I agree with the sentiments of the last few posters, but since we’re not on a jury, I think it’s better to wish Zabali the best in dealing with her obvious pain and take her at her (expanded) word.
The only point I would make to her is: as you originally presented it, astro wasn’t wrong in his assertions, and you should try to recognize that instead of demanding apologies from him. The fault for that fallout lies with you, not him.
My first sexual encounter was with my girlfriend when I was sixteen, her fourteen. When things started to get hot and heavy, at some point I looked into her face (I was mostly far too fumblingly shy to make eye-contact), and saw she was wide-eyed and silently terrified.
I immediately stopped and apologized, terrified myself at what I’d done. (nothing beyond heavy petting, but still terrified). When I stopped and apologized over and over, she burst into tears.
And she told me about being at camp two years earlier, when she was twelve. She’d befriended a camp counselor, who’d gone on a walk in the woods with her, and then pushed her up against a tree and started trying to undress her. But she kicked him in the balls and ran off.
And that had been her only sexual experience, and now she was getting horrible flashbacks. I apologized, told her I’d never hurt her, and backed the hell off.
Fast forward a year and a half, when we were in the process of breaking up. Our last real conversation was on the phone. I forget what we were talking about, but then there was a long silence, and then she said, "Daniel…I have something to tell you. Remember what I told you about the camp counselor?
“I didn’t get away.” And she sobbed uncontrollably while I helplessly, uselessly, numbly tried to comfort her.
Fast forward five years: the breakup had been very traumatic, just like too much of the relationship had been, but we finally began emailing each other again, based in part on a short story I’d written that incorporated the story I just told you. In our emails, she told me that she still wasn’t sure what happened at camp.
And she told me another story, about a time she and some friends were playing in the street when she was younger, and a guy drove up and asked them for directions, and when they came over to the car they saw he was masturbating. They didn’t know exactly what was going on, but it was creepy, so they told their parents.
The cops came and interviewed her and asked her, among other question, what color the guys’ shoes were. Thinking that she’d better give them some answer, she said “Brown.” The cops, knowing that she couldn’t have seen the guy’s shoes, concluded that she was lying, and she was punished severely for lying to the police.
The thing was, she told me, she was so confused by all this that her childish mind at the time figured that she must have been lying to the cops. After all, her parents told her she was lying, and the cops told her she was lying, and didn’t they know?
And the same thing with the camp counselor story. Her best guess was that, at the age of twelve, she couldn’t deal with the fact that she’d been raped, so she told herself that she’d kicked the counselor in the balls and run off, because that was a much more pleasant story. But slowly she’d stopped telling herself that story, culminating in that night on the phone with me.
This is a long way of saying that I don’t think Zabali’s alterations to her story are necessarily fabrications. As near as I can tell, sexual assault at such a young age is a reality-shattering event, and it’s difficult to tell exactly what happened.
My heart goes out to you, Zabali, for your horrifying experience.
Daniel
Oh, the hell it is. I’m still not insulted by Zabli’s choice of words, no matter how many times you lot keep insisting I am. Do try to come up with a better argument, thanks ever so.
AHunter, excellent post.
Daniel, that’s sort of what I was thinking. Lamia, ditto. Excellent posts, all.
I went through something similar to what Lamia went through, and it was scary in a similar way. And I didn’t remember it for years afterwards. One day I just remembered it, after blocking it out of my memory for so long. It almost seemed like a dream, but it wasn’t.
It was weird—on the surface maybe it didn’t appear that scary, but it was very upsetting on the inside, and I felt such fear and hatred towards the person who had done it to me. And, I remember at the time it never occurred to me to tell anyone, because what would they do? I seriously thought that I would be blamed somehow, or that I would not be believed.
When you’re a kid and you experience something so foreign to you and so scary, sometimes your brain freezes up and you can’t articulate it very well, even years later. And you don’t respond in the “expected” way. So it just adds insult to injury to be told (by people who weren’t there with you at the time) that somehow you should have done this and “Why didn’t you do that?” as if you had the wherewithall to behave like a calm adult, instead of a shocked, numb, terrified child.
