I don’t want to turn this into a debate, though I know that happens often with this particular topic. I was just interested in people’s personal experiences.
Have any of you who have been raped or assaulted experienced anyone blaming you in some way or implying that something you did led to what happened? (Or known someone who had a victim blaming attitude, or even been on the blaming end.)
When I told a close friend about a sexual assault she responded by asking me what I’d been wearing when it happened and that wearing a skirt/dress is probably what made it likelier to have happened. Yeah…that led to me being very eager to open up about that topic ever again. It was kind of eye opening for me. Though another friend who told me she was raped also said that she’s been met with attitudes like, it wasn’t a big deal or it wasn’t really rape.
I’ve never been raped. I can think of two close friends who have been. One never told anyone until five or more years after it happened. The other reported the rape the next day and was told by the police “oh, honey, we know you just had a fight with your boyfriend. You wait a week, and you’ll make up.”
Nope. But then again, maybe it’s different for boys. I mean, it’d sound silly to suggest a sub-10 yr old boy out with his friends was dressed all sexy-like.
A friend of mine was raped about a year ago. She was asleep in her bed and woke to a knife at her throat. She had a broken arm at the time. We were discussing it the other night and another friend (we’re all girls) said:
No one’s going to rape me, I’d fight them off.
The comfort I gain from hearing this view is that our fighting friend certainly has not had any rape experience - that’s got to be good. You wouldn’t put my friend in the ring with this guy and expect her to win - fully awake, expecting the attack, no knives involved and no broken arm, so why the implication that she didn’t do enough to get rid of him?
I not only had that experience, but I was disciplined by my church for not fighting to the death and for “giving up my virtue.” I was sanctioned by that church and was not allowed to participate in all of the usual rituals. I was 15 and the rapist was my 30 year-old stepbrother. I sat in church for the next few years listening to speeches and lessons about how I was a filthy worthless whore who had it coming and not only would no righteous man ever want me, but also, I deserved whatever hellish suffering I got instead.
Yes, that was my church.
My stepmother, naturally (It was her son.) also placed the blame squarely on my head and when the bishop of our church recommended family counseling, she told the psychologist that we were there to “find out why Dogzilla is so drawn to older men – why does she throw herself at them?” My dad was sort of supportive of me, but didn’t really defend me much either.
Nobody, not my parents, nor any of the church leaders, ever said to me “It wasn’t your fault.” It’s taken me 20 years to decide that, indeed, it was not my fault.
I wanted to point out that it wasn’t the sexual violation that messed me up. It was being told that I was filthy, disgusting and worthless because I was no longer a virgin… The self-loathing is still with me, fucking with my head on a daily basis. I know in my intelligent brain that all this is crap, but I have a lot of troubles with relationships because I cannot convince my lizard brain that I deserve to be treated with respect, love, and honor.
Victim blamers, IMHO, have never experienced such a thing and should shut their damn mouths.
A friend of mine was assaulted on a college campus by a guy she sort of knew, and I heard a lot of victim blaming from both men and women. Suddenly she was a fool for walking through a well-lit, well-populated campus at 10 o’clock at night with a fellow student she had met several times before. Or she was exaggerating (I think only one person hinted she might be flat-out lying, but he was a well-known shit disturber).
I was kind of surprised to hear it from both women and men, though I realized later that it all came from the same place – the refusal to change your perception of the world you’ve built for yourself, or to sympathize so much with a victim you become one yourself. The women didn’t want to believe they’d ever be ‘stupid’ enough to get into that sort of situation (and therefore had nothing to worry about), the guys couldn’t believe my (‘experienced’) friend could be traumatized by what happened and was probably just misinterpreting things, and both groups couldn’t believe someone they knew would do that.
It made me sick, and it took a few months but some people ended up seeing the light (including one guy who, I later found out, had been molested as a kid), but then a few ended up severing ties altogether by becoming better friends with the guy. She never pressed charges. Last I heard he works at a skeevy club. From what I can tell the situation was pretty standard, especially for college friends.
