criminals

I used to think rape was just holding people down by force onto a hard object. So I screamed that I was being raped when I was being restrained at school and disciplined onto a mat.

Miru

I used to think that when you read letters to counsellors in children's magazines, saying 'I don't like my mum's boyfriend' or whatever, it meant that they had bad taste in something that they didn't agree on, like not agreeing on the same food or watching the same TV show, before knowing now that it usually means stuff about
Paedophilia.

Anon

I thought at all prisons they never let the prisoners out of their cells. Once you went to prison, you didn't see the outside of your cell until your sentence was up.

Crocogator

I used to think that a "mafia" and a "gang" were the same thing except for what gender made up each one: A mafia being for girls, and a gang being for boys. Since the word "mafia" sounds like a girls' name, while the word "gang" sounds less feminine and therefore more like a boy's name, this belief made perfect sense to me and i believed it until middle school.

Anon

When I first heard of "The Five Families" of New York when my parents were watching the news, I thought a crime family was a literal family like a mom, dad, and kids, who all committed crimes together.

Anon

When I was little, i thought a "loan shark" was a literal shark. I remember hearing my parents talking about loan sharks and thought they were going to get bitten by a shark if they didn't pay any money.

Anon

I used to think the sound of a heavy church bell was meant to be the chime of doom, and that God was ringing it himself as a ghost. Grim but still funny.

Judging by the sound of the word, I used to think an asylum was where everyone had to be silent. Well, it is a type of prison!

Anon

For some reason, I used to think it was illegal to make up stories in your head, without writing them down on paper!

Anon

I used to believe that copying definitions out of a book counted as plagiarism!

Anon

When I was a kid, I thought it was illegal to photocopy pages out of books, because of that message that says 'all rights reserved' and tells you not to copy out of the book without permission from the publisher, and thought people had to contact the publishing company just to get permission for that! Like the privacy policy that you get on the internet with so many websites, makes more sense as you get older and learn about new inventions.

Natasha

My mother has this friend whose last name is Stalker, so when I heard people talking about stalkers, I thought they meant my mom's friend and people related to her.

Anon

I used to believe that if you “burnt” a cd on to ITunes on your computer, so you could listen to it on your IPod, you were violating copyright rules.

Marideth

When I was a kid, every time the lights in our house would dim, I thought another prisoner on death row was being electrocuted. Just like in the movies.

Shari