If this whole tale has been a line of bullshit (which I doubt it has), that’s okay. I’d rather be duped by some stranger on an Internet message board than to second-guess the story of a real person going through real pain. I know how it aggravated the pain for me to be told that I should have done this, or I could have done that, by adults who apparently had never been in my shoes. I’m not doing that to someone else. At least not this time.
[QUOTE=yosemitebabeIf this whole tale has been a line of bullshit (which I doubt it has), that’s okay. [/QUOTE]
JFTR, I don’t think this whole tale has been a line of bullshit, but it sure appears that the story has changed and been embellished a bit in an attempt to create support for arguments following her OP.
JMHO and I may be wrong, but it certainly appears to be that way to me.
I submit that if a person’s actions are such that there is a strong indication that they are going to do you some major physical harm, then, yes, “My boyfriend” becomes “person I must flee”. Even after he had pawed her against her wishes, she made no attempt to leave the scene, even though she had the opportunity. And she didn’t even need to walk away. Everything in her account indicates that she could have simply walked out of the yard.
What is at issue here is really not what was going on in anyone’s head, mine, yours or Zabali’s. What is at issue is what happened in the real, physical world that everyone shares and interacts in. The fact of the matter is that she had more than one opportunity to remove herself from a situation that was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. She was not being physically forced to stay there. Nor was she physically forced, or threatened with the use of physical force (“if you don’t give me what I want, I’ll just take it anyway so you might as well give it up” does count as the threat of force, but the boy apparently never said that) into having sex.
I’ve constructe a mental flow chart on this issue, as I’ve thought more about it. So, here it is.
Question- Did the boy use physical force to hold her down and sexually penetrate her? If yes, clearly it was rape. If no, proceed to
Next question- Did the boy threaten her with violence (including stating he would forcibly have sex with her, see above) in order to obtain her “consent”? If yes, it was rape, if no…
Had the boy plied her with alcohol or drugs in order to get her intoxicated to the point where she would have been unable to rationally decide whether she wanted to have sex or not? If yes, it was rape. If no, then no rape occurred.
It is clear that Zabali was abused, violated, taken advantage of in a vulnerable emotional state. But we all have been, to a greater or lesser degree, sexually, emotionally, financially or otherwise. I agree with the statement that to call what happened to her “rape” is an insult to people who have been forcibly raped.
One last thing before I bow out of this thread. There is more to human communication than the simple use of words. There is tone of voice, body language, behavior. I’m sure nearly everyone on this board has, at some time or another have said “I don’t want to…” as their last words before doing something that they didn’t want to do. It could be anything from calling their parents to borrow money to “pay bills” when the money is actually going to be spent on drugs (I’ve done this to stop an abusive boyfriend from badgering me about it) to doing something you feel is unethical or immoral businesswise in order to keep a job, to passively capitulating to sex. All of these situations leave a person feeling violated to a greater or lesser extent. Capitulating to unwanted sex is more of a violation than agreeing to borrow money from the 'rents to buy weed, obviously.
The statement “I’m not ready to have sex” carries a strong implication that at some point in the future you will be ready. If a person is persistant, makes with the flattery, shows of affection, or uses guilt, maybe the desired partner will decide that they’re ready a half hour from now instead of a year from now. And really, sixteen year old boys have probably the same level of emotional maturity as thirteen year old girls. In the same vein, “I don’t want to” can mean, at one of the scale, “I don’t want to and I absolutely refuse to do this” to, “I don’t want to but I will if it will shut you up.” The fact that Zabali did not physically attempt to remove herself from a bad situation, and apparently passively lay on the ground and allowed the boy to undress her and have his way with her indicates the latter was the case.
I will continue to follow this thread, but I will not post to it any more. It is showing signs of becoming a “yes it is rape/no it isn’t” tennis match, and that is something I don’t want to participate in, especially with such an emotionally charged issue as this.
Here’s a question for all the repressed memory folks: how do you yourselves know that your recovered memories are now accurate? There have been studies done that have shown people’s memories to be very faulty, and studies have shown that people under hypnosis can vividly recall childhood memories that in fact never happened.
It would seem to me that memories that have been suppressed are significantly less reliable than other memories, because they have not been reinforced by thinking or talking about it during the interim. Furthermore, the memory of a traumatic event has to be heavily influenced by emotional factors.
And this is before you even get to the spin being put forth by counselor and psychiatrists with preconceived notions to promote.