The alternative to blaming the victim is to admit that there’s nothing you can do to guarantee this horrible thing (be it rape, cancer, whatever) won’t happen to you. That’s a scary thought, and it’s not surprising that a lot of people would rather think they have some control over whether awful things happen to them (even if they really don’t, it’s more comforting to think that they do).
Yeah, I think people do all kinds of mental gymnastics to show why it just couldn’t happen to them because they’re too smart or savvy or know better.
And it’s especially scary to think someone you know and like could do that. I’m really glad no one I know has tried to do anything like that to me–it must be such an awful experience to have someone you care about and trust try to hurt you like that.
In response to the “it’s different for boys” comment upthread, in some ways maybe, but not always, I don’t think. I was reading IMDb boards for the movie Mysterious Skin and there’s a scene where one of the protagonists (who’s a gay hustler) goes home with a guy who picks him up and drives him to his apartment. The guy starts getting rough and the main guy is having second thoughts and ends up getting raped while being beaten with a shampoo bottle. A lot of people on the boards thought this scene wasn’t rape or that it was the guy’s fault for going home with this insane person–basically all the same reactions you see when people don’t want to admit that a girl who goes home with a guy she doesn’t know well can be raped by him.
I was accosted in college (about 1993) and managed to startle/scare them off by yelling extremely loudly. The first thing people asked me when I related what happened was, “What were you wearing.” Second was, “What were you doing walking outside at night alone.” I was walking from my apartment to another dorm to get a ride to get my keys because i got locked out. It a distance of less than a block in the middle of a busy campus.
I was raped in third grade. I was stripped of my clothes by a crowd, held down by several kids as I was raped in front of a large mob during recess. People have asked me what I did that made them think of raping me.
If I was a betting man, I think I could probably deduce what church you were refering to in your post…
Growing up here in Salt Lake, I have heard a couple very similar stories, with the same attitudes by the church elders; no one should ever be treated that way, and its reprehensible that those same beliefs and attitudes still hold sway in a “Christian” church today.
I dont know what else to say, except for I hope you can move on somehow, at some point, and not allow this awful violation (both what happened to you and how you were treated afterwards) to control the rest of your life—dont let them have that power, you certainly deserve so much better.
I didn’t get a whole lot of that kind of reaction but mostly because I was not at all inclined to talk about it for a long time. I had internal voices telling me that crap, I didn’t need to hear it from actual people as well. Make of that what you will…
I was 19, my roommate had blown all the transportation money I was supposed to use for a plane ticket on some stupid foolishness and the new plan was that if I paid half the gas he would drive me halfway from New Mexico to Georgia (get me as far as Lake of the Pines in Louisiana) and then he and his buddy there would pool resources enough to get me on the bus for the rest of the way. That didn’t happen: they were kind enough to drive me to an on-ramp of the eastbound highway and that’s it. I hitched from Louisiana to the Tennessee/Georgia border w/o incident and there got picked up by a couple guys in a Peterbilt or Kenworth rig, and for the remaining drive from there to Atlanta they kept “accidentally” bumping into my crotch area while reaching to tamp cigarette ashes into the ashtray or etc. Creepy. They had loaded my luggage into their luggage area (below truck body, sort of) when they picked me up. Stopped in Atlanta claiming they’d take me the rest of the way into college town Athens GA as soon as the truck got weighed and serviced. Hours went by. I noticed their truck wasn’t even on the line. I found someone else who said he’d give me a ride, and then asked them for my luggage back. Handed me one of the two items from the luggage then denied that I’d had more; when I restated that I’d had two pieces, invited me to search the cab. I stepped up from the passenger’s side and was about to step on in and search the sleeper compartment behind when I saw something move and realized the guy’s partner was behind the curtain in the sleeper compartment, while he himself of course was behind me on the steps. Backed the hell out of there, pushing past him.
