Reclamation
On burning what once defined me, and choosing my own
closure after sexual violence
By Jade Blue
Futue te ipsum
27 March 2017
Latin: Go fuck yourself.
This piece sits in conversation with the women of the 1960s who found ways to reject what constrained them. In 1968, during the Miss America protest in Atlantic City, bras, girdles, high heels and tweezers were thrown into what were called “freedom trash cans” - a symbolic refusal of the objects and expectations imposed on women’s bodies.
From what I understand, very little was actually burned that day. The fire was more symbolic than literal. But the refusal was real - and that was what mattered. My fire came decades later. Smaller. Quieter. Intentional. I burned the knickers I wore the night I was raped. For nearly four years, they existed only as evidence. Sealed. Labelled. Reduced to exhibit. Stripped of context and humanity.
When the case collapsed, they were handed back to me in a cheap black bin bag - each item still inside its own police evidence-labelled brown paper sack. Bagged. Tagged. Returned. As though trauma can be itemised and signed out. Something had happened. Everything had. So I burned them.
In the same London borough where my world fractured. With my two closest friends - the same people who were there that night - standing beside me. There was no audience and no performance. Just fire, smoke, and a long silence. It was not a spectacle. It was exact. What had once been evidence became release.
The phrase Futue te ipsum - “go fuck yourself” - became central to this act. It is blunt and uncomfortable, but exact. After years of being questioned, reviewed, documented and reduced to paperwork, I needed language that didn’t negotiate or soften itself. I needed words that didn’t ask for understanding.
Where the system failed to hold him accountable, I chose to mark an ending myself. Where something that should have mattered was returned to me emptied of meaning, I reclaimed it.
The ashes were placed into a small urn my mum made for me, with those words carved into it. Not as decoration, but as a boundary. A reminder that closure doesn’t always come from justice, and that sometimes it has to be made.
Burning is ancient. Fire doesn’t argue. It transforms.
Processing sexual violence takes years of energy. It seeps into your body, your trust, your sense of safety, and your relationship with yourself. Parts of you disappear. Parts of you harden. Parts of you grieve versions of yourself that don’t come back. Trauma isn’t something you simply move on from - it stays with you, reshaping the edges of who you are.
My knickers were personal. Hidden. Private. They existed in the space where consent was taken and rewritten without my say. Burning them was not about anger or spectacle. It was about ownership.
It happened here. It finishes here.
This was not about erasing the past or pretending it didn’t happen. It was about drawing a line. About taking something that had been used to define me and deciding, deliberately, that it no longer would.
From evidence to ash.
From silence to authorship.
From harm to agency.
My knickers once carried the DNA he left without my consent.
They hold nothing now but ash.
Safety note: Any act involving fire should be carried out safely, outdoors, and with proper precautions.