Nope. Still not insulted, no matter how often you yammering jackasses bray this nonsense.
Well, Zabali_Clawbone was thirteen. Therefore, she could not give consent. Therefore, it was rape. QED.
If she were eighteen instead? I am not so sure.
In particular, I noticed this:
I don’t really think they did.
If he were going to rape you by force if you didn’t consent, why did he waste two hours trying to convince you? For two hours, you kept saying “No” - and he did not force you. It wasn’t until you consented (however reluctantly) that he proceeded.
This is not to say that he wasn’t acting like an asshole, or that you are not fully justified in feeling violated. If he were going to use force, he would have done so in ten minutes, not two hours.
As I say, he is morally and legally guilty of statutory rape. What he did was morally wrong as well. But if I were sitting on a jury deciding on his guilt, and you were eighteen…
Regards,
Shodan
In my case, I don’t think I’d call it a “repressed memory,” exactly. It was a very upsetting experience, but I wouldn’t even quite put it on the same level of trauma as what Lamia experienced (it was bad, but her description of her experiences sound more traumatic. But then again, how do you quantify these things?). Anyway, have you ever just put something so far back in your mind that you just don’t think about it for a really long time? Well, that’s sort of what I did. Until one day, years later, it was okay to think about again. And it was almost like, “Oh my gosh, I haven’t thought about that in ages!” It was weird, to have forced myself to not think about something for so long, but there’s no doubt that it was real.
Besides, in my case, I was with someone else who could verify what happened. (If I was so determined to prove that it happened—which I’m not, because I’m satisfied that it did.)
Um, Wtf?! Since when is statutory rape not really rape? Zabali’s situation is EXACTLY why having sex with 13 year olds is illegal. If she were mentally incompetant and this guy took advantage of her, would you consider that rape? I’m sorry but at 13 years of age, you do not have the emotional capacity to make a good decision in a situation like this, nor the intellectual capacity to see that the situation is unfair and that you should completely leave. This is why 13 year olds are off limits. For the same reason that 12, 11, 10, 9 and 8 year olds are. They haven’t developed the ability to balance what they want with what others expect of them.
I will say that being “carried off and undressed” is certainly assault, if she asked not to be. Historically, we let kids get away with all sorts of assault (school bus fights, fanny-grabbing, etc), because “kids will be kids”… but that doesn’t make it right, does it?
I’m 25 years old. If someone picked me up and attempted to undress me (they would have to be VERY strong, ahem) against my will, I would press assault charges against them in a split heartbeat.
The fact is, at 13 you don’t have the capacity to recognize when the line has been crossed, and this is why it’s illegal and this is why it IS rape. Statutory rape IS a form of rape, it’s not a funny little word attached to rape that means “Not really”.
Diane, if you think that this story is BS then you should leave the thread. We have been given all of the information and although it has come haphazardly there seems no reason to refute it. Don’t go ahead and attack a girl’s credibility because you may think otherwise. This is not an attack. Just for future reference.
“I’m not ready to have sex” is not the same as “I’m not ready to have cake”. I may be hungry in an hour or so but my virginity should be staying for a while. A 16 year old boy does not have the emotional maturity of a 13 year old girl. I was 16 once and I knew that NO meant NO. If he had the emotional maturity similar to Zabani’s he would not have wanted a fuck for a birthday present. (I don’t want to use the word sex. Sex is beautiful, this was not.)
Here it is, ladies and gentlemen. This 16 year old, an older and more experienced (in general, if not sexually) person used his relationship to get what he wanted. Zabani had no reason to not believe his actions would be honourable and even though she was apprehensive to say the least at his actions (carrying her into dark corners etc.) her only fault was to trust a person, who she thought she could trust, to do what was right. That is emotional blackmail, that is rape.
It is only a shame she had to lose her trust of people through a waste of oxygen like him. Left Hand of Dorkness, by your account
[quote=Left Hand of Dorkness]
My first sexual encounter was with my girlfriend when I was sixteen, her fourteen. When things started to get hot and heavy, at some point I looked into her face (I was mostly far too fumblingly shy to make eye-contact), and saw she was wide-eyed and silently terrified.
I immediately stopped and apologized, terrified myself at what I’d done. (nothing beyond heavy petting, but still terrified). When I stopped and apologized over and over, she burst into tears.
