I met a young woman today who says she was sexually assaulted by a stranger after being drugged just last week(!), and is understandably going through therapy.
The revelation caught me completely off guard, since I really don’t know her that well. So I asked her if she filed a police report and she says that her therapist told her not to since they’ll ask prying questions and it might worsen the trauma or some bullshit. My reaction was kind of… Hrm… I wanted to say “wtf tell the fucking police, you got raped,” but at the same time I’m not a mental health expert and I really don’t know her well enough to make such strong recommendations.
But is this standard protocol? Discouraging a report? I’m still kind of baffled and tittering on outraged about this situation. Is this shrink a quack? Is she (the rape victim) bullshitting me?
Can any mental healthcare experts or anyone with some knowledge of rape trauma help me out?
What led her to tell you this?
In my completely unprofessional and uninformed opinion, it strikes me that the kind of person who might tell something like this to a stranger she’d just met might be the kind of person to be delusional about what actually happened.
I would tend to agree; it stretches credulity.
She was talking about being depressed lately and then it came up.
It’s kind of ambiguous, my relationship to her. A friend and his SO set us up on a blind date last Saturday. I thought we had some good chemistry, she says she’s into me and things are all dandy until we both have a little too much to drink and she starts talking about not being over her ex. I find out she broke up recently, and it dawns on her that night that she’s not ready to meet new people. She says she wants to be friends, which is an offer I intially refuse because I don’t believe in male/female friendships, but I cave and say sure because I’m actually a tremendous tool I guess.
So as “friends” we met for coffee earlier tonight, and she drops this bomb. She then offers to go to a DVD Room (a private movie viewing room common in Korea, most often associated with 3rd base) with me, which I refuse because that didn’t sound healthy at all, if what she told me was true.
From the get-go I thought she had a… Unique disposition but I thought it was quirky and charming but now I’m not so sure.
But I mean in either case whatever romantic goals I may or may not have had with her are completely gone. Because if she was in fact raped, she shouldn’t be meeting new men. Not ones like me, anyway. And if she’s bullshitting me, then well the reasons are obvious.
Now that I’m done rambling she kind of did strike me as a headcase, but on the off chance that she was sexually assaulted then um…
I’m not sure what my options are here. But I do get this feeling I’m getting taken for a ride a bit.
This is in Korea? That’s kind of a key piece of information!
You’ve been in Korea a while, and you haven’t figured out that Korea is very weird about female sexuality? I wouldn’t be at all surprised at all if a Korean therapist advised her not to get involved in legal testimony. Heck I had an American friend who was violently sexually assaulted in China, and she was advised by an American doctor (in China) not to press charges. The ugly truth is that the legal system in many East Asian countries has very little regard for women, and will spend a rape trial trying to hurt their credibility by trying to paint them as a “slut” and going over every minute detail of their sex life and casting it in the worst light possible. Concepts like acquaintance rape don’t exist, and if women who are raped during dates are told they are leading guys on, slutty, imprudent and deserve what they get. Conviction rates are low and the trials are (purposefully) brutal.
East Asia can be a shitty place to be a woman. The stories I heard from my female Chinese students were outright horrific, and heartbreakingly common. Chances are a good chunk of the smiling girls you flirt with have a lot of complicated stuff going on under that smile- almost like they are real people. Try being a “tool” for a bit and actually making some female friends rather than seeing the women around you as sex objects, and you will find that what’s going on around you is not all karaoke and sunshine.
She indeed sounds like she is not at all ready for a new relationship. Yes, it was inconsiderate toward you to let herself be set up as your date and then send a bunch of mixed signals and overshare information. But dude, whether she was in fact assaulted or is instead messed up enough to be making this up, spare her a little sympathy. Either way, she’s carrying around a lot of bad baggage, and you only gave up a few hours of your time.
China =! Korea.
Though I do admit I am completely ignorant of the legal process here when it comes to rape, let’s not be too hasty in our generalizations.
But if the process is in fact similar enough to be relevant, then her story has more credibility.
Hey, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I see all women as sex objects now? Karaoke and sunshine? Huh? Was that supposed to be a subtle cultural jab?
The situation I described is hardly conducive to a legitimate friendship. Even if she is telling the truth I have trouble believing that she would reveal this information to a half-stranger without some ulterior motive. She says all her friends and family already know, so between them and the shrink, what help does she expect from me?
