I want to add that it is ironic to be accused of wanting rapists to go free, because I got into a kerfuffle with some feminists on Twitter not long ago due to the fact that I said it was wrong for a rape victim not to report the rape to the police. I went on to say that any further victims of that rapist are partially on the conscience of the earlier victim who did not report. I got very angry blowback about that, and it might seem like the opposite of this case; but those are people who know they have been raped, whether they report it or not.
Interesting point of view. Do you think he did something wrong here? From your perspective, what was it?
It’s almost like you keep saying shit about shit you don’t know anything about!
I’m not going to illustrate my rebuttal in vague terms, because I don’t think you’ll get it. I’m not going to lecture you about why you’re wrong, either. But just let me tell you a little story.
I was molested by my mother’s 4th husband, who was my adopted father. I started when I was 11ish (don’t remember exactly), it went until I legally emancipated at 17. I hadn’t told anyone for a lot of reasons, including the knowledge that my mother would probably not be able to handle it psychologically (she was in a state of knowing-but-not-knowing denial at the time) and I would get very little support from anyone in my family. I remember the few times it really hit me what was going on – I was usually home alone when the realization hit me – and telling myself, ''This is one of those things nobody can ever know about."
Okay, so flash forward, I’ve left the house, I’m a legally emancipated minor living with my Aunt, and the reality of the abuse is really starting to sink in for the first time. I tell a friend, I swear him to secrecy. Then I tell another friend. She says, ‘‘You should talk about this to a counselor.’’ I’m worried about confidentiality. I poke around, I find out that since I’m legally emancipated I do have confidentiality with regard to disclosure of abuse. I confirm this with my counselor. I disclose the abuse to her. She sends me home with like a metric ton of materials about healing from abuse, which I’m nowhere near ready to even think about at that point. I’m just in shock.
That night, I go home, I tell my Aunt, who is my best friend and the closest thing to a ‘‘normal’’ Mom I’ve ever had. I’m reeling. I say, ‘‘Of course Mom can’t know about this.’’ She didn’t agree with me, but she could tell I was deep in it, so she let me keep my secret for a while. But she did make me go across the street and tell my Grandmother. My Grandmother said, basically in the space of 30 seconds. ‘‘This isn’t true.’’ ‘‘You were old enough to know better.’’ ‘‘This is all your fault.’’ ‘‘You’re just trying to get back at your mother.’’ I left her house somewhat demoralized.
Next day I get a phone call from my counselor. ‘‘Er, ah, Spice, I’m sorry, but… it turns out I had to report the abuse to social services after all, because he has children.’’ Yes, he had kids from his first marriage. They were my brother and sisters and lived with their Mom, and I hadn’t really been thinking about that.
So just to recap. 17 years old. Just starting to deal with the reality of ongoing abuse… literally within three days of telling someone for the first time. Very, very deteriorated relationship with both my parents, and now I’m facing the fact that either I’m going to have to tell my Mom what happened, or social services will. So I called her and told her I needed to speak with her urgently. And she was so pissed off she refused to meet me face to face, so instead I had to tell her over the phone, sobbing. I couldn’t get the words out so my Aunt took the phone. My Mom guessed correctly on the second try. She grilled me for every humilliating detail, which I gave her, out loud, over the phone, in front of my Aunt and my Aunt’s boyfriend.
I said to my mother, ''Do you believe me?"
She said, ‘‘It doesn’t matter whether I believe you or not. What’s important is that you know I love you.’’
Then social services visited his children. A couple of days later, I’m getting a screaming, rage-filled invective phone call from my mother. ''You selfish bitch, how could you do this to our family?"
‘‘I did not do this. He did this.’’
‘‘No, this is your fault. I blame you!’’
According to my siblings’ mother, she is so disgusted by my vile actions that I am never allowed to speak to my brothers and sisters again. My mother threatened to sue me for harassment if I ever called her again.
Now I was a straight-A student working to keep my place as Salutatorian at the time, and I was also working full time to support myself (that’s not a sneak brag, that’s a goddamn boast.) I got suicidal very quickly. I was home alone one day, wearing my pajamas, fantasizing about hanging myself, when someone knocked on the door.
It was a single police officer. A young guy, maybe early 20s, kind of cute to be honest, and clearly, visibly uncomfortable with the fact that he was interviewing me about sexual abuse. I did not call him, social services did. I felt obligated to answer his questions because it is my nature to obey authority. But it was really fucking uncomfortable. At one point I said, ''Do I really have to talk about this?"
