Silence not an option for many sex assault victims
Her name is Virginia, and she needed to share her story because the events of the past few days had ripped open the scabs across her secret wounds and talking about them seemed a far better way of dealing with the spooling out of her guarded memories than staying silent.
Silence, many of us know now, is no longer an option.
Virginia had not watched the Senate confirmation hearings Thursday, though she planned to listen to the testimony of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who had broken her own silence about her own wounding decades ago by a drunken, privileged boy she identified as Supreme Court shoo-in Brett Kavanaugh.
Like the millions of sexual assault survivors across the country, she almost didn’t need to watch. It was hard to escape the conversations of outrage and ignorance, the #MeToo and #HimToo descending over the country, aggravating old wounds and old misconceptions. It was hard not to have an opinion, even if you hadn’t a grasp of the facts. Hard not to remember, even if you had tried for decades to stuff your
anguish deep within your bones.
It had brought what had happened to women like Virginia back to the surface. And it had reminded many of us why we don’t come forward to report our abuse. But Virginia had. “There’s a trauma that gets ingrained in you,” she said. “When a person goes through something like this, it’s like what soldiers in the war go through. That situation destroyed me for a long time. I was afraid of everybody. It scares the hell out of me now as I’m talking.”
Virginia is 61 now, the same age I am. And while the edges of her memory have frayed, like Ford she can recall every detail and feeling of being violated with such precision that it sometimes feels like it happened days ago.
As she recalls, it was early evening in 1978 or thereabouts. She was in her early 20s and a part-time student at the University of New Mexico with a cheap car that broke down on her way to visit a friend in the student ghetto neighborhood around Yale south of campus.
“The sun was just going down, and I started walking,” she said. “Back then, there were no cellphones.”
A man grabbed her from behind, pressed a knife to her side, pushed her into a car and raped her. She tried talking to him to free herself.
“I said I understood that sometimes people do things in life and don’t mean to be mad,” she said. “He started to slow down, like he trusted me.”
That’s when she made her move and bolted out of the car. Before running off, she turned to look at the license plate on his car and forced herself to memorize it.
“I remember the look on his face, like ‘I’m about to get caught,’ ” she said.
He did. As soon as she made it to her friend’s house, she called police.
The man, whose name she can only partly recall, was caught. The ordeal of being interviewed and prodded and forced on the witness stand to share every sordid detail was nearly as excruciating as the actual rape, she said.
“I came away with one of the worst opinions of the Albuquerque justice system,” she said.
Her tormentor got off on a suspended sentence.
As angry as she was about that, most of her rage was saved for her rapist. Anger, counseling and time, she thinks, has helped her go on to lead a good life.
“I’ll be honest with you. When I think about what happened to me, that knife in my side, I’d like to get a baseball bat and just beat that guy until he’s bloody,” she said. “The more I think about what that guy did to me, the madder I get. How dare they do that to us? They try to make us victims, tear our emotions apart, and it’s important for us to get to a place where we know it was not our fault, that we will not be a victim or let that guy live in our minds.” Still, she knows, he does. As for Ford and Kavanaugh, she is not sure what to make of all that. She is perturbed that Ford got far more concessions and kindness than she was ever afforded and she is loath to condemn Kavanaugh without knowing more facts.
But what she does know is what so many of us have also come to know — that women have a right to be listened to, a right to be angry, to be believed, but that as a society we still have a long way to go before “Believe Women” is more than a slogan on a T-shirt. That means continuing to speak out, to share stories, to lock arms and push forward toward that bright day of reckoning when the burden of shame is lifted and the patronizing, patriarchal way of things is shaken and the truth, whatever that may be, is within reach.