Rajeshree Roy, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and domestic violence, has spent more than half of her life incarcerated by a system that claims to protect survivors. Trigger warnings for Domestic Violence and Childhood Sexual Abuse.

Rajeshree Roy was born in Fiji. Her mother abandoned her when she was an infant. Her father, like many Fijians, was forced to leave the country as an undocumented immigrant looking for work and left her with extended family. As a half-Indian, half-Fijian child in a country with long standing ethnic tensions, Rajeshree was hated by her Indian family, who started sexually abusing her when she was five.

“When I was eight, my uncle would tie me to a faucet outside and make me perform oral sex on him. He would give me twenty cents and warn me not to tell anyone.”

Rajeshree’s visa allowing her to immigrate to the United States and escape sexual abuse at home.

By the time her father was able to bring her over on a green card eight years later, Rajeshree had experienced an unfathomable amount of trauma. When she tried to tell her family, they refused to listen. Unable to express what she had been through, Rajeshree was filled with anger and sadness. At the age of twelve, Rajeshree attempted to commit suicide for the first of many times in her life. She passed out unconscious in the garage for days without anyone noticing that she was gone.

“After what I’d been through, I hated men. I couldn’t trust any of them. Still, if I wanted to survive, I had to forgive myself and find a way to forgive them too.”

Starved for affection that she was not getting at home, Rajeshree would often run away to live on the streets. In a summer when she was sixteen and homeless, Rajeshree started robbing people to get money. Years of bottled up pain and anger began pouring out as she found herself unable to stop punching, kicking, and beating the men she robbed. She was arrested for multiple counts of robbery and aggravated assault.