[quote]
if it had gone any further it would have been rape, do you agree? Even though the girl never resisted, it wasn’t consent by the fear in her eyes. Daniel did the decent thing and stopped. He stopped like any prick with a brain cell would have stopped but the b/f didn’t. He didn’t because he was intent on fulfilled his needs. Zabali did not resist, like Daniel’s girl, but she didn’t consent either. In both cases the end result would have been rape, it just a shame it was the case with Zabali. BTW my deepest, heart-felt sorrow to your ex, Daniel.
So should Daniel have been charged if he had gone through with it. Of course not. Everyone is so hyped up at the moment about proving whether or not it was rape by legal definition. Rape isn’t just legal. Legality is a good thing, though. It puts monsters away and protects the “just plain jerks” with lighter, reasonable sentences. But we cannot ignore the fact that it is a social term nowadays. On a social scale Zabali was raped. It doesn’t lessen the tragedy of more violent cases, nor does the terms broadening become perverted by the “cry wolf” girls. It is a case by case definition, which unlike legal rape, looks within respect of the individual. This is not a case that will hold up in court but it was still rape.
[bill hicks voice]Ya got that? Good. [bhv]
Also to calm kiwi call it whatever you want, you were still raped. So you got yourself in a bad situation, who here hasn’t some time in their lives. That doesn’t give those fuckers the right to do what they did and for you to lessen their burden by calling it something else. They placed you in a situation where you believed you had no alternative but co-operate and fulfill their perverted needs. Whether you consented or not, your consent meant zero because you were in a situation where you had no free will. In any case, I hope your life is a bazillion times better now.
I will admit, there is a tiny inkling in my brain that Zabali may be embellishing her story…but i think the reason I and a lot of other rape survivors in this thread aren’t jumping on the ‘she’s lying’ bandwagon is because I know, in my experience that no one, not even my MOTHER believed I was raped, and the feeling of telling someone what’s troubling you and not having them believe is HEARTWRENCHING.
So while I do run the risk of being taken for a fool (and I hate that more than anything), I’d rather believe Zabali was raped and wish her good health, good wishes and recovery than spend any energy trying to root out every untruth.
I don’t agree with the above at all.
The reason to look to legal definitions is that they provide a crispness of clarity that is lacking in your approach. You assert it’s “social rape,” I say it’s not – who is right? The advantage of the law is that there is a process by which the crime is defined, and the definition is tested by highly motivated actors on both sides of the fence.
So pick another word. “Rape,” has a very specific meaning in a given jursidiction, and to suggest that it’s up for grabs as a catch-all word to fit what suits you is not remotely useful.
Huh. I just tried imagining it having gone further, and it just about made me physically ill. That night was one of my formative experiences, and while I was bumbling and awful more than once in that relationship, I can’t imagine having continued in such circumstances. Would a court have called it rape? Probably not. Would I have been a rapist? Yes.
Thanks, on her behalf. Incidentally, last I heard, she’s doing a lot better, and is damn near living the life of Riley :). Neither of us made it to the other one’s wedding, but both invitations were turned down only with a lot of regret.
I do think that a different definition of rape is important, on an ethical level at least, and here’s what I’d suggest: if person A has sex with person B, and a reasonable person in A’s shoes would think that B wants not to have sex, then that’s nonconsensual sex. And there’s a much shorter word that means “nonconsensual sex.”
In this case, Zabali said, “I don’t want to do this.” A reasonable person would take these words at face value. The boyfriend knew that she didn’t want to have sex, and had sex with her anyway. That’s not consensual.
As Shodan suggested, if she were eighteen, things would be slightly different: a mentally competent adult who doesn’t want to have sex, and who isn’t facing threats of violence etc., removes herself from the situation. In that case, the actions and the words would contradict each other, to the extent that a reasonable person wouldn’t know quite what to think. Having sex then would be bizarre and assholish and abusive and selfish and awful, but I don’t know that it would be rape.
If a mentally competent adult said, “I don’t want to have sex, but fine, whatever, you’re gonna do it anyway, go ahead,” then absent threats of violence etc., I’d say it wasn’t rape (although it’d still be awful and disgusting behavior, IMO).
