Words

Author's Note: This piece is written as an analysis of a book titled Speak that is a fictitious story about a girl who is in trouble with a guy.

Why me? why me? It’s just not fair. No, I know, this isn’t happening. Yes that’s it, it’s just not happening. These are some of the questions victims ask themselves while they are being attacked. According to the office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention 2004 Victims of Violent Juvenile Crime. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, victims of sexual assault committed by juveniles are younger than 18 years of age approximately 96 percent of the time. If you are in trouble you need to talk to someone because no one wants to be assaulted, and they may be able to help you. I learned that you should never let anyone that you don’t know get your personal information because of this book. It helped to make the lesson clearer to me. In Speak Laurie Halse Anderson teaches us that our actions will always speak louder than our words.

When you are in your teen years, you can be succumbed to sexual violence. It is usually never fair. You can’t always help it if you are in trouble, but you can help yourself by always being careful in what you say and do. The main character, Melinda, is greeting her freshman year of high school with no friends because of THE event that happened during her summer vacation: she was sexually assaulted by a boy that she hardly knew. She feels like an outcast, but on the first day is greeted by a new girl named Heather. Melinda doesn’t really have anything in common with Heather except that she is an outcast because she is new. Melinda quickly figures out that her old friends want nothing to do with her. She wants so badly to tell them the truth but cannot because they wouldn’t believe her. She tries to write her old best friend, Rachel, a note to be careful, because Rachel has gotten involved with the boy who assaulted her. Her ex-best friend chooses not to believe her because she thinks that she is just jealous that Melinda is not going to the prom and she is. Rachel ends up almost getting hurt because she thinks that the boy she is with is perfectly harmless.

Actions are taken louder than your words because body language gives away the tone in your voice. Laurie Halse Anderson teaches us this important lesson in the book Speak. Why do people do these awful things? No one ever knows.