The term "sexual assault" was basically unknown to me before I came to college. I knew it existed, I knew it happened, but I didn't realize it was such a big deal until my freshman year. The first week of school, I was drilled with statistics, personal stories, and warnings about sexual assault.

I soon realized that sexual assault, sexual harassment, and rape were things that happened more often than I ever imagined, and I also realized that I, in fact, had been sexually assaulted before.

I was in sixth grade, my first year of middle school. I just started developing into my teenage girl body. I had gotten my first period only a few months before. Middle school was a scary new world full of boys who were suddenly very interested in me. I never received attention from boys in elementary school. I was the weird smart girl that never really talked to other people. So this new attention I was receiving in my first year of middle school was overwhelming but so exciting for me.

I met my assaulter in my science class. He was the "bad boy" with swoopy, long brown hair and beautiful green eyes, an ideal first boyfriend for an outcast 12-year-old girl. He was really nice in the beginning. We would text each other 24/7, he would sit with me at lunch, he was even my first kiss. It felt like love.

Things started to get a little weird though about a month into our boyfriend-girlfriend thing. He would bring up very sexually things to me in our text conversations, things my 12-year-old brain never even knew existed.

Naturally, as a young girl who just wanted to fit in and for a boy to like her, I would give in to these conversations. I would make promises to do sexual things with him. I knew it didn't feel right, but I thought that that was just what you were supposed to do when you had a boyfriend in middle school.

It got so bad, to the point where he would force me to touch him sexually under the desk during class. He would make me sneak away during our elective classes and force me to make out with him intensely in front of other students.

He would touch me sexually under the desk, even when I would tell him afterward that I didn't want it. He even made me send him nude pictures, and threaten to break up with me if I didn't.

He often used the phrase "if you really loved me, you would" to get what he wanted from me.

I know that teachers saw us, I know that other students saw us, but no one ever said anything. There was one time, and this was even after we broke up, that he tried to touch me during class, and a few other students saw and could tell I was really upset. They told our science teacher, and she talked to me about it. She told the guidance counselor, who also talked to me about.

Not one single person told my parents, and not one single person told me that what had happened to me was sexual assault.

No one told me it was not ok.

This boy eventually threatened to beat me up, which I did tell my mom about. He got suspended from school for it. But even after I had told my mom, the guidance counselor, and the school principal that he had touched me before, none of them were too concerned with it.

None of them saw it as sexual assault.

I carried so much guilt and shame with me all throughout middle school and even into high school. I thought it was my fault. I thought because I never said no when it was happening that it wasn't assault. I become very depressed and lost during my last years of middle school. I never told people what happened to me. The kids who already knew what happened to me thought I was a slut for most of middle school.

I couldn't even bear to tell my high school boyfriend, even after we were together for more than two years, that this awful thing happened to me. This awful thing that has completely altered my view of sex for so long.

After my first week of college, I realized that what had happened to me was wrong. I had no right to feel shameful or guilty. It was not my fault. I didn't ask for it.

I learned nothing about sexual assault in middle school or high school. People like to only focus on sexual assault on college campuses, but it is happening just as much to young teenage girls too.

According to an article by HuffPost, 44% of sexual assaults happen before the age of 18. One out of every three or four girls and one out of every five to seven boys are sexually assaulted before college.

It is happening so often and nobody is talking about it! I'm so angry at my middle school sex education teachers for never explaining fully what sexual assault was to me and every other boy and girl in my school.

I'm so mad that even after the teachers knew it happened to me, no one fully explained that what happened to me was wrong.

That's also why it's so hard for me to blame the boy, my assaulter, for the things he did to me.

He didn't know what he was doing was sexual assault. He probably thought the same thing that I was thinking, that those were things you're supposed to do when you have a girlfriend in middle school. He didn't know. He wasn't taught.

Without proper sex education, sexually assaults are going to continue to happen, and people are going to continue to get away with committing these terrible acts.

How can you know something is wrong if no one ever tells you?