Rape culture

Editor’s note: This story describes an incident of rape. The rape survivor’s name has been changed to Nicole to protect her privacy. Two years ago, when UW senior Nicole was 19, she studied abroad in France. To her, rape was something that happened to other people. She had always assumed perpetrators were deranged people, people she’d be able to spot from a mile away. One night, she drank a few beers in her dorm room with another UW student. After he left, Nicole went to bed — forgetting to lock her door. The two men who entered her room were not “deranged” strangers but rather a friend and an acquaintance, both of whom she had met in France. At first she thought it was a horrible dream, when the men removed her pajamas and began touching her genitals. They put something in her mouth, but she still doesn’t know what. All of a sudden, something in Nicole’s brain clicked, indicating that this wasn’t a bad dream. When she shot awake, the men left the room. Nicole sat, trying to make sense of what had just happened. She had always assumed rape involved intercourse, so she didn’t initially label this unwanted contact as “rape.” For a reason unknown to Nicole, the men returned. One perpetrator was extremely inebriated. Nicole noticed his eyes couldn’t focus. She gave them “verbal abuse” in multiple languages. The men then left and returned to bed. Nicole sat in her room shaking for hours. “[I was] feeling very dirty,” said Nicole. “And feeling like now that this has happened to me, I’m never going to have anyone love me, and no one’s ever going to look at my body and think, ‘this is a beautiful person.’ [I was] not really feeling connected to my body anymore … because it’s been kind of taken away.” * * * When you walk into a college classroom with 20 women, the odds are that four of these women, like Nicole, have been or will be the survivor of sexual violence during their college careers. It usually happens early on. More often than not, the women are freshmen. Sometimes it’s their first college party. Like Nicole, most know their rapists. In fact, 90 percent of college-age rape victims know the person who assaults them. Three-quarters of the time, the victim, survivor, or both, have been drinking. Nearly all victims stay silent. These statistics — from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, the American Association of University Women, and stories from women like Nicole — display a culture of silence where survivors are punished more often than their attackers. Many survivors wait months, even years, before coming forward with their stories. Nicole’s case is unusual; she told a close friend the next morning. Eventually, she told a few more friends back home. “I would preface it as this ‘weird thing’ that happened to me,” she said, initially recounting her story as “blasé.” Like many rape survivors, Nicole didn’t tell school officials, police, or her parents, who she said “like to worry.” And she doesn’t plan to. Ever. “I know how much pain it caused me, and I wouldn’t want them to have to go through that,” she said. It took Nicole a long time to identify that “weird thing that happened” as rape. She kept questioning herself: “What if I’d remembered to lock my door? What if I hadn’t been drinking — would I have woken up right away?” But ultimately, Nicole realized that she wasn’t to blame. Hollie Granato, a UW graduate student, works in a clinical psychology lab on campus studying the psychological effects of rape. Much of Granato’s research focuses on how rape survivors label their experiences. Whether a woman is intoxicated when she’s assaulted can change the way she labels her experience, Granato said. Many women will identify a drunken assault as a “hook-up” that falls into some gray area. Survivors often feel guilty about what happened and are too uncomfortable to admit they were raped. Many women also use the excuse of their drunken behavior to minimize the trauma. Survivors often think that if the details are fuzzy from drugs or alcohol, they shouldn’t turn to the police. Granato has worked with women who were assaulted while inebriated and drank more after being raped. It’s a coping mechanism, she explained. And a pathway to future rape. Nicole’s coping mechanism was more sex. After she was raped, she slept with numerous people, she said. Sometimes it was for power, to prove to herself that she could give consent. Other times, it was like she wanted someone else to take that power away again. * * * Many women, like Nicole, believe they’ll be able to spot a perpetrator before it’s too late. The cultural myth: a villainous man lurking in a dark alley. It’s not a guy at a party, a friend, or a boyfriend — it’s not someone you know. The reality is that, often times, rape victims do know their attackers. But many women don’t want to name perpetrators who are in their groups of friends because they fear it will disrupt social harmony. The fallout from a rape usually involves shame, guilt, anxiety, depression, and other symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). After being raped, Nicole became depressed, experienced