Nearly 4 years ago, on a warm September night during my first semester of college, I was raped. That word - rape - was something I had a hard time saying for months, if not years. I tried to convince myself that it was something else - I had "made a drunken mistake" or I had been "taken advantage of" but I did NOT want to say the word rape. I felt that using the word took my power away from me, that it made me a victim. But what I didn't realize at the time was that it wasn't the word rape that made me feel powerless or that made me a victim, it was the rape itself. And it wasn't my fault.
But it felt like it was my fault. I was drunk when the incident occurred and, for that reason alone, I remember saying to myself over and over again, "You brought it on yourself. Nobody would believe you anyway. Just let it go and move on."
Moving on was hard to do when the rape changed the very way I viewed men and, more than anything, the way I viewed myself. The only way I can describe how I felt for the months following that night is empty. I remember going to class or going to parties, terrified that I was going to run into him. He was a guy I was becoming friends with during the first few weeks of school, a guy I had a trusted to walk me home when I was feeling sick at a party. It was the kind of scary, uneasy sickness that made me think at first that I had drank too much. But I had drank far more in the past than I did that night and had never felt the kind of confusion and dizziness I did as I stumbled around that party. I have speculated that I was drugged that night but, with no evidence to prove one way or the other, the night remains a mystery.
I remember asking him to walk with me. I remember fumbling and struggling to put on my shoes. I remember feeling safer thinking that a guy I trusted wouldn't let anything bad happen to me. I remember saying goodbye to my friends as they walked to another house. But halfway through the walk home, I don't remember anything. I don't remember the rape. In some ways, that's comforting. But in other ways, it's terrifying.
Not remembering the incident was the main reason I refused for so long to call it rape and the reason I never pressed charges. I come from a small, fairly conservative town. There are hundreds of open minded, educated, intelligent people in that town but for every one of them there is also a person with a narrow mind and a loud mouth. The ignorance that I grew up around led me to believe a very misguided assumption: "It is only rape if somebody says no." I couldn't have been rape if I wasn't screaming, kicking, fighting him off. It couldn't have been rape if I knew him and trusted him before that night. It couldn't have been rape if I had asked him to walk with me to my dorm. There were so many reasons that it couldn't have been rape. But it was. I felt it in the deepest part of my soul. It comes down to this very simple fact - how was I supposed to say no when I wasn't in a state of mind to say anything at all?
I remember a male acquaintance of mine, completely unaware of what had happened to me just months before, making a joke that women who get that drunk (referring to an obnoxious, flirty girl at a party) are "pretty much asking for it." To that person, and to others who think that way, I say this: the punishment for drinking too much should be a hangover not rape. Before running your mouth about things you know nothing about, before joking about sexual assault, before making light of a topic that is so painful for so many people, remember this story. Before you say that a you got "totally raped" by an exam, or countless other similar comments I've heard over the years, remember that 1 in 4 women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime. The way you felt after failing an exam will never compare to the violation and horror somebody feels after being raped. Find a more accurate metaphor.
To anybody who has experienced sexual assault, please know that there is never any circumstance under which it was your fault. Don't justify it. Don't push it aside to deal with it later. You need to let it out, whether that means talking to a counselor, a family member, or a friend. You're still beautiful, even though ugly things have happened to you. The assault does not define who you are or what you can be. You deserve happiness and you are worthy of more respect than you can imagine.
