When Your Sexual Assailant is an Advocate Against Sexual Assault
I'm probably the last person you would expect to have been sexually assaulted. I'm wildly outspoken. Boys frequently tell me that I scare them. I'm very guarded in my relationships.
Maybe it's fitting that I'm not a "typical" sexual assault survivor (if there is a such a thing) as my story doesn't fit the mold for what most people consider sexual assault.
In the light of full disclosure, I have been sexually assaulted twice. Once as a long slow process over the course of a year and once in a single, rotten night. I'm not telling my story because I feel that what happened to me is in any way uncommon—1 in 4 women are sexually assaulted—but because what distresses me isn't my assault, but the attitude of my assailant.
Over the course of a year I was subjected to what could be characterized as light gray sexual assault graduating to dark gray (sexual assault always seems to be a gray area). It started with little things: making sexual jokes directed at me, inquiring in a crude way about guys in whom I might be interested. Once he looked through my phone and sent (in my opinion) a desperate text to hang out with a guy he knew I liked.
But over the year, bit by bit, it got more alarming. He would isolate me at parties, try to get me to leave with him, especially if he knew that I was extremely drunk he would try to take care of me. After one especially drunken night of which I only remember bits and pieces my friends told me I hooked up with him. When I tried to protest the response was "Yea right, we all know you wanted to."
I felt disoriented. How could I want to do something that I didn't remember doing? How do I know, even now, that at the time I didn't want to do it?
Up to this point, I'm not certain if I would call what happened to me sexual assault. I was made to feel uncomfortable. But what person who has attended college—guy or girl, for that matter—hasn't been made to feel uncomfortable in this way?
The turning point was the first night I ever browned out and when I replay it in my head, which I do frequently as a I try to rationalize, I sort everything into what I know and what I don't know.
I know that he kept coming up to me and telling me he was going to walk me home. I know that this made me nervous so arranged plans with another guy at the party who was going back to my dorm and who I knew would only ever be a friend. I know I told him that and he ignored me.
"I'm going to walk you home."
"No, I don't want you to."
I know he walked me home. I know that as we did he touched me in places that I certainly didn't want him to (and I mark this as the point at which this becomes dark gray—the part where I know I was sexually assaulted). I know that when we got to my dorm we met some mutual friends in the elevator.
"Are you two going to hook up?"
"Yes."
"No."
I don't remember how I ended up leaving the party. I don't remember much about walking back. I don't remember how I ended up back in my room. I do know that I ended up back in my room alone.
It's been about four years since all of this happened. I developed coping mechanisms. I act normally around him—or at least I think I do. I didn't tell anyone what happened to me for three years and only a handful of people know who it was that assaulted me. It took me about three years to admit to myself that I was sexually assaulted. I don't like to think of myself as vulnerable.
If this hadn't happened to me, if I was looking at this situation from an outside perspective, the feminist in me would be livid that I never told anyone, never reported it. I've often asked myself if I have put other girls in danger by not reporting what happened.
This is where my story becomes atypical and this is where I rationalize my behavior: the guy who sexually assaulted me openly advocates against sexual assault.
The year after our freshman year he had to leave school for mental health reasons, and when he came back to campus he was a scion of reform in how mental health is treated at our school. It follows that sexual assault survivors fall under the umbrella of people he is trying to help.
I've often wondered at this apparent hypocrisy. It totally unhinges me when he posts articles about sexual assault. Don't you know what you did? Don't you ever think about it? But then I think, this isn't worth it. Life has punished him enough, I don't need to add to that punishment.
Ironic as it may seem, I didn't have a coping mechanism for this paradox until I was sexually assaulted for a second time.
There was no gray area this time. I hooked up with a guy and even when I said no, he did what he wanted to anyway. I woke up the next morning, bleeding a little, feeling weak, and absolutely furious with myself. How could I let this happen again? There were signs. I know I saw them and I know I ignored them because I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Even now, I feel guilty naming either of these incidents as sexual assault. What would both either of them say if they knew that I felt they sexually assaulted me? Would they feel accused? Did they think they had consent?
And herein lies the problem, in my opinion, surrounding the entire dialogue of sexual assault: No one talks about it with the people who are doing it.
Writing this I feel that I am one of dozens maybe even hundreds of young women who have told their stories through the media. I feel horrified and ashamed that I am not brave enough to talk to either of these young men. I would rather write about it and hope that maybe they'll see it, maybe they'll recognize a certain familiarity and maybe they'll try to talk to me about it.
I don't need their apology. I don't need them to be punished. I need them to recognize what they did. I need stop feeling like I'm over-reacting, like I'm overly sensitive, that I'm making a big deal out of nothing.
Because that's how I feel. Whenever my assailant posts an article, writes a long Facebook post about the wrongs of sexual assault, it makes me feel stupid. I feel like no one would ever believe me.
I don't have the answer for how to solve the problem of sexual assault. In a perfect world I would be able to say to him: You advocate against sexual assault, but have you looked at your own behavior?
But we don't live in a perfect world. So instead I'm writing this article.
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