I’m reading Alice Sebold’s autobiographical** Lucky**, about her rape as a college freshman. She recounts going to her family’s psychiatrist, who knew her and knew she was a virgin (important only in the context):
Why are you here to see me?
I was raped at school.
Well, that should make you less uptight about sex.
:eek: Alice got up and walked out, but I was boggled by this. I kind of expected what her father said; how did he rape you when he didn’t have the knife in his hand? because he is trying to understand how it happened…like, What were you wearing? misguided but not as fucked up as the psych doc.
but to hear that something like the above came from a professional??
IMHO, it depends on the age of the psychiatrist and the training s/he’s had.
When I went to therapy for the rape/sexual abuse I endured, I found a college’s student training psychology center very helpful. It was easy to find a female student therapist and they were trained to help sexual violence victims - a relatively new thing in therapy/pshchology. (Sorry, I’m at work, so no cites.)
In my experience, I have been disowned by my father and his family for “shaming” them. (My father’s brother-in-law raped me multiple times. They would rather have him “in the family” than me.) I have also encountered the “you were sexual abused so you must be a lesbian” attitude from some people. This is an insult to homosexuals and sexual violence survivors. Sorry, I am heterosexual. Yes, there are times when it feels like it would be easier to be gay, but I’m not that way. Personally, I take this as evidence of homosexuality being biological.
I just wished people would shut the hell up about it. I think I was more “damaged” by the reactions of “supportive” friends and family (and mental health professionals) than I was by the rapes themselves. I was told over and over again how victimized I was, how confused and angry and upset and warped and broken I must be. I started to believe them, and it became a self-fufilling prophecy. I turned crazy and acted out sexually, not because of the rapes, but because I was told that’s what I was expected to do.
Finally I realized what was going on, and I cut that drama out. I’m now on relatively good terms with the rapist (my step-brother) and no longer have “flashbacks” or panic attacks when I’m in sexual situations.
As a result of my experience, I generally advise those who discover someone close to them has been raped or molested to just shut up and listen. Find out what the victim feels instead of telling him or her what he or she “must” be feeling. Sometimes, “I don’t want to talk about it”, really, honestly means “I don’t want to talk about it.” As far as I’m concerned, the victim’s right to feel and talk about whatever he or she wants to trumps my right to have my curiousity and savior complex satisfied.
Pop-psychology and the “victim culture” does a lot more harm than good. Finding a good therapist, or even a friend who understands, is very difficult. I hope you are doing well.
Eh, professional smesshnel. Just look at the so-called professionals through the ages; the way they treated mental illness, let alone rape victims. These things change every day, and IMO, like in every other profession you’ll find some good and some bad. Just because they’re professional may HOLD them to a higher standard but the slots are still filled by humans, are they not? And humans are very fallible, unfortunately. Not that there are no good ones, or that we should excuse the bad ones.
WhyNot, I’ve heard that from lots of other girls, too. I tend to think similar things about abortions - if many people didn’t go around saying how depressed and horrible the girl must feel, she might not feel so depressed and horrible! Same thing with the rapes. If we told people more often “You’ll all have different reactions, and whatever’s good for you is OK” it might be better. But the listening advice is golden - lots of times, people just want to be listened to.
Mouse, I’m sorry to hear about that. It happens in my culture, too…blame the girl instead of the rapist. Fathers have killed their daughters or themselves over a rape.
Yes, Mouse Maven, I’m doing well. I hope you are too. Honestly, your situation would be harder for me than my own was. My family didn’t cast me out, they just chose not to believe me, while simultaneously telling me I was broken. Rather odd dichotomy, but they managed it. On the other hand, I won’t tell you your pain is harder or worse than mine. It is whatever it is!
Anaamika, I agree. I think that, for *any *dramatic, potentially horrific event (rape, molestation, abortion, adoption, flooding, famine, divorce, whatever) it’s more useful and kinder to find out what people are actually feeling than to tell them what they’re feeling. I understand the impulse to feed people information (“Hmm, I don’t think WhyNot’s facing up to the pain caused by her rape. Maybe if I tell her it’s OK to be full of rage, she’ll let it out.”) but I think that, especially with young people, you can end up creating the feelings, rather than releasing them.
Rape is a very complicated thing. When a man is valued over a woman, its easy to blame the victim. WhyNot had an excelent point, being told that you are a victim doesn’t make things any better. “Victim-hood” provides weakness when what the survivor needs is strenght. Very few people will tell a sexual violence survivor, “You lived. That takes a lot of guts. Now let’s help you find the joy in life that you have lost because you feel like you can’t trust anyone anymore.”
It has taken me a long time, but at this point of my life I see challanges and compare them to what I have survived: I’ve been beaten within an inch of my life, raped and disowned by my family. Anything else is easy compared to that.
Alice says something that seems shocking when she goes home from college after the rape and her dad offers her something to eat. “Yeah, I would like something since all I’ve had in my mouth for the past 24 hours is a cracker and a cock.” The reason she says it is to show her parents that the person they know is still in there. Apparently she was pretty outspoken before the rape and wanted to be sure she said something that reassured her parents that she could still be her.
A friend told me this once when oddly this subject came up
“My parents were just friends in high school. Then my mom was raped by a rich kid who offered her a ride home. He dumped her out of the car and drove off. My dad actually just happened upon her just by chance. My dad’s reaction was to find the guy and beat the shit out of him.”