Maybe you’re Mother Theresa and welcome all allegedly broken women into your worldly bosom of empathy, but I’d rather be more skeptical than get manipulated by someone that I don’t know very well, and quite frankly owe very little to.
The reason I tend not to befriend women is a different topic entirely and not sufficient reason to declare that I don’t respect women or whatever it is that you are accusing me of.
I did in fact spare quite a bit of sympathy. It’s why I made this thread. I felt awful something like this would happen, and as mentioned, somewhat outraged that legal action was not being taken. Then some skepticism is voiced, I review the situation and get the sense I’m being toyed around with. Maybe not intentionally even, as is the case with some emotionally unhealthy women (and men), but toyed around with all the same. Which sort of destroyed whatever sympathy I might have felt. But I’m still not sure really if she’s telling the truth or not so… It puts me in a somewhat awkward position.
Perhaps it’s true that you “grew up” in Korea, but—and she doesn’t like to share this—even sven was once in East Asia for a few months as a Peace Corps volunteer. You have much to learn from her.
I have some pretty strong connections to Korea. When it comes to female sexuality, Korea is extremely conservative, and you know this. Until 2009, for example, it was perfectly legal to brutally rape your crying and pleading wife.
Your comment that you “don’t believe in male-female friendships” and that you were a “tool” for deigning to going out to dinner with a girl you weren’t trying to fuck prompted the rest. I’ve never in my life heard someone write off an entire gender like that, and that’s screwy in any culture. You know women are just people, right? People with vaginas, I’ll grant you, but still people. It’s pretty amazing to say you “don’t believe” in being friends with a class of person that makes up half the population, simply because a trait they have no control over and actually isn’t that huge of a deal.
Clearly, the therapist IS the rapist. THE-RAPIST? Another puzzle solved!
My surmise is that he meant that he doesn’t believe in the wisdom of making friends through blind dates. Which I think is not without justice, as the offer to remain friends after some chit-chat and ramen usually means that one or both parties is too fragile to handle the mild rejection of “Sorry, just not fuhllin’ it.” Moreover, putting effort into a new friendship (because one or both were too chickenshit to bail) when one is actually looking for a romantic relationship is rather a waste of emotional energy.
I do not get the sense that if the OP had a female co-worker or lab partner, he would be unfriendly towards her. But, of course, our OP can answer for himself, although I do find this to be fairly collateral to the question raised in the OP.
Exactly.
Over-disclosure is pretty common for people who have PTSD. In the midst of a traumatic experience the boundary between self and other becomes blurred. Some people feel the need for constant external validation. People share things they wouldn’t ordinarily share, sometimes because it can feel like what is going on right now is an emergency and doesn’t fit the standard rules of self-disclosure. For example, most people wouldn’t blurt out their health problems to a complete stranger, but if you were in the midst of a heart attack, don’t you think you’d drop the facade? PTSD feels like a psychological heart attack.
The experience of PTSD-like symptoms immediately following a trauma is nearly universal. It is expected that these symptoms resolve themselves over the next three months. If they’re still around after six months, that’s PTSD.
Over-disclosure is not evidence that the person is deluded.
Maybe all on it’s own, but don’t you find the *She then offers to go to a DVD Room (a private movie viewing room common in Korea, most often associated with 3rd base) with me, which I refuse because that didn’t sound healthy at all, if what she told me was true. * part at odds with PTSD?
It’s hard to say. One major symptom of sexual trauma is over-sexualized behavior, believe it or not. But in and of itself this DVD Room scenario is not really proof of anything. Either way, this girl sounds like she’s got issues and this is probably one of those dodged bullet situations for the OP. Honestly she sounds kind of histrionic to me. Some people are very quick to sexualize relationships and really get emotionally intense about it.
As for the therapist, it’s possible the therapist explained the pros and cons of reporting the crime and the client basically heard what she wanted to hear. There’s really no way of knowing what happened between them.
I am a mental health professional. She said that her therapist asked her not to file a report but nobody knows what exactly happened in the session. If she has an existing diagnosis of PTSD, maybe the therapist was directing her to think about how her choice to take any legal action will impact her symptoms and coping and she probably took that as discouragement?
