Category Archives: Sexual Assault

by | July 18, 2011 · 10:31 am

Confronting My Rapist

It takes a strong person to confront their rapist. Sometimes it is unavoidable. In cases of rape between family members or close family friends, you will undoubtedly see this person again. Other times people are forced to confront their rapists in the court of law in order to get the justice they seek. The majority of rapes go unreported ( 95% of sexual assault victims do not report the crime to the proper authorities).

I was so young when I was raped I thought I would be the one who got in trouble if I reported it. So I didn’t get the courage to speak up for a decade. By that time, any physical evidence that was left had faded. I spoke to police and counselors about reporting it but they told me it wouldn’t be an easy case to prove with only circumstantial evidence. Since there were two rapists involved, I thought maybe it was possible that one would rat the other out to save their own butts. It was a possibility, but nothing was for certain.

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by | June 13, 2011 · 3:32 pm

Surviving Trauma: I Choose To Live

I was surfing the web looking at different statutes of limitations and legalities for rape crimes, when I found an article that proposed a repeal of statutes for certain rape cases in the state of Connecticut. In the article, Governor Jodi Rell is quoted as saying of rape crime, “It is violence of the most personal and devastating kind, as brutal in its own right as murder.”

In the article, Rell points out that rape is not a crime of passion, but rather a violent crime, which is a common misconception for many. The term rapefrom the Latin word Rapere, originally had no sexual connotation, and meant “to seize or take by force.” It simply meant to steal. If you are someone or know someone who has been raped, you can testify that this definition is still applicable to the verb “rape” as we use it today. Because when you are raped, something is taken from you by force.

Justice systems for centuries have considered rape as brutal of a crime as murder. Even in ancient Greece, Rome, and Colonial Times, rape was considered a capital offense within the same category as murder. In the 12th century rape victims’ families were granted the right to carry out the rapists’ brutal and sometimes fatal punishment. In 14th century England, the rape victim was expected to gouge out their rapist’s eyes or castrate him. Today in the United States, current death penalty standards consist mainly for convicted murderers. Modern day rapists typically receive much cushier punishments than their violent predecessors.

Read the rest of the article at The Huffington Post. 

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by | June 10, 2011 · 2:49 pm

Are You a Victim of Victim Mentality?

How does a caterpillar transform into a butterfly? It doesn’t just happen. There are many steps involved in this transformation, as there are in the journey from victim to survivor.

Going from victim to survivor has to be a conscious choice, because often, as we suffer through “victimhood,” we rarely realize we’re doing it. We grow so accustomed to the misery of our victim mentality that we forget that we are making the conscious choice to live life this way.

As a former victim of a victim mentality myself, it felt like unfortunate things were always happening to me; that I had the worst luck in the world while the people around me appeared to have it much easier. After being raped, I sulked in my depression, running from one addiction to the next, trying to numb the memories and feelings of worthlessness and humiliation. They were hard to numb, and in the sobriety I experienced between substance abuse and eating disorders, I couldn’t handle it when my feelings of being violated came flooding back in.

To move on with your life, you must break away from identifying yourself as a victim and transcend this experience by becoming a survivor. After being sexually assaulted or experiencing any great trauma, consciously processing your thoughts and feelings is not always your first response. More often, we are just trying to survive, to live day to day without our pain burdening us to the point of inactivity. I found that running away from my emotions through the use of substances inevitably complicated things. Not only did I have to deal with being raped, but now I had to battle addiction.

Read the rest of it on The Huffington Post 

Feel free to comment and share!! Thanks!

Hayley

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by | · 2:04 am

Are You a Victim of Victim Mentality? Overcome Sexual Assault or Any Trauma by Moving from Victim to Survivor

How does a caterpillar transform into a butterfly? It doesn’t just happen. There are many steps involved in this transformation, as there are in the journey from victim to survivor.

Going from victim to survivor has to be a conscious choice, because often times as we suffer through “victimhood” we rarely realize we’re doing it. We grow so accustomed to the misery of our victim mentality, we forget that we are making the conscious choice to live life this way.

As a former victim of victim mentality myself, it felt like unfortunate things were always happening to me; that I had the worst luck in the world while the people around me appeared to have it much easier. After being raped, I sulked in my depression, running from one addiction to the next trying to numb the memories and feelings of worthlessness and humiliation. They were hard to numb, and in the sobriety I experienced between substance abuse and eating disorders, I couldn’t handle it when my feelings of being violated came flooding back in.

To move on with your life, you must break away from identifying yourself as a victim and transcend this experience by becoming a survivor. After being sexually assaulted or experiencing any great trauma, consciously processing your thoughts and feelings is not always your first response. More often we are just trying to survive, to live day to day without our pain burdening us to the point of inactivity. I found that running away from my emotions through the use of substances inevitably complicated things. Not only did I have to deal with being raped, but now I had to battle addiction.

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by | June 1, 2011 · 4:03 am

Hunted

Someone once told me that rapists scope out their victims and deliberately choose certain type of person; who they view as easy prey. By sizing up their victim in this way, they gain control of the situation. When I heard about this, it really upset me, and I wondered if my persona could make me the victim of this violent crime once again. Once a rapist selects their target, they stalk him/her and plot their attack. Then they ambush their victim in a variety of ways such as coercion, date rape drugs, and violence.