symptoms of PTSD, and developed an eating disorder. She didn’t want to go to class or hang out with friends. There were weeks when she couldn’t do anything. Those weeks have shrunk to days, but even a year and a half later, she still struggles with anxiety and abjection. A year ago, during what she called the “brunt” of her PTSD, she dated a man whom she told about the rape. During the relationship, she struggled with mood swings and irrational decision-making. “I had a really hard time with intimacy,” she said. “What it caused in me was a really sharp separation between sex and love, and so when I would have sex, I would see it as a weird way to prove myself and get power.” Nicole still has nightmares, too. They’re not always about her perpetrators, but they are often about someone chasing her, cornering her, and raping her. Even now, she still struggles with irrational fear. “Sometimes I’ll go to bed and just be so afraid of nothing,” Nicole said. * * * When she told her friends her story, their reactions were always one of two things: anger or pity. They asked the same questions she had asked herself: “Were you flirting with him? Why didn’t you lock your door? You should always lock your door.” “I internalized a lot of victim-blaming,” Nicole said. “I was searching for what I did, what I could have done to prevent it, or what I did to cause it.” Nicole also said she felt ashamed because she didn’t experience all of the symptoms other survivors did. She’d Google resources for sexual-assault survivors, and when she discovered she didn’t have the same symptoms as other survivors, she wondered if she was emotionally broken or healing wrong. That’s one message she wants to get out to other survivors: There’s no “right” way to heal. “They’re not wrong, they’re not alone,” she said. Hollie Nguyen, a UW graduate student studying the social and psychological effects of rape, said women can be “slut-shamed” by their social groups after being raped. Victims rarely turn to the police first, and sometimes when they do, it leads to more victimization, Nguyen said. College-aged students often distrust police. This is especially true in certain ethnic groups that have historically experienced police brutality, Nguyen said. * * * Nicole didn’t turn to the police partially because she was in a foreign country where the native language was not her own, but also because she was afraid the UW would shut down the study-abroad program. She also didn’t want to report her friend to the police. As an advocate for sexual-assault victims, she wants perpetrators to be punished. But as a survivor, she didn’t want to get her friend in trouble. “I still don’t think he’s a bad person,” she said. “He didn’t plan this, he just really f----d up one night.” In retrospect, Nicole thinks there should have been some repercussions. She wishes he had been kicked out of the dorm, but even now, she won’t press charges. UWPD Cmdr. Steve Rittereiser works with rape victims who do go to the police. If there was one thing he could change about the judicial system, Rittereiser said he would educate juries about sexual assault. They’re often uninformed and assume that the college-party culture promotes promiscuous sex, he said. “The jury pool believes a woman who drinks is vulnerable and asking for sex,” he said. “They think there’s a level of promiscuity that occurs, [that] sex is expected to happen.” Even though Rittereiser encourages rape survivors to do what’s best for them, including forgoing legal action, he worries about the men who go free. “Whether or not they’re detected, there’s a percentage of people who are predatory,” Rittereiser said. “They’re seeking out people, looking for the drunkest woman.” * * * Melissa Tumas, director of the Sexual Assault & Relationship Violence Information Service, said the UW’s rape statistics align with the national average. Nicole doesn’t see the numbers changing, but Tumas said she hopes to see more women report rape. That would mean more survivors are breaking through cultural barriers and stopping the silence by telling their stories. “To keep doing this type of work, I have to hold onto hope that things are getting better, but it’s hard to tell,” Tumas said. She clings to this hope that societal norms will change, women will break their silence, and perpetrators will be punished. Still, rape culture is a serious problem on many college campuses and there is much work to be done. Nicole has begun working on behalf of other survivors. After she was raped, she said she had a lot of energy that she didn’t know what to do with. At first, it surfaced negatively, but now she is an advocate for victims of sexual assault. She currently works with multiple advocacy groups on campus and in King County. It’s not about seeing the numbers decline — something she doesn’t think she’ll see in her lifetime. It’s about helping others break the silence. “If I could take power over this thing that hurt me,” she said, “I feel like I win in the end.” Reach reporter Sarah Radmer at features@dailyuw.com. Twitter: @sarahradmer

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