Posts from — April 2006

I’m sure all of you have heard at least one news story about a woman who stepped forward years after the fact to accuse some well-known man of having sexually assaulted her. You’ve probably heard more than one such story.

I’m also sure that when those cases come up, you’ve often heard people ask, “If this really happened to her, why did it take her fifteen years to step forward? Why didn’t she report it right away?” If you’re really honest, maybe a few of you will even admit the thought has at least crossed your own minds from time to time.

This is not a statement of blame. Because I thought the same thing about those women.

It wasn’t that I didn’t necessarily believe their stories. I would defend these women publicly, insisting no one would go through the agony of exposing themselves to court proceedings, having her sexual history become public record, and facing public scorn and ridicule just for financial gain, or to “get some attention.” But secretly, I wondered: Why had it taken her so long? And I often got frustrated about how much more of a liability these women were to the getting people to take “real” (read, immediate) sexual assault issues seriously.

Yes, I thought somewhere deep down that an immediate accusation of assault was more “real,” or deserved more merit, than an accusation decades after the fact.

So, again, this is not a statement of blame. It’s an explanation.

Because, I find now that I am one of those women.

I mentioned in this post a few days ago that I was sexually assaulted as a teenager. Would you believe me if I told you I had no idea this was so until almost 20 years later?

It’s true.

For years as an adult, I would go to “Take Back the Night” protests. I did it to support other women who had been raped. That’s what I thought. I would read or hear sexual assault statistics in the news. And I would think, with no sense of discomfort or irony, “I’m just so lucky that has never happened to me.”

You might think it was because I had blocked the memory. Not true. I hadn’t forgotten or buried the events of what happened to me in my subconscious. I remembered the entire thing. I just didn’t give it a name. It was a small, gnawing, uneasy spot of memory with no label affixed.

And hence, I was completely, utterly clueless. Even long after I should have known better.

So, now I’m one of those women I wondered about. The one who’s only able to name what happened to her so far after the fact that everyone around her wonders why she’s even bothering. And I now understand who that woman is, and why she waited, and why she’s even bothering.

But this piece today, I’m writing just to tell you and everyone out there that the woman isn’t lying because she brought it up so late in the game. And she isn’t bringing it up “at her convenience” for some kind of dramatic effect or gain.

Like me, she may simply not have realized what happened to her.

Sexual assault is almost never as cut-and-dry as people think. We have our friend Senator Napoli telling us in that now infamous news clip that assault means being “brutally raped, savaged…sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it.” Though we’d prefer to vilify him and call his view an aberration, and though he was certainly disturbingly extreme in his description, in truth, his viewpoint is not so far off the mark from what many people unconsciously define “real” assault as. Because despite what we’re told over and over again, that’s what people usually think makes it “real,” what counts as proof. If there are marks, if there are bruises and scratches. If there’s an alley, and a stranger, and a weapon, and a struggle, and a penis forced into an orifice, then, and only then, it counts as a “real” assault.

And so if you’re assaulted, and none of these things happen to you, often no one will believe you were really assaulted. And more to my point today, often you won’t even believe it yourself.

Of course, real truth is that that list of conditions above is RARELY the case in most sexual assaults. Only a tiny percentage of assault survivors sustain serious physical injuries. Weapons are rarely present. The assaulter is rarely a stranger in an alley. Far more frequently the assaulter is someone the person knows, making the victim less guarded, and more confused about how to respond when things suddenly turn ugly. The situation is rarely 100 percent spontaneous. It’s often deliberately set up ahead of time, so the person who is assaulted is less likely to be believed.

But these details, while not completely unknown, still don’t loom large in the public consciousness. In the end, it’s only the victim who’s been beaten mercilessly by a stranger and reports it immediately that gets our full, unquestioned belief.

And then there are those who are assaulted not only by people they know, but by people in roles that most others have difficulty believing could be capable of perpetrating such an act. A priest, for instance, or a parent, or a lover, husband, or wife. Or, in my case, a well-respected doctor.

If, for instance, a parent tells you what he or she is doing to you is a good thing, that he or she loves you for doing it—well, is it any wonder that the person who’s being assaulted may not be able to put a label on what has happened to her or him until many, many years later? Or let’s use an example of a sexually active adult. Let’s say you’re getting physical with someone you actually like—someone you’ve chosen to be with, maybe even someone you’ve had sex with before–and suddenly a boundary is crossed before you had time to figure out what was going on. Might you not possibly convince yourself what happened to you wasn’t what it actually was? Might you not put a blank spot on the event, the way I did?