“So, what, you don’t want to look around? Hey, you accused me of stealing your stuff. I don’t want you going off and saying I stole stuff from you, you better look around” I was scared and angry and I laid it out, accusing him & partner of groping me in the truck on the way here and hell no I wasn’t going up there, etc.; and got a lot of disgusted contemptuous epithets about fag hitchhikers and “this is why I shouldn’t ought to ever try to do someone a favor”
Yeah, of course I figured there was something about ME that made this happen. That it would not have happened to someone else. And yeah maybe what I was wearing. I tended towards plaid or print button-down cotton short sleeve shirts back then. Effete sissy boy clothes maybe. I drifted towards the plainest of ordinary solid colored t shirts in the years to follow.
You would win that bet, based on your location. I am intentionally not mentioning the name of this church because I am not posting all this to make a point about that church or disparage it specifically. I have another forum for that (heh), where it’s much more likely that I wouldn’t offend any currently devout members who don’t want to hear/read negative things about their own. For all I know, you could be one of them and I certainly don’t want to paint all members of this church with the same wide brush.
But. I do want to say that I believe that – and this is not exclusive to this one church of which I was a member – the more patriarchal + fundamentalist religions tend to encourage an atmosphere of blame-the-victim mentality. My church taught that the natural man (or woman) is an enemy to god and that you should spend your entire life trying to quell your natural instincts. Sex is taught as something that is bad, and dirty, and dangerous, and you should save it for your wife. It’s the one sin that is secondary only to murder as the “worst” sin you could commit.
When someone gets caught doing something that comes naturally to them, and it’s a crime that is perpetrated by one of the fine, upstanding male members, that strikes fear in the hearts of all the other devout members who think their own natural proclivity to masturbate (for example) is an example of deviant, unholy, evil behavior. They hear about a guy who they thought was just as righteous and wonderful as they think themselves to be and they realize… it’s those open-toed shoes. Or the spaghetti-strap tank tops. It must be the victim’s fault because this perpetrator is a man of god. And so am I. And if it was so easy for him to be tempted to commit this crime, then how difficult would it be for me to resist committing the same crime?
As a consequence of this type of black and white thinking, I think all too often people react with denial, preferring to blame the victim rather than confront whatever it is within themselves that they’ve been taught to fear so much. That and people have some really funny ideas about what “supportive” means.
Not asking if anyone agrees, but… did that make sense to anyone?
And P.S. to MPB in Salt Lake, thank you. I’ve been working on these things and I’ve moved on in every way except for still having trouble expecting to be treated with respect in intimate relationships – I don’t hate men; I just don’t generally feel safe with them in intimate relationships. I’m good to go in all other areas of my life and moved past “victim,” past “survivor,” and on to “thriver” by trying to help other women from the same church who have had similar experiences. Sadly, this is more common than I care to think about.
A few years ago, my best friend suffered a home invasion in which she was beaten, raped, and kidnapped; she escaped by jumping out of a moving car and spent days in the hospital. The assailant was known to her and her family. Both her parents wanted to hush the matter up and were ambivalent about her pressing charges (not that she had a choice) because they didn’t want people to know such a thing had happened in their family, as to their minds such a thing had to have been provoked by her and said more about her character than her assailant’s.
I seem to recall a Catholic bishop who claimed last year that some victims of child molestation by priests had deliberately tempted the priests into sin.
My wife was a victim, many years ago, before we met. She admits that she made some bad choices to be in the place she was and be with the person who raped her, but she does not blame herself. As she likes to remind me, we all make bad mistakes, and if stupidity was against the law everyone would serve time.
Whenever my grandfather assaults someone, my grandmother
gets angry at him
denies it happened
claims it wasn’t so serious
decides it’s the victim’s fault.
That includes myself, my brothers, both of my cousins, my mother and my aunt among the victims. My mother only gets to phase 3, be it for my grandfather or any other case she happens to know personally; she doesn’t do it for unknown folk.
I am intentionally not mentioning the name of this church because I am not posting all this to make a point about that church or disparage it specifically. I have another forum for that (heh), where it’s much more likely that I wouldn’t offend any currently devout members who don’t want to hear/read negative things about their own. For all I know, you could be one of them and I certainly don’t want to paint all members of this church with the same wide brush.