Bob CollinsThe rape culture is getting more attention since a Stanford swimmer was given only a six-month sentence last month for raping a woman. He’ll be released from jail after serving only four. Brock Turner could have been ordered to prison for 10 years.
The courageous decision of his victim to detail her thoughts in a 12-page victim-impact statement has propelled the nation to take a long look at the excuses society makes for men who rape women.
She’s chosen, however, to remain anonymous. And with good reason, she said in a statement delivered to a TV station yesterday: Because she could be any woman.
“I remain anonymous, yes to protect my identity.
But it is also a statement, that all of these people are fighting for someone they don’t know. That’s the beauty of it. I don’t need labels, categories, to prove I am worthy of respect, to prove that I should be listened to. I am coming out to you as simply a woman wanting to be heard.
Yes there is plenty more I’d like to tell you about me.
For now, I am every woman.”
Athena Pelton, a Minneapolis photographer, could be any woman, too. She went public yesterday with her story of being sexually assaulted. Three times.
The brother of a middle-school friend put his hand down her pants during a sleep-over. She was attacked again as a teenager. After a day of snowboarding, she awoke to find the man with one hand down her pants, another on her breast, and him screaming for her to wake up.
A third assault occurred on New Year’s Eve when, again, she awoke with a friend’s hands in her pants.
I’ve never shared these stories, the tragedies of my past. These men are the reason I was depressed in high school and tried to take my own life when I was 15.
They are the reason I shaved my head and dressed in men’s clothing when I was 17 in an effort to de-feminize myself, and they are the reason I decided to “just say yes” to losing my virginity instead of risking falling asleep amongst friends and yet again finding myself the victim of assault.
These three men, one of them still a boy himself at the time of my attack, are the reason I still struggle with healthy intimacy and feelings of self worth and crushing – fu***** crushing – shame. And they are the reason I’m terrified to be a woman, to be a mother to daughters, and to be alone with anyone of the opposite sex, despite the tenure, trust, or strength of our relationship.
I still don’t know how to navigate all of the things that I am and have become because of what these men took from me, and some days – especially days like today when sexual assault is going viral – are still a crazy struggle. But these men, these cowards and thieves, will no longer be the reason I stay silent.
1 in 5 women have been sexually assaulted. ONE IN FIVE. Which means you know more than one woman who has had this, or something like it happen to her. Sexual assault can be as (fu***** ridiculously) culturally appropriate as a woman getting her ass grabbed in a bar and as vicious and violent as rape.
It can also be – and often is – somewhere in between those two extremes. But no matter how or why or what it looks like it is still, is always, sexual assault. It is never justified, it is never boys being boys, and it is never okay.
She writes that it took her years to accept that none of the attacks was her fault.
My body, any woman’s body – unconscious or otherwise – does not and will not ever belong to anyone simply because it exists. Rape happens because some men are rapists. Sexual assault happens become some men sexually assault women. PERIOD. That’s the end of the discussion on “Causes of Sexual Assault.”
Staying silent hasn’t made the emotional scars go away, she writes, “and it hasn’t held the men who victimized me responsible for what they did to and stole from me. I’ve realized all too late that our voices are our strongest asset.”
(h/t: Adam McCune)
