But let’s not beat ourselves up for not reporting? Some of us still beat ourselves up for getting raped.
Not me, but I understand those who do.
This crap. This is the why. Because you in your infinite goddamn “wisdom” have decided that people saying why they didn’t report something isn’t the same as “the WHY someone may not have reported.” Because you came in here talking about Kavanaugh, then tried to say you weren’t talking about Kavanaugh, and as a bonus you let us know that our perceptions can be mistaken. Our "short stories with no validity " apparently are worthless to you, so kindly fuck off.
I feel I need to share more of my story because it resulted in a conviction.
My father molested me until I was eleven when my sister told my mother. Of note: she did not tell my mother about him molesting her, until later.
I would have never said anything. I was afraid my father would kill me.
My mother went on a crusade to get him convicted. This sounds good right? But it all seemed always about her, not her daughters. I was forced to talk to many, many people about what happened. There was an indictment and a trial. After this I became an almost recluse until I was out of high school.
I want to speak a little about being a child witness. I remember being asked over and over to come up with dates and times and what exactly happened in detail. In other words I was asked to give testimony that would be how an adult would give testimony. I could tell details of what he did, but not when.
My testimony would have been more like: He did these different things and he did it regularly, for as long as I can remember.
He was convicted on my testimony and that of my sister’s friend (yes, he molested her too) but not my sister’s. They did not like that she wouldn’t take any shit while she was on the stand.
The whole thing was horrific and traumatizing. The utter shame of people knowing. And the fact that my mother seemed to have no problem just blurting out this information to almost anyone because she liked to cast herself as a hero.
My father went to prison for two and a half years for molesting me and the friend. Two and a half years for years and years of abuse.
I want to be very clear: i would not have said anything, ever. And after all this? I never told anyone about my brother and that went on for years after the trial. And the thought of saying anything about mere harassment and groping never entered my head.
Well into my forties, I googled my father’s name (it’s unusual) and the 1973 conviction was right there. It was surreal.
Because I was about 8 years old and he was my mothers boyfriend. Because while his finger was inside me, he reminded me that he carried a gun.
I was almost 50 years old when I told my mother. The only reason I told her was because the ex boyfriend had been trying to get in touch with her through my grandmother and she asked me if I bought she should give him her number.
#WhySheDidntReport
On behalf of my high school girlfriend: Because she believed she would not be supported. He was Family, and Family was Tight-knit and Armenian and Important.
On behalf of my ex-wife: Because she sought attention and therefore maybe people would assume she “asked” for it.
Also?
I love you.
I am listening.
You are not alone.
You are worthy.
You are valuable.
It’s not your fault.
.
My story is a little different. First, I was a little boy. Second, it happened when I was VERY young. Third, I didn’t realize what had happened until I was 40.
I always had an image of my father’s erect penis, along with its odor and taste. Nothing else, just an image that had gotten stuck in my head, popping into my consciousness at random times. But for the first time, when I was 40, I asked myself what was the source of that image. When could I ever have seen my father’s erect penis at such an early age? And it was then that I had realized that there was some kind of sexual abuse going on.
By then he was 72, and I really wanted to confront him about this. And tell my mother as well. I kind of still wish I had.
Several years later, my father had Alzheimer’s, but was still rather coherent. I was talking to him on the phone, and he suddenly said “I love you.” This was the only time in my life I ever heard him say something like that. I remember wondering whether he knew what he said, or to whom he was saying it. Then he said “When you were a baby, I more than loved you.” Oh, sweet Jesus, I so wanted to say “Yeah, I remember how you ‘more than loved’ me when I was a baby.” But by then I had pity on him and his disease, so I kept my fucking mouth shut.
In the ensuing years, after his death, I always had thoughts of telling my mother what had happened all those years ago. But she wouldn’t have believed me, and it would hurt her immensely. I never told her.
I still think about telling my brother, and asking whether he had any memories like that.
I used to carpool with three other women. We were talking about sexual assault one day and I mentioned reading that one in four women had been sexual molested. The three women all admitted to being raped when they were in high school or college. That is disturbing.
I can’t imagine how terrible it must be to report, and testify. The cards are staked against the victim. There is an article in the Alaskan tribal news of a white man that attacked a native woman and he walked away with a slap on his wrist.
