I was raped more than 4 decades ago. I was in the early stages of recognizing I was a lesbian. My reaction was the opposite to that of E. Jean Carroll - I had sexual relationships with several men, and married one of them, largely (subconsciously) to prove I was not damaged goods.
I will add - before I share my story - I am one of the lucky ones. I never, not for an instant, felt I was to blame for being raped. That made my own recovery much "cleaner," and easier because I could feel pure grief, anger, fear - whatever I needed to feel without beating myself up for whatever I might have done wrong to bring this on myself. And even with that huge benefit, within the last week, I've had to wrestle with uncomfortable seating in a restaurant (read the story below).
Since you are obviously oblivious to the life-long impact of being raped - let me share my story with you (from a piece I wrote in 2013 at the peak of hand-wringing over lifetime reporting laws ruining the lives of teenage rapists from Steubenville):
Thirty-Seven Years into a Life Sentence
Last August, in Steubenville, Ohio, a 16 year old received a life sentence. Yesterday two of the teens who imposed that sentence on her were given their own far shorter sentences: juvenile detention for of a minimum of one and two years, respectively.
Those sentences are an insult. The news outlets bemoaning how much these teens have lost should be ashamed of themselves. For every minute they spend worrying about the future these teens have lost, the media should spend several reminding their audiences that whatever they have lost is the consequence of the choices they made; the survivor of their attacks had no choice, and her sentence is forever.
In the past few weeks the survivor – and her new forever reality – has become invisible. I find that appalling. I know we must do better than locking up her assailants and throwing away the keys – which is what the lifetime sex offender registration law which these teens also face figuratively does.
That rational thought, though, will keep for another day. Today my heart is with the survivor; whose story I know all too intimately.
My own life sentence began when I was 19, three years older than the Steubenville survivor. It is a sentence I share with, conservatively, one in seven women. As is fairly typical, I wasn’t physically injured (in the sense of bruises, cuts, or gunshot wounds), but 37 years later I still bear the emotional scars.
In the first decade, especially, others I loved came to share my sentence: A young man I should never have married – an unconscious attempt to prove I wasn’t “damaged goods.” A spouse who hesitated to wake me in the middle of the night, because sometimes I woke up swinging. A relative I reluctantly agreed to let clean our house, knowing how challenging it was for me to grant anyone access to my personal possessions because that kind of access by my rapist led to later phone and mail harassment. PTSD isn’t rational, so the reality that this relative wouldn’t hurt me did nothing to damper my emotional response the moment I discovered my spouse had left her alone in our house – and it was in that moment (one of many) that my injury spread to others.
Over the years I’ve made peace with many of the forever changes to my life. When I join you in a restaurant, if I hesitate a moment too long before I sit it means it is a bad day and my back feels too exposed for me to be comfortable in the seat you have left for me. But that no longer happens as frequently, and these days you’ll probably never notice. I won’t ask to switch seats with you, partly because deciding when to give in to the remnants of PTSD is part of my recovery: I choose when to let anxiety or fear limit my life. But it is still – nearly four decades later – a conscious decision every single time.
Then there are the little unexpected gems that catch me completely by surprise. Oberlin students are currently infuriated over the permanent secret no trespass list for things my daughter, a current Oberlin student, has described to me as minor offenses. I’d been thinking they had a point, until I read an article which dated the list to the early 1970s. The man who raped me, in the fall of 1975, is on that list. His is likely one of the first names on it, placed there to make me feel secure in the knowledge that Oberlin would immediately escort him from campus. No questions asked. Just in case he carried out his threats to show up. I had completely forgotten I knew about that list, even as my daughter was talking about it. Now I can’t get out of my mind. I used to think I’d finally encountered the last “new” memory or learning, but by now it really didn’t surprise me a month ago when that newly recovered bit popped up.
And then there are the enormous gems. For most of my adult life, I have carried between 10 and 80 pounds more than the weight at which I feel most healthy. After losing 65 pounds my final year in law school, I found myself flipping through the clothes in my closet preparing for my first prison visit as an almost-attorney. Everything I pulled out seemed wrong.
Then, with no warning, I knew with absolute certainty that what I was looking for was something that would make me look fat. When I am fat I feel invisible – at least as a target of sexually aggressive talk and acts. That thought had never consciously crossed my mind in the 20 years between being raped and that moment.
Even now, 17 years later, knowledge is only part of the struggle. Although it is no longer an unconscious motivation for eating more than I should, it is still a daily struggle to overcome the 20 years of eating habits that helped me sustain enough weight to feel safe. And when life gets hard, it is one of the first things to slip.
So 37 years into my lifetime sentence the anger in the wake of coverage like CNN’s resonates deeply with me, as do the demands that those teens suffer as long and as harshly as their victim will. In the ten years I spent comforting fellow survivors as a peer advocate at the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center, I entertained some very dark fantasies about the perfect sentences to make rapists’ lives as much of a living hell as they make the lives of those who survive their attacks; fantasies most people who know me would be shocked to hear had ever crossed my mind.
Tomorrow, or perhaps the next day, I’ll worry about the impact of lifetime reporting laws. But for now, a good dark fantasy is a nice antidote to the stories fretting over how much these particular rapists have lost.
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