In all these cases, might it not take you years before you realized what had really happened? Might it not take even longer for you to get brave enough to stand up and tell it to the world, knowing you are going to face the same doubt, denial, confusion, and even anger that you’ve used against yourself for all this time?

Something to think about the next time those questions at the beginning of this post come up, in any context.

More another day.

(Photo credit: day goes by by Simon Pais)

A number of years back, well before the turn of the current century, I decided to move across the country. I was excited, and brimming with hope. It was a new adventure. I was putting my life as a slave to the New York City publishing world behind me. I was leaving a lot of other things that had grown tiresome or oppressive to me, too. I had a new significant other. I was starting fresh. Everything felt young, exciting, and full of promise–endless possibility lay ahead of me.

I packed up my car. I wanted to stock it full of everything that had meaning to me, so I would be able to surround myself with the things I loved when I arrived at my new home. Turned out a lot of things had meaning to me. My whole car was filled up, and then I had to attach one of those bubble things to the roof to add more. My family helped me pack. When I was done, I went happily on my way, watching them get smaller and smaller behind me as they waved goodbye.

I drove from daylight into evening, and then when it had been dark for a good number of hours and I’d started to get tired, I pulled into a budget motel for the night, in a place I’d never been before. I’d call it a big town, but the people who live there call it a city. I went to a chain restaurant next door for dinner. I grabbed my travel case and headed in to my room for a good sleep before heading out the next day.

I woke up in the morning, got dressed, and went down to the parking lot. I stood there for a minute, unbelieving. My car was gone. Everything I owned and loved was gone. Everything.

Try to imagine this. You’re standing there in an empty parking lot, and all you now own are about four pieces of clothing, a pair of shoes, and a toothbrush.

ALL your clothes are gone. Your photographs. Your favorite music (hundreds and hundreds of cds), and your stereo to go with it. Your favorite books. Your favorite earrings, rings, or what have you.

I lost that, and more. All my favorite clothing, both the comfortable and the sexy. Letters from old friends and lovers. A stuffed animal I’d had since birth, that my family had chosen specially for me while I was still in the womb. Special gifts from friends that meant everything in the world to me. Keepsakes from family members who had passed on. Every single journal I’d written in from grade school through adulthood, documenting every memory and emotion I’ve ever experienced in my life. Every non-human thing I have ever loved, gone. Things I could never, ever get back or replace.

I couldn’t even process it. I went blank. I started shaking uncontrollably. When I got that somewhat under control, I went to the front desk. I told the hotel manager what happened, and he laughed at me. He laughed. And he said, smirking, that he was sorry, but he had no control over what happened in his parking lot. It became more than evident from his attitude and responses that he was probably involved in some way. I suggested the least he could do was refund my money for my night’s stay, given my inconvenience and my extreme financial loss which had occurred on his premises. It couldn’t have been more than $30. It wouldn’t have broken him. He laughed at me again and refused. When I got angry at his behavior, he called the police and had me forcibly removed from his property. When the police came, I told the them what had happened. They didn’t care. They made me leave, and didn’t say a word to the hotel manager. They protected him, not me. They treated me like I was the criminal.

The police couldn’t have cared less about my theft, but they suggested I wait 24 hours in town after that, just in case the car showed up abandoned somewhere in town. I went to another hotel and sat there, with my four pieces of clothing and a toothbrush. I called home to let them know what had happened. And when I finally got someone, I found out my father had just been rushed to the hospital for an emergency quadruple bypass, and no one was sure whether he was going to make it or not.

What was your reaction when you just read that story? If you were going to say something back to me, what would you have said?

I’ve told this story numerous times over the years. It no longer affects me. It’s just a story that’s happened in my past. But it affects the people I tell it to, every time. Everyone is always instantly horrified. They tell me it’s the worst thing they have ever heard. They tell me they can’t imagine how I got through that day. They ask me how I ever got over it. They ask me if it still bothers me now. They often look like they want to hug me, even though I don’t look upset anymore when I tell the story. Some do hug me. They shake their heads in disbelief and say they can’t figure out how they would ever get over something like that. They spit venom out at whomever the person or people were who stole my belongings, and at that asshole of a hotel manager. They get extreme about it. They call them names, they suggest all kinds of cruel punishment for them. They ask me if I ever got any of my stuff back, if the theives ever got caught. And back when it had just happened, everyone asked me how they could help. They also ask me about my dad’s surgery, if he survived (he did), and how I got through dealing with that when I was all alone, with nothing, in a strange state.

