For some reason, I’ve been suddenly surrounded with sexual assault issues this week–in the lives of people I know, in films, on blogs, in email discussions with friends, etc. Everywhere I turn the topic is coming up. I’ve been wanting to write about a few of these recent encounters with the topic, but I’m finding it hard to get started.

I guess since I’m tired, for brevity’s sake I’ll start with what I think will be the shortest one. 

I won’t go into the details of that got me to what I’m going to write below, because it’s someone’s personal story and I don’t feel comfortable revealing that without their permission. But let’s just say the topic came up of why someone who was sexually assaulted, but not raped (by this I mean no penetration of any type) would have such a difficult time recovering emotionally from it.

In answering this, I came up with a metaphor that I think may helps explain and (hopefully) combat the harm produced by one of the problematic responses many people give victims–and that victims also often require of themselves–after a sexual assault: That is, asking for an assessment of the “degree” of the assault. And once that’s been asked, measuring whether the level of emotional response is “appropriate” relative to that “degree” of physical trespass.

Here’s what I came up with to get through to people about it:

When it comes to sexual assault and its emotional after effects, degree doesn’t really factor into it. Trying to measure the “allowable” emotional impact of something like a sexual assault and how a victim “should” respond based on that is basically the same as if a child came up to you crying and told you an adult had just walked up to him on the playground and punched him in the face, and you asked him to tell you exactly how hard the adult had punched him, and on what part of his face, because if it “wasn’t too hard” or “in too bad a place” then he really needed to stop crying already.

No one in their right mind would do that. They wouldn’t be thinking about whether the kid had a right to be upset; they’d be running to the police to get that abusive bastard locked up before he left the park.

As in that scenario, when it comes to sexual assault, the degree of the act doesn’t matter–the fact that the act happened is what matters, and what holds all the emotional impact. What matters is that something wrong was perpetrated, and it’s harmed the person it was perpetrated on as a result.

There are no “shoulds” or “shouldn’ts” in terms of  the feelings around it. It’s an extremely upsetting, scary, and traumatic thing, and it is always seriously wrong behavior on the part of the perpetrator, regardless of degree. Whenever someone disrespects and devalues another’s body, needs, and boundaries, that is a dangerous person. And the victim of that person has survived a dangerous situation. It would makes sense that she or he would feel strongly about it, and that it would have strong after effects.

Asking a sexual assault survivor to “quantify” her or his assault–or, if you are a survivor yourself, telling yourself you have to quantify it–is never helpful to healing from that trauma. It is only harmful.

And also, in my experience, those of us who have been sexually assaulted–no matter what our assault was like–also do this same thing to ourselves. We tend to try to minimize the event by telling ourselves it was “not that bad” or that “nothing really happened” or that we “shouldn’t be making such a big deal about it.” (Or all three together.) But actually it’s just the opposite. It WAS bad, something DID happen, and it IS a big deal, no matter what the physical situation was or how “far” the perpetrator(s) got before he/she/they stopped his/her/their unacceptable behavior.

That last sentence is one of the most important things to stress to a victim of sexual assault, no matter what type of assault it was, no matter how long ago in the past. There is no minimizing of it, regardless of degree. And it’s not something people “just forget and get over.” Or that they get over at a predictable and standardized pace. It lingers. It is trauma, and the brain and body reacts to trauma over an extended period. It doesn’t let you forget.

So stressing that sentence to a traumatized survivor is a far better, more supportive option than questioning the “degree” of someone’s assault vs. their emotional response. That’s not what a victim needs. Ever.

So what do you think? Does that opening metaphor work? I find often that sexual assault often makes people so uncomfortable, they can’t seem to think properly, but if you can take it outside of the context of sexual assault and use a comparative association, people can sometimes get what they’ve been unable to see right in front of them the whole time.

—
Update: I’ve been getting a lot of hits on this article from AAG’s blog and elsewhere today, so I’ve decided to republish some posts from an older blog of mine that document some of the history/struggle/growth/healing I experienced around my own assault, including my personal story. If anyone would like to read them, you can find all of them categorized in the order they were first published here.

I can’t put them all up now, because it requires fixing lots of links and things, which is very time consuming, but I’ve put up three of the main ones and may put up more as I go along.