But Zabali wasn’t eighteen: she was thirteen, and she communicated her lack of consent as best she could, and she certainly communicated it in an unambiguous way (“I don’t want to do this.”) The boyfriend, in proceeding anyway, committed rape.
Who, specifically, are you talking about here? I’ve read a lot about repressed memory recovery, and generally it sounds like a crock of shit; but nobody here has described anything that sounds to me like repressed memory recovery therapy (which is where the shit comes in). Hell, I myself was mildly sexually assaulted when I was a kid, by some creepy pervert at the local video arcade. I completely forgot about it for about five years after it happened, but when I remembered it, I remembered it in a flash and was astonished that I hadn’t thought of it in so long. That’s far different from being hypnotized by a therapist and being led into memories of satanic abuse and such.
Daniel
That’s the way I feel too.
So what if I’m made a fool? This is just some stranger on the Internet. I’d rather be made a fool by some stranger on the Internet, than second-guess her and (possibly) cause her very grave, very undeserved pain.
That’s the beauty of it, Bricker. You have the ability to make you own opinion on a specific case. The problem with defining a crime like rape legally is that it has to be rigid. If there is flexibility within a law, it becomes chaotic and unmanagable. I did say that the laws were a good thing because of their uncompromising nature. The only problem is life doesn’t always fit into that rigid structure and sometimes the law fails to recognise those on the fringes. While some may not agree that it is rape on a social standard, having making the judgement of “social rape” makes what happened to Zabali definable. There should be a new word to describe what has happened to her and everyone else who has shared their story in this thread, but you know that it would never have the effect it deserved, unless it was called “rape”.
Nope. Not even close. I absoutely disagree with you on this point. Being telepathic is not a prerequisite to having sex. Yeah, in LHoD’s case, the young lady was obviously terrified, (and fully I agree he did the right thing), but I can see someone figuring “Hey, she’s nervous but wants to go ahead with it…she said yes, after all” and being able to justify it on that basis. And what if the woman is somewhat less nervous? Or better at hiding it? Or what if the guy did the right thing, asked, but simply wasn’t perceptive enough to pick up the clues. Hell, what if he’d had his eyes closed and didn’t notice that she was scared? Does closing your eyes while having sex suddenly make you guilty of rape? (Again, in LHoD’s case, the situation seems fairly obvious, and he was obviously perceptive, but it’s rarely going to be that cut-and-dried)
One obvious correllary to the “No means NO!” standard is that “it’s fair to assume that a non-coerced yes means YES.”
Sorry, but IMO, the standard you’re setting with this example necessitate the guy being able to use psychic powers and I don’t think that’s a fair standard.
Fenris
I’m not saying you have to be telepathic, Fenris. In LHoD’s situation he had realised the predicament and acted justly. If he had chosen to continue after he knew then it would have been rape, not by a legal definition because she had “consented” but definitely in a personal view. A man who is unaware his actions are wrong cannot and should not be held accountable for his actions, however immoral they may have been. Like you said, he would not have known. In Zabali’s case, the b/f knew she did not want to start nor, when it had begun, continue. He should be held accountable under my definition.
If I did it is probably still back there. 
But I do have things that I remember as having happened a long time ago that I suspect are not actually true. Just the other day I was telling my wife something that the kids in my family used to do, and she says my mother contradicted me in a significant detail. I’m inclined to think that my mother was right and that I remember it wrong, even though I can still see it my way in my mind.
I actually have memories of things happening that I am no longer sure if I actually saw them or merely heard about them from others. Maybe it’s just me. But I’m pretty sure there have been studies showing that people’s memories are often simply wrong, as above. (Unless I’m remembering that wrong too and there really aren’t any such studies. :D)
I didn’t mean the specific “repressed memory therapy” in which the entire incident is unrepressed in response to some abuse. And nobody is even suggesting that the OP here made the entire story out of the whole cloth.
Nonetheless it has been suggested by several posters that people might forget and later remember details of these types of traumatic experiences, and the OP indicated that something of this sort may have happened here, and that she first confronted the implications of her rape with the help of counselors at a battered women’s shelter. My suggestion was merely that in cases such as this one, in which so much seems to hinge on the specific details of exactly what happened, that there might be room to question whether a person truly remembers these recovered details precisely.