There is a common misconception that rapists rape for sex. This is wrong. In fact, it is noted that rapists have access to legal sex; many of them have wives or girlfriends. Rapists rape for power. Serial rapists might even do it for sport, for some type of twisted thrill, that is perhaps comparable to the jolt of excitement kleptomaniacs cite to explain their addiction to stealing. After committing a rape, the rapist does not care that they just traumatized and possibly destroyed a living and breathing being. The rapist didn’t even consider that their victim was an individual with thoughts and feelings. The rapist only cared about one thing: getting what they wanted through control and domination.

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by | May 24, 2011 · 5:00 am

Rape and Gender Bias

A friend recently brought an article to my attention about a seasoned sexual assault detective who, after years on the job, was sexually assaulted. Aside from the irony of the victim’s profession, I read the article to see why else this story had attracted so much attention. It was not surprising to read that the officer-turned-victim experienced the same shame and anxiety that is common for most victims of sexual assault. Additionally,  like 95% of sexual assault victims, the officer did not want to report the crime to the proper authorities. There was only one outlier in this story: the rape victim was an adult male.

When most people hear the term “rape victim,” the image of an adult male is not what comes to mind. In cases of rape, men are usually associated with assailants rather than victims. Perhaps this is because 90% of rape victims are female, and the majority of rapists are male. These statistics do not make men immune from rape, in fact,  1 in every 33 men are sexually assaulted in their lifetime. In the US a sexual assault occurs every 2 minutes.

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by | May 22, 2011 · 7:31 pm

I Am a Rape Survivor Part Two: Turning Self-Abuse Into Self-Nurturing

Societies have stigmas. These typically vary from country to country and are based on outliers that differ from what a society deems normal. An unusual physical attribute or a mental or physical disability is sometimes enough to generate harsh judgment and alienation from others.

In Morocco, being a known rape victim is so stigmatized that they are often forced to marry their rapists in order to avoid this label. Through marrying their rapists, victims escape this scarlet letter in favor of a typically short and abusive marriage. These victim-rapist nuptials don’t usually last long, and they usually end in divorce. In Moroccan society, being labeled “divorced” is much more acceptable than being labeled “raped.”

Rape is my scarlet letter, too. Although people cannot tell I’ve been raped through common interactions with me, I used to think they could. As I silently suffered through the aftermath of sexual assault, my friends and family could tell that something was wrong but didn’t know what. Although it always clouded my consciousness, it still took many years for me to speak about what happened. As a result, my healing process began, and I never would have guessed that one day, being raped would brand me as undesirable.

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by | May 12, 2011 · 2:05 am

Surviving Sexual Assault by Conquering the World

"Pearl in Shell" via Blue Eyed Ennis

I recently had an anniversary. About a year ago, I was unable to sleep and up late at night calling anonymous help lines. To even admit this, I am bashful. Who wants to represent the image of a person who has reached the point in their life when calling anonymous help lines in the middle of the is nothing out of the ordinary? I did this for about a week until one night I was connected to a local hotline, not one of those 24-hour hotlines that have someone sitting by the phone around the clock. Nope, the person I spoke to on this particular night had been sleeping and was woken up because it was their night to watch the hotline. For the next few days this counselor, the one I had awoken, relentlessly called me until I agreed to go to the Rape Crisis Center in my area.

Not long after that, I reluctantly showed up at the doorstep of this old house turned office building in the middle of the city ready to talk about what happened to me ten years ago. As I rang the doorbell and waited for security to let me in, I figured that talking to a counselor couldn’t possibly make me feel worse than I already did.

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by | April 27, 2011 · 12:54 pm

I Am a Rape Survivor Part Two: My Scarlet Letter and Breaking Addiction

Societies have stigmas. These typically vary from country to country and are based on outliers that differ from what a society deems normal. An unusual physical attribute, a mental or physical disability, is sometimes enough to generate harsh judgment and alienation from others.

In Morocco, being a known “rape victim” is so stigmatized that victims of rape are often forced to marry their rapists in order to avoid this label. Through marrying their rapists, victims escape this scarlet letter, in favor of a typically short and abusive marriage. These victim-rapist nuptials don’t usually last long and end in divorce.  In Moroccan society, being labeled “divorced” is much more acceptable than being labeled “raped.”

Rape is my scarlet letter too. Although people cannot tell I’ve been raped through common interactions with me, I used to think they could. As I silently suffered through the aftermath of sexual assault, my friends and family could tell that something was wrong, but didn’t know what.  Although it always clouded my consciousness, it still took many years for me to speak about what happened. As a result, my healing process began, and I never would’ve guessed that one day being raped would brand me as undesirable.
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by | April 17, 2011 · 7:14 pm

Victim Blaming

Photograph by Hayley Rose, Copyright 2005

As I am writing, I can hear a story blaring from the TV about an 11-year-old girl who has been raped by 19 young men. The story gets worse as this little girl, who has just been gang-raped becomes the target of victim blaming. The TV anchor quotes one of the rapists, who defends himself by saying, “She looked older than 11.”

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