Was your imagined response similar to any of the above?

When I was a teenager, I was sexually assaulted.

What was your response to that?

Because it should have been the same. But I bet for some of you it wasn’t.

When I tell random people about my car, they react as described above. When I tell people about my assault, they generally act nothing like this. They most often try to run away, or make me shut up about it. It’s “too much information”–it’s stepping out of the comfort zone. It’s letting a dirty secret out into the light. You get the sense the person wants to say, “Why would you tell me this? What can I do about it now? What do you want from me, telling me this?”

I’m going to say this now for myself. And maybe I’ll take a little liberty and assume I can say it for all sexual assault survivors. I’m saying it to any of you out there who have had or will have someone tell you they were sexually assaulted.

What do we assault survivors want from you when we tell you this information? Read carefully:

All I want is to be able to talk about my assault openly, the way I can about my car story. All I want is for you to respond to me about it the same way you would about my car story. Show sympathy for me. Show outrage for the crime committed. Ask if I’m okay, and if the crime has been very recent, ask if there’s anything you can do to help. Ask how I managed to recover. Ask any of the things I listed above for the car story.

With the car story, people believe me right away. No one ever even stops for a second to wonder if I’ve possibly made it up. No one asks me pointedly why I stopped at the motel for the night in the first place. No one suggests I’m tellng the story to tarnish the reputation of the motel chain I stayed at. They never suggest that the fact that I walked into that motel of my own choice meant that I was asking to get robbed. They don’t ask why I didn’t yell a little louder at the hotel manager or the police officer. They don’t ask me if I am sure my car was stolen, rather than merely misplaced. They don’t ask for in-depth explanations of every item that was stolen and then question whether my theft “counted” as much as other thefts where more expensive cars and belongings had been taken. They don’t ask if I had done something to deliberately piss the theives off, so that they stole my car over someone else’s. They never push me to describe exactly what inflection the hotel manager used when speaking to me, or exactly how tightly the policeman put his hand around my arm when he escorted me off the property–it doesn’t even occur to them that those details were necessary–it’s simply enough for them to hear that it happened. They don’t wonder if the way the car looked made it my fault that it got stolen. They’d never think to tell me that because I only got robbed once, it wasn’t such a big deal, and that I shouldn’t make such a big case out of it. They never say because it happened years ago that it shouldn’t affect me anymore and I should just get over it and forget about it. They don’t suggest that because I wasn’t held at gun point when the car was stolen that it didn’t count as a theft.

And certainly, whenever I walk up to someone and say, “A while back my car was stolen with all my stuff in it,” they never look freaked out and don’t want to talk about it. They never say or act like, “Whoa, too much information, there!” They’re not at a loss for how to respond. They’re not afraid it’s something that’s “too sensitive” to talk about.

So, again, when I tell you I’ve been sexually assaulted, let me. And just treat me the same as you would if I told you about the car.

Because when boiled down, they are both the same, you know. Some fucker took advantage of me, and committed a crime while doing so. Period.

So why is it my car story considered appropriate and acceptable to tell any time, anywhere, while my assault story is not? Why should the loss of my car receive more spontaneous expressions of sympathy than my assault? Why should it be so difficult for people to treat both the same way?

***April is National Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

In recognition of that, I’m going to (probably) do a number of posts on the topic this month. I know it’s not your standard sex talk, but it’s relevant and it’s important. I’m only just learning myself how relevant and important it is to have a voice on this issue.

So, despite it not being a “sexy” sex-related topic, I’m going to be talking about it. If that’s not your thing, there’s plenty of other good reading on my links lists on the right. But I hope some of you will stick around and read it.

If not, well, if it helps just one person who’s been assaulted to deal with their own experience, or helps even one person learn how to step up when someone who has been assaulted confides in them, then that’s all I care about.

And if you read any of these posts and find it brings up any upsetting memories of your own, please don’t struggle with those alone. Go talk to someone–preferably a professional in your local area with expertise in working with assault survivors, but if not, call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1.800.656.HOPE. It’s free, confidential, and open 24/7. (Sorry, that number is in the US only. I wish I knew ones for other countries, but maybe readers can share hotline numbers for their own countries.)***