Rape and the Victim Blame Game

When I was in ninth grade, I selected Speech as an elective. My first speech was one I felt passionately about, and it took all my classmates off guard. Essentially I tackled the subject of how girls and women are treated when they press legal charges of rape. At first, the boys in the class snickered at the uncomfortable subject matter - but you could have heard a pin drop when I admitted that I, myself, was a survivor of rape.

At the end of the speech the class applauded - something they had not done for anyone else.

It was an amazing moment that taught me a little about courage, especially when classmates came to me privately later to tell me they understood what I was saying because they were survivors themselves. Only no one knew, because they hadn't yet found their voice to share their stories.

Some had been victimized by their own family members and thus were still terrified of what could happen to them if they told.

My immediate danger had been over for years, but I still understood well that fear because it had been tattooed inside of me by the actions of a stranger.

I had been taken from my yard as a four year old child and assaulted by a man I had never met, several blocks away in the back yard of a neighbor. I went with the stranger initially because I had never been taught to fear strangers. That was the benefit of living in small town Texas in 1974, where the crime rates were low and the possibility of the community living around you sharing your same values was high.

Yet one day the unthinkable happened. I was playing in my front yard and a man just happened to be walking down that particular street. He asked if I wanted to play a game and as a four year old I decided that I did - even though I knew leaving my yard was a big no no.

I didn't really have any fear until he put me down on the grass and took off my underwear. He then took me by surprise by exposing himself and laying on top of me. Within a few strokes he was done, but he told me to wait there for him and he took off.

For some reason I can't really explain, I thought that he meant he was going to go get a gun and come back for me and kill me. Eventually I began to cry and the neighbors in the house heard me. The police, who had already been looking for me, came and got me, then returned me home.

I had no fear of strange men before that day, but afterward I would never look at them the same way again. In truth, all men would scare me on some level because I no longer trusted that they would not hurt me.

(This may be why my gays mean so much to me. They, aside from my sons, are the only ones I know I can trust 100%.)

This story typically inspires a great deal of sympathy due to my age at the time of the attack. If this had been an acquaintance rape and I had been a lot older, whether or not it would have inspired the same outrage is debatable. In our society we have delegated the crime of rape to a more conditional status, that says we have to know who the accuser is, what she's done in her own life, and how she herself may have contributed to the attack.

Commentator Ben Stein recently proved this in living color when he wrote a piece for "American Spectator" that wanted to put the brakes on publicly crucifying accused rapist Dominique Strauss-Kahn for any wrongdoing. He titled it, "Presumed Innocent, Anyone?"

The problem with his approach is that by presuming the accused innocent, he had to cast doubt on the accuser. Stein demonstrated an elitist, small-minded mentality that suggested only a certain type of person commits crimes and suggested that because he had some crazy chambermaids in his day that we couldn't *really* take this blue collar worker at her word.

His exact words, "How do we know that this woman's word was good enough to put Mr. Strauss-Kahn straight into a horrific jail?"

Unfortunately this misogynist way of thinking doesn't just limit itself to the blinding ignorance of Ben Stein. Recently while doing research for a couple of articles on rape I ran across websites, run by men, who doubted the authenticity of ANY rape charges.

The argument was, as was Stein's in his article, because these crimes go unreported there is some agenda to when they ultimately do have charges filed with the authorities.

Here are the statistics for you.

According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network one in six women will be the target of rape (whether successful or attempted) in her lifetime. Men are targets as well, with a 1 in 33 chance of being the victim of sexual assault. Despite these alarming statistics, more than 60% of rapes go unreported - with men being the least likely to report an attack. Of those brave survivors that do, only about 50% secure an arrest. About 80% of these are prosecuted, but only about half of those get a conviction. Factoring all this together means that 15 of 16 of these criminals walk free.

So why is it so hard to first report a rape or sexual assault, and then prosecute it?

These are two sides of the same coin.

When you are raped, whether by force or coercion, it is a violent, invasive action. It takes that one sacred thing you should never lose control over, your body, and strips you of your humanity. It makes you feel like nothing more than a thing at the mercy of someone else.

This is why survivors are far more likely to treat their own bodies with disrespect after the attack. They are 26 times more likely to abuse drugs, 13 more times more likely to abuse alcohol and 4 times more likely to commit suicide.

And, speaking from experience, likely to indulge in highly sexualized behavior and an eating disorder from an early age. This impacts your entire life in ways you cannot even imagine. Here we are more than 30 years later and I still fight off the residual effects.

I may have only been four, but I felt immediate and long-lasting shame for the attack. I knew that going off with a stranger had been wrong, so I felt it had to have been my fault in some way. When I was returned to my mother and she asked me if anything inappropriate had happened, in a voice that let even a four year old know how very bad that could be, I lied.

Through this personal experience and the stories from the other survivors I've met who kept their stories secret, I assert that it's far more common for survivors to lie that it DIDN'T happen, as opposed to lying that it did.

Of anything you should have control over it is your own body, so if anyone does anything so heinous to it the victim always wonders if there was anything he or she could have done to prevent the attack. Maybe if we fought harder... maybe if we had just taken another street home... maybe if we had just been more clear sex was not what we wanted to that guy we dated in college.

The what ifs and maybes are endless.

This shame festers with an internal blame game that makes reporting a crime and dealing with the humiliation of sharing our greatest weakness or failure to another person, risk being considered bad, used or dirty.

It is compounded, mercilessly and purposely, by a male-driven society that will bend over itself to make excuses for the attacker by laying any guilt it can on the victim. The biggest defense for a rape case is that maybe sex did occur, but was it really *rape*?

It's a he said/she said scenario that makes a criminal out of the victim.

"What were you wearing?"

"Were you drinking?"

"Were you a virgin?"

Or, in the case of Mr. Stein, "The prosecutors say that Mr. Strauss-Kahn "forced" the complainant to have oral and other sex with him. How? Did he have a gun? Did he have a knife? He's a short fat old man. They were in a hotel with people passing by the room constantly, if it's anything like the many hotels I am in. How did he intimidate her in that situation? And if he was so intimidating, why did she immediately feel un-intimidated enough to alert the authorities as to her story?"

This mindset is unthinkable to me, but I have the misfortune of being someone who has actually been the victim of rape. I am one of the 84% of survivors who know exactly how one can be coerced without a weapon, forced and intimidated.

And in my case ultimately shamed into keeping my silence.

I didn't stop being intimidated the day I stood before my ninth grade class and admitted to all my peers that I was a survivor of rape.

I just got my voice back.

After nearly committing suicide myself at the age of 13 before I finally told my nearest and most trusted friend what had happened those nine years before, I began a long journey to understand that what happened was not my fault. No matter what I did, he had no right to take my no away from me.

Going public, though scary, though painful, though embarrassing - was how I turned something dark and ugly into something good and positive.

I applaud ANY rape survivor who does the same. She (or he) doesn't have to prove to me they are qualified to make the claim.

Presumed innocent?

Yes. The victim most certainly is.