"Homam Almahdi grew up in a Syrian-American family in West Los Angeles, the oldest of four children. Bookish and sensitive, he worked hard in school, and went to mosque. All the time, he kept a secret from the world: when he was 8, he says he was sexually abused by a family friend, another Muslim.
'Growing up, I kind of believed that sexual violence was, just in general, a Western concept, like it doesn't happen to people who are Muslim,' Almahdi says. 'If you are spiritual enough, God will protect you from evil.'
He didn't fully understand that he'd been assaulted until he took sexual health classes in middle school. And it wasn't until his freshman year at the University of California, Irvine that he wrote out an account of what had happened. He left it on his computer, searing into his hard drive.
Then, during his sophomore year, his life changed.
He took a campus workshop on sexual abuse in the Muslim community, put on by a national organization called HEART Women & Girls. All its sex educators are Muslim.
'It was really emotional for me because I hadn't ever experienced an event like that where somebody who was Muslim-identifying kind of knew what I had been through,' Almahdi says.
HEART educators have been talking about sex and sexual assault for nearly a decade, creating their own #MeToo movement even before it had a name.
The organization, which has been growing its reach online and through training workshops, puts sex education in a cultural context, recognizing that Muslim survivors of sexual abuse, especially women, face obstacles to reporting the crimes both within and outside the community."
