(WXYZ) — Shirquera Ayers joined Job Corp when she was 16 years old.
Wanting to enjoy a night out, she and some older friends ventured off campus.
“We ended up at a club and some guys picked us up,” Ayers remembers.
Pretty quickly she realized something was off.
“I’m like, you know, take me home. And they just kept riding past like I didn’t say anything. And I felt like something was going to happen to me,” she said.
Ayers tells me that night she was drugged and sexually assaulted by five men.
“It was like, a nightmare after that. Like bits and pieces would come to me as I would like sleep, as I would just, it was bad. It was bad.”
Ayers fell into a deep depression, contemplating suicide and struggling with an identity crisis and isolation. She didn't speak about her assault for a decade.
“It just felt like a muzzle was over my mouth,” she said.
That's until she realized, "It’s okay, to not be okay.”
She decided to share her story on Facebook and YouTube.
“It was like an instant relief. It was instant. I felt free," she said.
Michelle Purdue an assistant psychology professor at Oakland University tells me 1 in 4 women are sexually assaulted. Men are 1 and 33, but the numbers aren’t exact because most victims never speak up.
“Our success rate comes when survivors are no longer isolated,” Kalimah Johnson said.
Johnson is the founder of the Sasha Center, a sexual assault agency in Detroit. The organization aims to holistically heal sexual assault survivors by cultivating small groups, safe spaces, and providing resources.
“One of the things we provide that perhaps doesn’t happen enough for rape survivors is we believe them," Johnson said.
Ayers now aims to be a mouthpiece for the people who feel muted hosting events to encourage others that there is a joy-filled life on the other side of agony.
“When you share your trauma, it’s like a wound that is being healed," she said.
