I Believe You

By Eliza Bellones

I love being a girl. Being born into a matriarchal family and surrounded by friends I consider sisters has always given me a deep sense of safety and belonging. The knowledge that I am truly understood and supported by the women in my life is one of my greatest comforts. But there are many days when this comfort is overshadowed by disappointment, fear, and sheer rage.

I say sheer rage because it is the only emotion that encapsulates the feeling of being a woman in a world that refuses to take you seriously. It is a sickening whiplash to move from the sanctuary of women who hold you safely in their arms to a society that treats our bodies, our trauma, and our pain as collateral damage. How many stories must we tell before our voices are finally heard? How many women must bleed before we are granted basic humanity?

Let me tell you this: no one willingly lies about being sexually assaulted. No one volunteers to have their character dissected, their name dragged through the dirt, and their deepest traumas interrogated. Yet society treats a woman’s claim with immediate skepticism while extending endless grace to the accused.

There is a specific, insidious way the world refuses to take women seriously. I see testimonies of sexual assault from a year ago, a decade ago, a century ago, and almost one hundred percent of the time the victims were treated the exact same way: denied. Why does this cycle keep repeating? Because belittling a woman’s testimony is the easiest way to defend the status quo. If society admits a woman is telling the truth, it has to confront the men it protects, the institutions it rests upon, and the complicity of everyone who looks the other way. It is far easier to call a woman crazy, vindictive, or hysterical than it is to dismantle a culture built on her exploitation.

And when I see someone say “If that’s sexual assault, that means countless men have assaulted women,” I feel like screaming. You are so close to the point, yet missing it entirely. Yes—that is precisely the point. The fact that non-consensual boundary violations, coercion, and assault have become so normalized that recognizing them threatens the comfort of “countless men” is not a defense of men. It is an indictment of the system.

And for the record, I want to make this clear: unwanted touching is assault. Coercion after a “no” is assault. Taking advantage of someone who cannot give consent is assault. Stealthing, physical intimidation, ignoring explicit boundaries under the guise of “miscommunication,” and using power or emotional leverage to demand sex are all assault. The normalization of these acts does not erase their violence.

If there is one group I do not feel pure anger towards, it is the handful of women who choose to uphold misogyny. Whether their actions are voluntary or a survival mechanism to appease the system, I mourn for them. And if any of them are reading this, I hope that one day you will change—because if they can do it to us, they will do it to you. The patriarchy will not spare you just because you helped build the cage.

Believing women cannot remain a quiet sentiment whispered only behind closed doors. It must become a public demand. Stop protecting uncomfortable men at the expense of destroyed women. Intercept the harmful jokes, call out the casual boundary pushes, refuse to shield abusers out of convenience, and make your support loud enough that survivors don’t have to break their silence alone. We cannot reform a culture we are too afraid to confront.

Abuse continues to fester not only because of perpetrators, but because of all the bystanders who sit in comfortable silence and let it happen. Silence is not neutrality; it is permission. To every woman who is carrying a story she has never told, to every woman who was questioned, blamed, or brushed aside, and to all the women who suffer in silence: I believe you.