He said, visibly relieved, ‘‘No, you don’t have to file a police report.’’
I didn’t even realize that’s what I was doing until that point. In addition to the abuse and manipulation by my stepfather, every single step of the process had been wrenched out of my control. Everyone thought I had either lost my mind or was trying to get back at my mother.
What my stepfather did to me didn’t even fit the legal definition of rape. I had zero physical evidence and maybe two people in my family who believed me on any level. I made the decision that it would be utterly pointless to file charges in that case. I could prove nothing, and my abuser is a sociopath by the most clinical definition so he’s capable of lying with a smile and a wink.
This all happened within one week of disclosing abuse.
He suffered zero consequences for his actions. He continued running his business without consequence. My Mom remained married to him for another six years and the family pressured me relentlessly to forget and move on. I lost most of my friends for being such a downer. I never saw my brothers or sisters again.
I don’t know what world you imagine most rape victims live in – is it one where they get justice, and support, and advice? Is it one where they should automatically know how to properly handle the most traumatic thing that has ever happened to them? I don’t know of that world. I work for a domestic violence and sexual assault center, and we tend to leave it up to the victims to decide how to handle their own rape, given the fact that so much control has already been taken away from them.
Make of it what you may.
By the way, that little story is not intended to shut down all discussion, or dissent. Some people interpret it that way at times and I want to be clear. My experience is one experience and I’d be ashamed if anyone thought that experience makes me beyond reason or ability to entertain dissenting viewpoints. It’s just the best way I know to illustrate the point that the way someone handles a sexual violation is not as simple as some would love to make it. There is a world of context that is often ignored, and that we very often simply do not have in the case of highly publicized cases like this. It’s easy to judge someone’s actions if you have no concept of their reality.
Every survivor has their own story and their own responses. What one person fixates on and thinks is the worst, another person will find such a small incidental part of their experience. Someone may want revenge, someone else may want nothing more than to try and forget it ever happened. Some people get over it quickly, others never do. Some think what happened to them was fine for years, and then one day they say “wait, that was seriously fucked up!” And it isn’t the amount of violence or what is done that determines the reaction.
When I was in group counseling, the person most screwed up about the whole thing had the most “modest” level of abuse (the getting verbally harassed sort of thing - she was older, and protected and VERY suburban - no one had ever spoken to her like that before). But for her, her emotions about the event were as strong as if she’d been physically violated - and stronger than some who had.
This has nothing to do with legal definitions or prosecutions, this has to do with the emotional impact of sexual abuse on women.
But isn’t nice we have someone here who has not experienced it telling us how we should feel about rape?
“The penis knows all.”
The worst part about my abuse is that my Mom knew about it on some level, and would take it out on me. And that I lost my Dad. The lack of support in the aftermath, that was all one hundred times worse and more damaging than what he actually did. I’m quite certain if I hadn’t been so vilified and degraded, and my claims were actually taken seriously, that I probably wouldn’t think about it much at all.
That’s actually consistent with meta-analysis for risk factors of PTSD. The factors with the two greatest effect sizes contributing to the development of PTSD are lack of social support, and the presence of other stressors at the time of the trauma. ‘‘Severity of trauma’’ has actually a very little effect size as a predictive factor of PTSD.
I’m so sick of going into detail about the research on sexual assault and PTSD and being ignored that I don’t even bother with cites anymore. I’ve got a very detailed post about this meta-analysis and other published clinical research on trauma and PTSD that I’m going to try to dig up, and I’ll just keep linking to it in the future so I can get the info across without wasting my time. Sufficed to say, for now, a lot of people *really * don’t understand how trauma works, either in terms of how information is processed at the time of a traumatic incident and in terms of how trauma affects the brain over the long-term. It gets really frustrating when it goes from ‘‘ignorance’’ to ‘‘willful ignorance.’’
As for the relative nature of trauma, what my adopted father did to me cannot compare to the damage caused by my mother’s emotional abuse. It just can’t. I’ve had therapists tell me I’m minimizing the sexual abuse because they just don’t believe emotional abuse can be more damaging than sexual abuse, but holy fuck, that woman psychologically tortured me for years. I don’t expect people to understand it because they weren’t there and frankly what most people describe as ‘‘emotional abuse’’ isn’t in the same ballpark as what my mother did to me. It was really bad, and while I’ve had enduring impact from the sexual abuse, the effect is limited in scope, whereas the effect of the emotional abuse has been more pervasive and seems to impact every area of my life.