Forgive me for interrupting these important stories to say: Just when we’ve all been wondering if the SDMB still serves much of a purpose, this thread happens — likely to be remembered as one of its crowning achievements (I mean that sincerely). This kind of dialogue is happening in other venues, too, of course, but I think there’s something special about the community we’ve built up here over the years that makes it play out a bit differently here — for the better, perhaps.
I’ve been following the Kavanaugh thread and it’s just…disgusting and disturbing.
Then I saw this thread this morning and it just lifted my spirits. And reading it is very inspiring.
Thank you all for participating.
And thank you j666 for starting it.
I was 16 and drunk. The 3 of them were in their 20s and at a high school party. It was 1978. It was my fault.:mad:
I don’t have a perfect memory, but I do know for certain I never forced anyone to do anything. Ever.
It doesn’t take perfect total recall. Either there was force, or there was not. There is nothing extenuating about force.
:dubious: Nobody’s arguing that memory is perfect, but “morphing” a “mild attempt at sexual persuasion” into “a brutal attack” is not really typical of the ways memory malfunctions.
Do you remember, say, breaking a bone when you were a teenager? Do you think that your memory somehow “morphed” what was actually just a bruise into a broken bone? Do you think that’s a likely explanation of many adults’ recollections of breaking a bone when they were teenagers?
So, even if such a bizarre exaggeration could occur in somebody’s memory occasionally, does it seem likely that all or most of the women (and men) who describe such experiences are suffering from such a drastic memory malfunction? Especially when you know how common such experiences have always been and still are in everyday life?
The claim is not that every single memory of sexual assault is 100% reliable in all its details. The claim is just that since sexual assault is so common, and is usually such a strongly negative experience for its victims, the probability that someone who describes such an experience is remembering it mostly accurately is much higher than the probability that they are massively deceived by a grossly distorted “morphing” of their memory.
That being the case, if your first reaction to somebody’s describing such an experience is to suggest that their memory might be massively deceiving them, it not unreasonably calls your good faith into question.
Because unless you were full on raped, nobody gave a shit. You were groped? Fondled? Catcalled about your ass and tits? You should be happy for the male attention. It’s a compliment, you uptight bitch!
Tip of the hat for the witnesses in this thread. And sorry you’ve had to deal with that: it sounds pretty awful.
When I hear statistics like those, I kind of… hope that is true. Not the “1 in 4 have been molested”, but the “3 in 4 have not”. My hope is that we’ll keep growing this side of the equation.
And I sometimes wonder: if a person has been attacked repeatedly, if you’re one of us who apparently have a big “grab me” sign painted somewhere, does that mean we count as 1 “person who has been assaulted”, or do our multiple assaults count multiples? If someone has been attacked twice, are there 3 who didn’t get attacked by those attackers or are there 6? What can I say, I think all those years of having a big target left me with a sort of mental deformity when it comes to statistics on assault (be it sexual, bullying or whatever); I take refuge from the memories in the detachment of mathematics.
In my case, who would believe that girls do things like that to other girls, especially at that time? I’ll leave it at that.
No point in going over it all again. It was just expected back then and you were lucky if you could get away without too much damage. Sometimes you just let it happen because we were too afraid to stop them. Mostly we didn’t tell adults because we thought we’d get in trouble. Honestly it was also because we just thought that’s just the way it was, that it was expected and our feelings didn’t really matter. It didn’t help either that my first experience was as a six year old being molested for several years by my own father. No desire to revisit these experiences to add to an online tally. I know what it was like for girls my age back then.
I know this. I couldn’t go through the details 30 years later from a single incident.
Good, thank you, because when I read your previous post, I felt bad for bringing it up. Your sister wouldn’t make a good witness because she wasn’t docile enough? Oh, fuck that.
I knew a woman in your mother’s position. It was really important to her that people knew she had believed her daughter and put her first. Still, she thought her daughter would never forgive her for letting it happen.
And if you were full on raped, it was your fault; you shouldn’t have been there, wearing that, alone with him, whatever. “Didn’t you know better?”
Maybe it does happen that way. Maybe rapists - date rapists, at least - convince themselves over time that an attack was “just rough-housing”, that the demands to stop were half-hearted pleas and just for show, that the torn clothes were just over eagerness, that s/he obviously wanted it, and - in the same thought - girls don’t really like sex and that’s why she didn’t enjoy it.
Maybe rapists just keeping rewriting that memory until they actually believe it wasn’t rape.
That makes more sense to me than that someone would make a traumatic event even worse in retrospect.