The Child Everyone Missed: An Open Letter to Those Who Hold Power

I have spent most of my life learning what happens when people with authority choose what is comfortable over what is true.

I learned it first as a child.

For most of my life, I was sexually abused and trafficked. There were adults around me. There were professionals. There were systems supposedly designed to notice children like me.

And still, I was missed.

Not because what was happening wasn’t serious enough. Not because there weren’t signs. Not because I didn’t deserve protection.

I was missed because what was happening to me did not look the way people expected it to look. Accepting the truth would have required adults to consider something almost unimaginable: that a child could be exploited by the very people who were supposed to protect her. That abuse could be chronic. Organized. Repeated. Hidden behind respectable families and institutions.

It was easier not to understand.

And so, adults didn’t.

What Failure Actually Sounds Like

We imagine institutional failure as something dramatic. Someone deliberately turning away.

But that isn’t always what failure looks like. Sometimes it sounds like:

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“Are you sure?”

“Why didn’t she tell someone?”

“Why didn’t she leave?”

Sometimes the most devastating failures begin with someone’s inability to imagine that another person’s reality could be true.

I know, because I have lived on the other side of those questions for decades.

Growing Up Doesn’t End It

Eventually, the child everyone missed grew up. I found my voice. I began speaking publicly about what happened to me.

And I learned that speaking up doesn’t mean you leave the systems that failed you behind. Sometimes you just meet them again, with different names, different buildings, different procedures.

This time, I understood what was happening. This time, I fought back.

And even when the process went my way, I learned another lesson: winning and being protected are not the same thing.

One moment from that process has stayed with me more than almost anything else. A person with authority asked, in substance, how it could be possible for someone to be harmed that many times in such a short span.

I have thought about that question ever since. Not because one person asked it, but because it is the question survivors have been answering for generations.

How could this possibly have happened to you?

My answer is this: Because I was being trafficked. Because human beings can be assaulted repeatedly. Because exploitation does not become less real when a victim turns eighteen. Because coercive control does not disappear at adulthood. Because people being exploited do not get to set limits on how often someone else violates them.

The frequency of victimization is not evidence that it didn’t happen.

Sometimes it is evidence of just how much danger a person was in.

“I Don’t Understand” Is Not “This Didn’t Happen”

Your inability to imagine what happened to someone is not evidence that it didn’t happen. Sometimes it simply means you don’t understand what you are looking at.

That distinction matters, because when someone with power mistakes I don’t understand this for this doesn’t make sense, the survivor pays the price.

We have built systems that demand traumatized people present their trauma neatly. 

Start at the beginning. 

Remember the dates. 

Explain why you stayed. 

Explain why you left. 

Explain why you didn’t report. 

Explain why you did. 

Explain why your story changed. 

Explain why you didn’t save yourself.

And then we call that justice.

We ask people who survived chaos to recount their suffering chronologically. We ask people whose brains adapted to survive overwhelming trauma why their memories don’t behave like ordinary memories. And when their experiences are too complicated, too horrific, or too frequent to fit inside our frameworks, we scrutinize the survivor instead of questioning whether the framework is inadequate.

That is how systems fail people. It is how they failed me.

Where Is the Courage of the System?

Survivors are told that justice requires courage. I agree. But we have been asking the wrong people to provide all of it.

Survivors have already been courageous. They survived. They disclosed. They reported. They answered humiliating questions. They watched their histories get dissected. They survived being doubted.

And then we congratulate them for being brave.

Where is the courage of the systems receiving them?

Where is the courage to say, Maybe what I was taught about trafficking is incomplete? 

Where is the courage to recognize that a respectable family can hide horrific abuse? That people who appear credible can be perpetrators? That victims can love people who hurt them? That dissociation affects memory? That someone’s story can sound unbelievable because what happened to them was unbelievable?

Where is the courage to admit: I don’t understand this yet, so I need to learn

No one is expecting omniscience. What is needed is humility. Curiosity. Courage.

Especially from those who sit on the bench.

A judge’s disbelief is not ordinary disbelief. It can reinforce the very shame and doubt survivors have spent their lives trying to escape. A courtroom can either interrupt institutional betrayal or become another chapter in it.

I do not expect anyone in authority to automatically believe every allegation. Due process matters. Evidence matters. Fairness matters.

But fairness is not ignorance disguised as neutrality. And skepticism should never substitute for education.

If you are going to preside over cases involving sexual violence, trafficking, coercive control, or childhood abuse, understanding those dynamics are not optional. The people standing before you deserve better than having the most painful experiences of their lives measured against someone’s intuition about what victimization is supposed to look like.

Survivors have already spent enough time paying for what other people don’t understand.

I know I have.

The Choice

For most of my childhood, I waited for an adult to notice. I waited for someone with authority to decide that protecting a child mattered more than protecting a family, an institution, a reputation, or their own comfort.

Eventually, I stopped waiting.

Because the fundamental choice never changes, whether the person across from you is a teacher, a police officer, an administrator, an attorney, or a judge. When someone tells you something that challenges everything you believe about how abuse works, will you retreat into disbelief? Will you protect what is familiar? Will you search for the explanation that makes everyone more comfortable?

Or will you ask: What if there is something here that I don’t yet understand?

That question might have changed my childhood. It may change the life of the next child or survivor who stands in front of you.

I was the child everyone missed. Today, I am the adult who refuses to let you keep missing children like me.

There comes a point when inaction becomes a choice. There comes a point when ignorance is no longer an excuse.

The people who abused me benefited from adults who didn’t understand, who didn’t ask enough questions, who couldn’t imagine what was happening.

They benefited from silence.

I will not give them mine anymore.

I spent my childhood waiting for people with authority to find their courage. I have spent my adulthood learning that some never will.

So I found even more of my own courage. And I intend to keep using it.

Because silence does not always look like silence. Sometimes it looks like disbelief. Sometimes it looks like skepticism. Sometimes it looks like “I just don’t understand how that could happen.”

And sometimes, it wears a robe and holds a gavel.

Kait Gannon
Survivor. Advocate. Still speaking.