Here we go. I’m bookmarking this post. Learn away.
Highlights:
[QUOTE=Risk Factor Estimates]
The three factors relating to events during and after the trauma (i.e., greater trauma severity, lack of social support, and more subsequent life stress) convey the strongest risk of PTSD, with effect sizes that are individually small to moderate in Cohen’s (1988) terms. Next, there was a group of demographic and prior history variables that had similar effect sizes in the range of .10 to .19, including female gender; lower SES; less education; lower intelligence; a positive psychiatric history; a reported history of abuse, other trauma, or childhood adversity; and a family psychiatric history. These individual effect sizes are generally regarded as small, according to Cohen. Finally, two variables, younger age at trauma and race (minority status), had effect sizes that were weaker still, although highly significant because of the large numbers involved.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Discussion]
Other reasons why pretrauma variables do not appear to be
powerful predictors of PTSD include the possibility that their effects are mediated by later aspects of the trauma or of the person’s response to the trauma. That is, their effects are distal rather than proximal, and their impact is diluted by one or more intervening variables. For example, it has been shown that the association between childhood abuse and later PTSD is mediated by the experience of shame (Andrews et al., 2000). Alternatively, several studies suggest that early trauma interacts with level of combat exposure to intensify the risk of PTSD (e.g., King, King, Foy, & Gudanowski, 1996). Together with the fact that the predictor
variables so far identified are very general ones, these findings suggest that our understanding of vulnerability to PTSD is at an early stage.
[/QUOTE]
This is a meta-analysis of 77 pre-existing articles intended to find out what factors, if any, were predictive of PTSD. The study made the attempt to compensate for a possible bias in the literature by calculating the number of opposing studies that would need to be unpublished to render the results invalid. For all factors except age at time of trauma (which, despite being statistically significant, showed as the least predictive factor all around), at least 150 unpublished opposing studies would need to exist in order to nullify the results of this meta-analysis.
It is worth noting here that even among the top three variables, the effect sizes were only moderate. It is, at present, given the information we have, extremely difficult to make generalizations about who is more likely to develop PTSD as a result of trauma. We know that subsequent factors play a larger role than pre-existing factors, we know that to varying degrees severity of trauma, gender, SES, etc. play into it, but we cannot with any great reliability look at a given person and predict whether or not they will be afflicted by PTSD.
God, I used to know shit.
Honestly, the fact that thousands and thousands of rape kits are apparently never processed, there’s never even any real attempt to process them, tells me that reporting a rape is at best participating in a sham designed to present the illusion that people really care, and at worst is basically accepting a second assault designed to make sure you and yours never report a rape again.
Do you find this surprising? I don’t. Someone who expounds offensively ignorant opinions on one aspect of rape might be expected to expound offensively ignorant opinions on another aspect of rape.
Maybe women will be inclined to report rape once that actually means something. I’m not holding my breath.
One of those true crime TV shows profiled a serial rapist whose modus operandi was to perform cunnilingus on his female victims before stealing their possessions. He didn’t think he was raping them, because after all, it’s a sex act performed with the pleasure of the female recipient in mind.
The women he victimized didn’t think this was very pleasurable, to say the least.
Thank heavens none of those women were raped. :dubious:
I agree the sentence was ridiculously light but it was not by his own doing. Many blame the Judge, and are trying to recall him, and thats a reasonable course of action. Otherwise I think any one of us would happily accept a light sentence compared to the severity of our crime.
Call it what you will. But the idea of gangs of Internet nerds stalking a released criminal for the rest of his life because he got off easy scares the hell out of me. I don’t get what these maniacs gathered outside his house want. He isn’t going back to jail unless he violates his probation. I guess they want him to kill himself or drive him insane. Seems extremely hateful to me.
He’s 21 and Im 48, so to me thats a “kid”.
I have zero sympathy for Brock Turner. What he did was terrible. His ruined life is by his own decision, and the victims are by his decision as well.
I don’t get your question. Maybe reformulate it.
I, personally, have a hard time seeing myself as a rapist. But if I were one I guess I would want a light sentence to lessen the rape I would likely be on the receiving end of.