AN OXFORD University student has written an open letter to her alleged attacker after she was sexually assaulted while walking home.
The 20-year-old spoke out about the attack near her home in Camden, north London, as she launched a #NotGuilty campaign, highlighting that assaults are never the fault of the victim.
Writing in the university’s Cherwell student newspaper, she said she was assaulted as she walked home from a London underground station in the early hours of April 11 when her attacker followed her, dragged her by the hair, smashed her head against the pavement and sexually assaulted her before running off when her neighbours and family came out.
She wrote: “I don’t know who the people in your life are. I don’t know anything about you. But I do know this: you did not just attack me that night. I am a daughter, I am a friend, I am a girlfriend, I am a pupil, I am a cousin, I am a niece, I am a neighbour, I am the employee who served everyone down the road coffee in the cafe under the railway.
“All the people who form those relations to me make up my community, and you assaulted every single one of them. You violated the truth that I will never cease to fight for, and which all of those people represent – that there are infinitely more good people in the world than bad. This letter is not really for you at all, but for all the victims of attempted or perpetrated serious sexual assault and every member of their communities.”
The Met Police said a 17-year-old boy was charged with sexual assault and bailed to appear at Highbury Corner Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday, May 6.
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