ended up seeing each other on a serious basis.

J had this magnetic charm to him – I would believe it if someone said he charmed his way into robbing a bank. Everyone loved him – he seemed to be on great terms with everyone up to and including the neighbourhood rojak man. J was active in the activism scene, and we did lots of campaigning and fundraising together, where I saw his charisma in action.

Our relationship was like something plucked out of a romance novel – we certainly had our dramatic moments. I forgot about my group of friends, and spent hours upon hours with J. He would always magically materialise with a bouquet of roses or some book of poetry he thought I should read, and never failed to be charming. We did have arguments, and on hindsight he was constantly lying and being secretive. He would never let me touch his phone or laptop, and he would always straight up lie about where he was and who he was with.

Once, he went down to Singapore but told me he went to KL. I found out, and we had a big argument about that. We argued a lot about things like that, but I think that incident in particular would sum up our relationship nicely to those not in the know. Looking back, I have no idea why I stayed with him and why I believed his half-baked excuses. I guess I was young, naive, and in love, and therefore in my mind, things couldn’t have been going better.

And then I got pregnant.

Part II

My period was a bit late, and I was fairly regular, so in the back of my mind I was a bit worried. I tried not to think about it until I was staring at the dreaded double lines on the pregnancy test stick I had grabbed from Watsons. The rest of the day was a blur – I could only remember calling J on my phone (who was supposedly in Singapore at the time) and just collapsing into a puddle of tears on the cold floor of my bathroom.

To cut a long story short, I decided not to carry on with the pregnancy. I told J it was because I was afraid of my conservative family (which was partially true), but it was actually because I didn’t trust him to be responsible for the baby. The whole episode was rather sobering for me, and shook me enough that I abandoned my sense of complacency about my relationship. Did I really want to have a child with this man? Sure, he was absolutely charming, but he was impulsive and (it broke my heart to admit this to myself) a compulsive liar.

J became quite cold after I terminated the pregnancy, but we kept up our ‘perfect couple’ facade for a couple of months. Maybe he sensed that I had my doubts about him, but I guess it wouldn’t have mattered in the end. I broke it off a couple of weeks shy of our one year anniversary. He threw a tantrum and we smashed a few things, but I was just glad to be done with him – or so I thought.

J started constantly messaging me on Facebook a couple of days after the break-up. He would constantly write long, heartfelt messages to me at 3am in the morning, talking about how he would “do anything” to get me back. I’m not going to say I wasn’t tempted to try to fix things, but I knew that it would just end badly again if we got back together. One night, I finally told him to stop messaging me, and I blocked him.

Part III

Looking back, I’m pretty sure that was the moment that set him off.

I woke up very late the next day, turned on my phone, and was immediately assailed by the usual buzz of incoming notifications from Facebook and WhatsApp. I did my morning ritual of scrambling for my glasses, read the first few on screen and nearly fell out of my bed.

I was greeted by a hail of abuse on my social media accounts, ranging from insults against my supposed promiscuity and many, many rather rude variants of “how could you have done this to him?!” I saw a message from someone I can’t remember, asking if “everything was true”, with a link to J’s Facebook page.

J had written a long post that accused me of cheating on him, and getting pregnant by another guy. I remember thinking that my English teacher would have called his turn of phrase oxymoronic, as he called me a slut and whore in one sentence, and then said that he was still “madly in love” with me a couple of sentences later. Everyone in the comments was either shaming me or comforting J. I immediately messaged J begging him to take everything he said back, but he just ignored me.

It is a testament to J’s popularity that almost everyone took his side, and even the friends that I had left always seem slightly doubtful about my side of things. Going to uni was agonising – people in the lecture hall would just stare at me openly, and talk about me rather loudly. Obviously, I stopped doing volunteer work, and I took to just staying at home. I was afraid even to leave my room because that meant I had to face my housemates – this developed into social anxiety, to the point where my housemates had to get food for me, and had to force me to get out of the house to attend lectures.

I was lonely, ostracised, and an emotional wreck. On top of everything, every time I used my phone I was terrified that I would see another nasty message or comment, but then uninstalling my social media apps made me anxious about what people were saying about me that I didn’t know about. On hindsight, this was almost hilariously clichéd, but I remember crying and thinking if it could get any worse.

Part IV

And then I got a phone call from my parents. The gist of it was pack your things, you’re coming home, you’re a disgrace, and no, you don’t have a choice – you’ve brought down our family name! As I have mentioned before, my family is very conservative, so I took great pains to keep my personal life under wraps, away from their eyes. However, my parents seemed to have found out about the whole Facebook affair – but how?

I would find out later in the car on the long drive back to KL that someone had sent links to my FB page and screenshots of J’s post to my aunt, who then told my parents. I was lectured on how I had disgraced the family, and had acted unbecoming of a woman by having a child out of wedlock. I would also like to add how they flat-out refused to hear anything I had to say, and took everything in the FB posts and comments at face value.

When we got home, I had my laptop and phone taken away, and was made a prisoner in my own home until I could prove that “I had repented”. First my friends, and now my family were against me. I got extremely depressed and just slept constantly. I will not talk about how my family treated me, although I will say that I was not physically abused and leave it at that. I will say that it was enough to make me ask for J to take me back, so I could escape my family after two months under their roof.

J and I were together for slightly under two months – he did certainly seem like he still had feelings for me, but he also became extremely over-protective and controlling, with a bad temper on top of it all. I was only allowed to go places if he was with me, and he constantly checked my phone, among other things. I still found this arrangement liberating – I could finally contact my friends and tell them what happened, though I didn’t have very many left after many of them turned against me. I was still depressed – I didn’t have the energy to think up a plan, and just went through the days like a robot on autopilot. One day, we had a nasty argument, and then he threatened to contact my family.

My parents and two of my cousins came to J’s apartment in Penang and literally dragged me away. I would like to say that I went out kicking and screaming, but I just let them take me quietly. I spent a few days in my own house as a prisoner, and overheard my family members talking about sending me to a religious rehab centre for “unwed mothers” and those who had “social problems”. On hearing this, I panicked and tried to contact someone to help me, but that just led to me getting screamed at by my parents even more. They shipped me off to the rehab centre against my will, but this time with quite a bit of screaming and kicking.

Part V

I am not going to talk much about my six months in the rehab centre- what is there to talk about? Listened to a lot of lectures about morality, was constantly asked if I had repented, etc. I just felt more and more ostracised and isolated and alone with each passing day, and I just got more and more depressed until it just hit a point where I just stopped caring about everything in general. They brought my parents to the centre for a therapy session where they cried in front of me and I just didn’t care. My own parents disowned me and I didn’t feel much at all. My heart was empty by that time. I felt numb.

After I was released, I drifted for a while, but a very old friend took me under her wing and helped me get my life back together. I used to find it very hard to get to know people and form relationships after everything happened, but my friend forced me to see a therapist. She managed to help me with a lot of those issues, although I still tend to be very detached emotionally. She suggested that helping others who have been in my shoes, and spreading awareness about the consequences of cyber-harassment might help me find closure.

So, here I am, writing this out for the world to see. I honestly feel that revenge would be a better way of closure – I want J to be exposed for the liar that he is and for his facade to be torn down, but then who would believe me? I want him to suffer like I did – I want him to languish in jail for 6 months like I did in my own home and in that rehab centre. But I’ll settle for helping others, for now.

Read more survivor’s stories or check out the cyberharassment survivor’s kit.