This past March, a friend of mine was raped. The rapist was a student who she knew through a small extracurricular group at her college; she had been hooking up with him for the past few weeks. On this particular night, they were in bed, and he kept asking her if they could have sex. Each time, she said no. Then, she told me, after the third time she said no, “all of a sudden he was in me.”
My friend didn’t use the word “rape” when she told me what he had done. The closest she came to that was saying, “He had sex with me when I didn’t want him to.” I could tell by the tone of her voice—which was shallow, distant, and monotone—that she understood the gravity of what had happened, but that the memory of it was too sickening and, seven months later, still too recent for her to call it “rape”; she still couldn’t deal with that thought yet.
But it didn’t help that she felt forced to pretend that it never happened with their mutual group of friends. As horrible and wrong as his actions were, she knew that they would be just as easy for those friends to rationalize and minimalize. In colleges, minimalization is an all-too-common reaction to accusations of sexual assault, according to Jennifer Schweer, the Sexual Assault & Health Issues Coordinator for Georgetown’s Health Education Services.
“[W]e live in a culture that automatically asks many questions that immediately focus on the behavior of the victim (as opposed to the actions of the perpetrator),” she wrote in an e-mail. “’What was she drinking? How much? Did she go to his room? Was she walking alone?’”
As Schweer pointed out, this would have forced my friend to focus all her thoughts on defending herself, instead of coming to terms with what had happened.
The number of students who have probably had an experience with sexual assault at Georgetown is disturbingly high. Based on “surveys, reports, and services sought,” Schweer estimates that one in four students has been sexually assaulted to some degree, which is on par with the national average. Often times, they will have been assaulted by someone that they know. In my friend’s case, her assaulter was someone with whom she had previously been intimate . She worried that this would color how her friends saw his crime, and that it would seem less serious to them because they had already “done everything” short of having sex. “They would say something like, ‘well, at least he didn’t drag you into bed as you were kicking and screaming no.’” And, she said, he was “a nice guy,” someone their friends would not want to know, or worse, would not believe, had committed rape. Someone their friends would want to defend by mitigating what he had done.
Of course, none of those are legitimate reasons for dismissing the fact that he had penetrated her after he had been told three times, in no uncertain terms, that she did not want to have sex. But my friend was afraid enough of being doubted or put down that for the rest of the time she was involved with her theater group, she kept what had happened a secret. It was often excruciating, notably when those friends teased her about the times she had hooked up with him. At the beginning of this year, she gave up the group entirely, which effectively alienated her from friends she had had since her freshman year.
As for her assaulter, he has never acknowledged what he did. My friend is not sure if he doesn’t remember, having been drunk, if he made the conscious choice to pretend that it never happened, or if he doesn’t realize that he raped her. Either way, she has decided that she could not bring herself to confront him, or share with her friends what he did to her. My friend has no reason to feel any shame about what happened to her, but as long as she feels compelled to keep this a secret, she is bearing the brunt of the embarrassment and shame that should be his.