I looked at his dad very differently from then on.
I have mixed feelings about this sort of reaction. Yes, there is a part of me that want the man who hurt me so very thoughly to experience as much pain as I did. Another part of me knows that nothing change because of that. Great, he’s beaten. He’ll heal, but I doubt that he will have the same emotional scars I have. If anything, the “I’m just as bad as he is” cliche kicks in. (Hey, cliches are cliches because they’re true.)
Personally, I have become a pacifist. Being on the recieving end of violence, I know how it feels. Physically harming someone solves nothing.
There was a friend of mine that I hadn’t seen for a while. I happened to be right by where she worked at the time so I stopped in to say hello. She apologized for losing touch and said that she had been raped and just hadn’t felt like talking to anyone. I just said, “Oh, I am so sorry. Let me know when you want to get dinner or something.” She said that she was off work in ten minutes and we could go right away.
At dinner we mostly talked about normal stuff and a little about the incident. At the end of our meal she told me that I was the only one of her friends and family to not react in a way that either insulted or annoyed her.
When I was raped while living in Germany as an exchange student, people didn’t believe me. Because I was promiscuous, I guess they figured I just “changed my mind” afterward or something. No one believed me and no one did anything about it, so I shut up about it. A year or two later, when I was visiting, my host-brother took me aside and told me about how the guy had gotten in trouble for similar stuff since then and now he believed my story. I’m not sure if that annoyed me more or made me feel better. At any rate, I was pissed at my rapist, but I was even more hurt by the people who wouldn’t listen.
I was date raped a couple of months ago. I was afraid to tell my best friend. When I finally did, I couldn’t tell whether she was mad at me or sad for me. She said I must have wanted to have sex with him since I shaved my legs. Hmmm…She wanted to know why I “let him” even though he split my lip and I was afraid he would do more. But then she told me how awful she knows it was and how I would go “psycho” now and have a really hard time with it. Telling her didn’t make me feel better like I thought it would, it made me feel worse. Then I told my little brother and instead of being a good listener and support like he usually is, he told me he needed to think about it and hasn’t talked to me since. Now I just wish I hadn’t told anyone.
In the interest of trying to understand life after rape, and because the last thing I want to do is hurt someone with my own ignorance, I have a question.
Do all rapes violate equally? Is there any difference, from the victim’s viewpoint, between a makeout session turned into coerced sex and a sudden, violent attack? I’m thinking that, just as “no means no,” thus “rape is rape.” True, or are there varying degrees of violation?
Also, has there ever been a serious attempt to study long-term effects of rape and, even more importantly, society’s reaction to it?
Have you tried telling him something like, “I guess hearing that I was raped freaked you out; maybe you don’t know how to respond, but I was hoping you could just be a good listener like usual”? I know it’d be tough to say, but it sounds like maybe he doesn’t know how to react and is stuck on how to proceed now that it’s been a while? (Of course, if it’s been a seriously long time that he hasn’t spoken to you, like several months or something, he has less of an excuse.)
I think there are a wide range of reactions, and certainly as many “recovery tracks” as there are victims. Some people say stranger-rape is less damaging than, say, incest (because of the emotional baggage that comes with it), but that’s not necessarily the case. I’ve known some individuals with histories that should, truly, have landed them in the looney bin for the rest of their days but they are well adjusted, productive survivors. I’ve known some individuals with a history of, say, an unwanted grope by a stranger on a subway to be devastated to the point of suicidal ideation.
In my opinion, everything hinges on immediate intervention and “after-care”, along with the victim’s personality, history, and identity prior to the sexual assault.
There are some studies on the long-term effects of rape/sexual abuse/sexual assault - plenty, in fact. I’ll dig up some cites for you later. As is true with most trauma, there’s a wide variety of reactions, healing processes and recovery periods, depending on the victim.
Society’s reaction is interesting. I’m sure someone has poked at it, from a sociological or psychological angle, but I haven’t really come across anything that would qualify as in-depth. I’m sure it’s out there.
I’d imagine a repeated abuse situation such as a kid who is raped many times over a period of years, vs. a one-shot deal on an older teen or adult, would be a completely different situation. But not always. I have a friend who was raped over and over by a relative for four years (age 8 - 12) and she’s ok. She doesn’t hate sex, she’s in a loving 25+ year marriage, is successful, and has never told her mother.
I was raped when I was 14. Was I violated? Yes. Did I survive? Yes. Am I emotionally scarred? Not in the slightest. It isn’t the end of the world.
In my truly humble opinion, this is the one area where American society generally remains stuck in some distant past. One of the worst travesties against rape victims is the refusal of most mainstream media to even use the word. Folks, “sexual assault” is NOT an appropriate euphemism for rape. (A city editor I once worked for screamed at me across the newsroom for using that phrase, by the way. “What the hell is sexual assault?! Did he beat her over the head with his dick?! It was rape, goddamnit – use the right words or get the hell out of my newsroom!”) I think using euphemisms improperly lessens the seriousness of the offense. I know, people are offended by the word – and that’s exactly why it should be used when it applies. I’m offended by the act; indeed, we all are offended by the act.
I’m not saying “sexual assault” shouldn’t be used when appropriate – any time a person’s body is sexually molested, there is sexual assault. But rape is a specific act, and we need to use the right word for it.