I don’t know…I am just thinking out loud. Having said that, I do know that there are some horrible therapists practicing out there. As a therapist myself I do believe in empowering my clients with information but in the end its their choice and my job is to support them in any way I can. That changes if I am working with a client who is conserved and has a public guardian who makes decisions for them. I do have to let their guardians know if they were assaulted in any way and the guardians decide how to proceed. Some of the public guardians are great about talking to their clients and figuring out what they would like to do, but some tend to ignore it, some are all about filing charges. I do advocate for my clients either way.
Not at all.
If you have a traumatic experience that is not properly resolved, that trauma just keeps replaying and replaying in the back of your head, and it will keep coming out in the things that you do. Our minds can’t handle things that come out of nowhere, so we keep trying to fit the traumatic event into some kind of logic, in an attempt to resolve it. Unfortunately, if the trauma is severe enough it can undermine the mind’s ability to come up with good ways to process the trauma, and you can end up in a loop of bad attempts at making sense of things.
It’s common for victims to put themselves back into situations resembling the initial trauma, perhaps as a way to replay it with a happier ending, or for the more severely traumatized, as a way to prove that they “deserved” the trauma. It’s all about trying to figure out some kind of logic as to why this horrific thing happened- and to a severely traumatized mind, proving “I got raped because I’m a slut” or “I got beaten because I’m worthless” is at least some kind of logic and organization. Your mind may then test this organization by acting slutty, and then seeing if bad things happen. This is why, for example, the children of abuse so often end up in abusive relationships themselves.
Another thing that sexual trauma does is that it messes with your relationship with your own sexuality, which is a pretty important part of a person’s identity. In some cases, a person comes to see their sexuality as their only thing of value or only means of relating to people, so they use their sexuality inappropriately in an misguided attempt to get the closeness they desire. A variation when trauma victims can become focused on sexuality in an attempt to control what they once couldn’t. This is why you may find hypersexuality among childhood abuse victims- it’s literally the only way they know how to relate to the opposite sex.
I know that I recently got in a (non-rape) traumatic unwanted sexual experience, and my very first thought was to go find someone- anyone- new to sleep with in an attempt to sort of tape over what happened. I hoped that if I could get some new image in my head, it’d erase the old one. Luckily I wasn’t that badly traumatized, and it resolved itself.
In this situation, it sounds to me like she was doing a bit of “replaying with a new ending.” Something in her mind was likely telling her “sex and men are really important right now” and she interpreted that as thinking that she should seek out a sexual situation, maybe try to write over the last one. But once she was in this situation, the “OMG trauma” circuits fired and she went into over-disclosure, which is both an attempt to resolve the situation by replaying it, and a way to create distance and defuse the sexuality.
I agree that no matter what the story is, she’s obviously not in a space to be dating right now, and as a stranger you don’t really have much of a connection or obligation to her. I guess I’d like to see a bit more of your frustration and dismay directed at rapists, crappy legal systems and shady therapists, rather than being upset at this young woman for ruining your dinner date plans by being still a bit screwed up by this horrible thing that (probably) happened to her.
I’ve heard people say that rape victims who go to the police get raped again by the legal system. The defense often tried to turn it around and make it seem like she was asking for it or something like that, also asking probing questions making one feel even more violated.
And when all is said and done, if he gets off she is left being raped twice with no consequences making it worse, diminishing her self worth.
Not all will take it that way, but one would expect a therapist would tend to have some insight as to how she will take it.
I’m not a mental health professional, but I have volunteered as a rape crisis counselor for seven years and have been there for hundreds of sexual assault survivors.
In the U.S., this sort of advice would be terrible. Most jurisdictions, at least to my knowledge, are quite well-versed and sensitive about dealing with sexual assault and certainly don’t make people feel like they’re being “raped again by the legal system.” Yes, part of reporting a rape is having to provide details and physical evidence (charmingly called the “rape kit”) but, again in my experience only, doing so actually tends to give the survivor a sense of power and control because they are doing something to fight back instead of being passive. And, the cops and doctors I’ve had experience with have had training and are (mostly) really kind and sympathetic to survivors.
That said, I don’t know how such things work in Korea. Also to the OP - in part because you “don’t believe in male-female friendships” I would agree with your decision that this isn’t a relationship you, or she if the story is true, needs to be in right now. One way or another, she’s vulnerable and you don’t believe in platonic relationships, and in any case this doesn’t sound like someone who is ready for or capable of a romantic or sexual relationship right now. Whether her story is true or not.