A year ago today I changed.
A year ago today I went to my first college party. A year ago today I became part of the one in four college students who are victims of sexual assault. A year ago today I was part of the 64% of victims who didn't report. I still haven't reported it. This is probably the closest I'll ever come to doing so.
My story isn't an isolated incident, nor is it an uncommon one. Less than half of all sexual assaults within the United States are reported. Of those, the less severe it is, the less likely it is to be taken to authorities.
A report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics showed that from 1992-2000, only 36% of all rapes, 34% of all attempted rapes, and 26% of sexual assaults were ever reported to police. And that number doesn't seem to have changed too much in the last twenty years.
Naturally, people wonder why the women who were the victims of these attacks don't report them when they occur. But, to be quite honest, if you've never been the victim of sexual assault, you will never truly understand.
Sexual assault is personal.
The most intimate thing about you is forcibly violated, and there is no way for you to stop it. It doesn't just violate you physically. It's an attack on the way you view people, your comfort in social places, your trust of those around you; it affects everything.
But the hardest part has to be the shame and the self-blame that can come with it. It's consuming. It's a personal sense of guilt that shouldn't be there, yet is nearly impossible to shake. It forces you to accept responsibility for something that was never your fault, to shelter trauma you didn't cause.
And it can be debilitating because you're trying futilely to control feelings from a situation you didn't have control in. And it kills you inside.
What's worse, we live in a culture where blame is placed on the victim rather than the attacker.
If a woman is dressed a certain way, she somehow "set herself up" to be assaulted. As if by choosing an outfit, she also chose rape. Or by choosing to drink or attend a party, she in some made some unspoken agreement by which she was to be violated. As if it were her fault for being assaulted and not her attacker's fault for assaulting her.
As if somehow this logic is at all logical.
Being fully aware that this way of thinking is common in our society, of course reporting the incident becomes a questionable decision.
A year ago tonight, I was at a party. I wasn't drunk. I made conversation with friends and a new guy, none of whom were drunk either. I continued talking to this guy after my friends had stepped away. And somehow, in all our sobriety, a rape still took place. I kept it to myself.
I went back downstairs and took a few shots. I cried in the bathroom at the Denny's where we stopped and I couldn't hold down my food.
I cried myself to sleep. I went over it in my head and tried to assess where maybe I could have changed the situation. But all I did was talk to him. I told him no. I was too freaked and terrified out to yell. I got overpowered. I kept quiet.
But there was an embarrassment to it, there was shame, and fear, and helplessness. So I kept it to myself. Because who's going to believe some girl at a college party?
People wonder why most women don't report, and the answer is that we don't feel safe enough to. Because we live in a society where if we so much as touched a bottle of alcohol, if we chose the wrong shirt, or said the right wrong thing, being assaulted is a product of our own doing.
We live in a society where a college kid can rape an unconscious woman behind a dumpster, and serve 3 months jail time because they don't want his time to "have a severe impact on his life." Because somehow it's overlooked that rape will undoubtedly affect every aspect of that woman's life for the rest of her life. Because she did report and nothing was done.
And that in itself is enough to make a woman question whether or not it's worth having to retell her trauma and go over it again and again with police and detectives and face the possibility that he could be found guilty and get to go home anyway.
More than half of all women who experience sexual assault do not report it. And that's a big reason why.
https://introvertedenergies.wordpress.com/2016/10/16/why-women-dont-report
