Nothing to hide

James* is a family friend who I have known almost my whole life. One night he started telling me how I had to watch out for people who would take advantage of me. I never thought he would be the one I would have to question. He kept lecturing me, telling me that I had to be careful but ensuring me that if I wasn’t careful, he would kill any guy to try to hurt me. He made me trust him, made my parents trust him. When my parents went to bed he asked me to go to the guest bedroom with him. I was about to turn away, so close to saying no and going to my room, but at the last minute I said yes. I said yes to going in his room, I said yes to kiss him, but I didn’t say yes to anything beyond that.

Every 107 seconds, a person is sexually assaulted. If you haven’t done the math, that is 1.3 million people each year. Only 54 percent are reported.

When most people think of rape they think of the sketchy man lurking in a dark alley, waiting for his next victim, who ends up being the women with the short skirt, high heels and caked-on makeup. The woman you think is “asking for it.”

In actuality, 93% of sexual assault victims know their attacker and 4 in 10 rapes take place in the victim’s home. Senior Annie* was raped in the beginning of the year in her own home. She wasn’t alone, instead her parents were upstairs, unaware of the events going on downstairs. James was a friend she had been close with for years, but he abused her trust.

“I should have gotten up and walked away the second I started feeling uncomfortable, but I kept going further and further away from my comfort zone,” Annie said. “No matter how much I wanted things to slow down, he didn’t, and I was too afraid to stop myself. I hadn’t said no, but I certainly hadn’t said yes. If there’s one thing I wish I knew at the time it is the saying ‘no ‘no’ does not equal yes.’ But, I allowed myself to believe I caused it.”

Rape is a criminal offense defined in most states as forcible sexual relations with a person against that person’s will. The phrase “by force” is one of the main aspects of rape that differentiates between consent and no consent. “By force” can mean actually holding a person down, using violence or some sort of weapon, coercion, manipulation, putting pressure on a person, threatening, blackmail, bribery or trickery.

“Saying ‘no’ is an obvious indicator that there is no consent,” said Ashlie Berg, history teacher and certified rape and sexual assault counselor. “But there are other ways that people say no or indicate they don’t want to do something without using the word no. If you were too scared to say no, that doesn’t mean that what happened was your fault. Only a clear and enthusiastic ‘yes’ means yes.”

Berg said that there is one commonality between all rape victims, male and female. They all believe they did something to deserve it, provoke it, or cause it. But, there is only one person to blame: the rapist. Especially in rapes where the victim is acquainted with their rapist, victims have a hard time differentiating between the person they knew as a friend and the person who took away their control and abused their relationship for personal gain in the most intimate way possible.

“Survivors have all these mixed emotions,” Berg said. “They have the sense that is was their fault, that they did something to deserve it and a lack of self-esteem and the blaming that comes with it. Another hallmark of sexual assault is they have a desperate need to make what happened okay, they will do whatever it takes to make life normal again.”

Annie felt mortified, after the incident she laid in bed feeling embarrassed. She thought her parents would be ashamed of her, so she kept what happened a secret except from her best friend, who she cried to the next morning.

“At home, I tried to pretend like everything was normal, when really it was the opposite. I was so stressed I couldn’t eat. James still came over all the time so I used running as an escape to get out of my house,” Annie said.

“My immune system was so weak from the stress that I started getting really sick. The secret I was keeping from my parents burdened me so much that it was hard being in the same room as them,” Annie continued. “One night in particular, everyone was sitting in the living room, and I felt so much tension that I started to panic. My throat felt like it was closing and my body was going numb.”

The stress that is induced from the trauma is often too overwhelming for the body and can often lead it to shut down the immune system.

“Your body remembers trauma even when you don’t,” Berg said. “Even after they feel like they have coped and have dealt with it, they can experience physical restrictions in their relationships. Their body still remembers that trauma and it has to work through that.”

Eventually, Annie decided to stop seeing James as much as she could. If he was at her house, she left and if he tried to contact her, she wouldn’t respond.

“Not having him as part of my life helped me heal, but even still he took a piece of me with him,” Annie said. “On the outside I seemed fine, but inside I was a lot more insecure and I questioned myself a lot. I tried to hide everything that was going on from my friends, but my body had other plans.”

One night at her friend’s house, Annie started experiencing seemingly unprovoked panic attacks. She went outside in an attempt to hide it from her friends. She tried to control her breathing on her own, but she couldn’t. She was outside for hours but she was too afraid to tell anyone why she was isolating herself.

The human body and mind are not meant to endure the amount of trauma that is associated with rape, and the stress can become so increasingly overwhelming that it can often lead to eating disorders, use of drugs, alcohol, resorting to self-harm, development of depression, severe anxiety attacks, and even suicide. They are left feeling powerless and often feel like they are all alone in the world with no one to turn to who will understand or believe them. They want to control what happened to them and make sense of the events that occurred.

“It is common for victims to go back to their perpetrator because it is a way to normalize the situation,” Berg said. “If she hangs around him again and nothing happens, then maybe it didn’t really happen in the first place. It is also to reestablish control over the situation.”

Annie felt that she had moved on and was ready to have contact with James again, so she started talking to him. He fell back into the brotherly role that he held before the rape. This led her to believe she was just overreacting to what happened in the past. In an attempt to prove herself that she was in control of the situation this time, she tried to reapproach a physical relationship with James.

“Before long, I found myself in the same vulnerable position I was previously in,” Annie said. “I thought I was going to be stronger this time, tell him no when I wanted things to stop. I was trying to make up for the last time. He made me believe that he was the only one that could care about me. He wore me down, broke me down, and all so that he could get what he wanted again.”

After James raped Annie the second time, she realized that the cycle needed to stop. The most important thing you can do to aid a rape victim is to give them back control over their life. Once the victim accepts that the rape is not their fault, they can find the closure they need to begin to move on.

“People are absolutely, abjectly and utterly terrified, which is why talking about rape is uncomfortable” Berg said. “They would rather just not deal with it and make up excuses for why it could never happen to them.”

After months of trying to deal with it on her own, Annie finally built up the courage to talk to a rape and sexual assault counselor. The counselor told her that what happened to her was indeed rape, even though Annie did not believe it fit the stereotype.

“I never saw myself as a ‘survivor’ until I talked to her, but surprisingly I wasn’t afraid to hear those words,” Annie said. “Instead, it was like a weight lifted off my shoulders. All this time I was blaming myself for something that happened to me, but hearing her speak to me validated that I was not to blame, he was in the wrong, not me.”

Rape can have an effect on the rest of a victim’s life, even after they heal. It becomes part of their story and identity, but it is also something that can make a person stronger. Victims can use their experience to help empower other rape victims, and to make a change.

“James will always be part of my past, and what happened to me will always be part of my story, but I get to choose how it ends,” Annie said. “So all I have to say to James is goodbye.”