More posts about rape

I have lately gotten ridiculously pissed off at the number of movies that have rape scenes in them, but have no indication of this in the reviews or description. Not that they need to give away plot, but if in the ratings system where we point out a movie might contain swearing (my god!), it would be nice if they also mentioned the movie features sexual assault. Maybe they figure this is covered under “adult situations,” puke.

I do not like getting blindsided by rape in a film. If I wanted to see a movie, I would watch it regardless of a rape scene. But to be watching a movie, see a situation begin to escalate, and know, “Oh, in about twenty minutes there’s going to be a rape because the writers are too lazy to find a way to illustrate a male character is cruel without having him rape a woman, or writers can’t create female characters that don’t get raped or married, or we are going to be disingenous and have a ‘rape’ scene instead of just putting hardcore pornography in the film.”

So, since this has been a theme lately, I decided to practice what I preach and warn everybody: this is going to be another rape post.

A while ago, Just a Girl did a post in response to the T-shirt created by Jennifer Baumgardnner that says, simply, I Was Raped. The shirt obviously caused a bit of controversy, which I’m not going to touch on her because most of it was nasty shitty misogynistic crap — when it wasn’t just thinly veiled “la la la I’m not listening I don’t want to know who was raped” — that is just going to get me all pissed off again. Also, I already wrote about it here.

Just A Girl felt that, in the midst of people making assumptions about what rape victims need or want, it was perhaps prudent to just ask them. So she did, and got quite a few responses. One of them was from me:

Believe me.

Anything else you can say or do might be comforting or gauche or unnecessary or awkward or perfect or just what I needed at that very moment.

But none of it is as important as believing me. People are imperfect and will say or do the wrong thing, and I don’t expect anybody to have the “right” reaction to something so monumental and painful and traumatic and scary as rape. In retrospect I can think of all the things I could have done “right,” but I can’t hold that against myself, and I don’t hold it against anybody else, saying or doing the wrong thing when they hear my story. Until you’re confronted with rape, you never know how you will feel or react.

But I can forgive them, I can understand them, and more importantly I can trust them enough to tell them how I feel about what they have said or done, if they have only believed me.

If you do not believe me, we have nothing more to say to each other ever ever again.

Just recently, Just A Girl started thinking more about what it means to believe an alleged rape victim, especially with the possibility of false accusations. Here is what she decided:

Believe me.

I will believe you.

I once asked a question: when a sexual assault survivor makes the decision to speak about their experience, what can we do to support them? I am grateful for all of the responses: one in particular has been on my mind recently. It was, in short: believe me.

How should a feminist handle the reality of false rape accusations? To deny that they happen is to do a great disservice to the wrongly accused and actual sexual assault survivors, as well as feminism itself. There are far too many real sexual assaults for feminism to have any reason to rely on the myth that false accusations never happen in order to raise awareness.

I’ve searched, and I’ve yet to be able to find a conclusive study I’m satisfied with regarding what percentage of reported sexual assaults are actually false. Statistics given range anywhere from 2% to 50%, with criticisms of each and every number given abounding. Some factors that must be taken into consideration when examining these statistics and how they’re gathered/interpreted include:

1. Many studies include cases where the wrong man was convicted, but not through a false report. In other words, an assault did take place, but, due to circumstantial evidence, mistaken identity, and/or the lack of reliability of eye witness testimony, an innocent man was found guilty but later cleared, possibly through DNA evidence.
2. Some cases are dismissed as unfounded; while they could very well be false reports, a lack of evidence with which to press charges does not mean that no assault occurred.
3. Sexual assault is underreported, especially incest, male-male, female-female, and female-male assaults; a percentage of false reports is taken from the number of reports, not estimated number of actual assaults.
4. And, of course, there are factors such as intimidation/shame that could cause someone to recant, the bias of law enforcement, etc.

So, I don’t have a number I feel comfortable giving you: all I feel that I can say at the moment, as someone who is not qualified to analyze much of anything, is that false rape accusations happen, and that I don’t know how common they are. I do know that a false accusation can mean many things besides the “evil rejected bitch seeking vengeance” or the “morning-after regret.”

So, what about the falsely accused man (or woman)? In the United States, we are (supposedly) assumed innocent until proven guilty: the media frequently does not see it that way. While, ideally, we would have a media who understood that compromising our justice system for entertainment’s sake, it looks as if that’s not going to happen any time soon. I think that it is important that the identities of all accused of any crime, not just those accused of sexual assault, be protected in the same manner that the identities of sexual assault survivors are.

However, it must be said: that assumed innocent until proven guilty thing? It works both ways. When a woman reports a sexual assault, we must assume that she is innocent of making a false accusation until absolutely proven otherwise.

I am not the justice system in America, nor am I the media. I am not a police officer or a jury. I am someone who wishes to support others. I self-identify, among other things, as a feminist. How do I, personally, proceed?

I will believe you. If you tell me your story of sexual assault, I will believe you. Male or female, friend or stranger, younger or older, I will offer my help and support as best (and surely woefully inadequately) I can.

She got a few responses, one from another blogger who described her experience of both knowing rape victims and those accused falsely, and one from a troll stating that 50% of rape accusations were false and Just A Girl ought to be ashamed of herself for believing alleged rape victims.

For just a second I want to address this. If we give the troll the benefit of the doubt that he is concerned about false rape accusations and the lives they destroy (which I do not think is the source of all his concern or vitriol), this was a pretty stupid place to extend his concern. To whit: I work at a place that works with adopted children. We have, on occasion, had people call us very irate that we do not work with couples experiencing fertility issues. That does happen to be a topic that is tangentially related to adoption, it’s true. But it is not our focus. We are not the infertile couples resource. We are an adoption resource, and we are not obligated to cover everybody’s bases all the time. Why? Because we said so, quite clearly, though for some reason you called us to be snotty anyway.

It is true that false rape accusations happen. But this was not a post about the judicial system or laws. It was a post about relating to on a person-to-person level, about reacting to a sensitive divulging of information that has incredible personal and emotional meaning. It is about how we react to the person who does the divulging, not the alleged rapist, and not the police, and not the courts.

To be even more benefit of the doubty for the troll, Just A Girl wasn’t even talking about REPORTED RAPES. Let’s say we discover, somehow, magically, concretely, that it’s completely true that 50% of all reported rapes are false accusations. That number has no bearing on the truth or falsity of unreported rapes, which, according to survey data, make up the vast majority of sexual assaults in this country.

Okay, done with that. The last response Just A Girl got was from me:

This got long, I apologize. I thought about making it a post on my blog, but I really did just want to respond to and not write my own post.

As the one who originally left that comment, I appreciate this. And I think you’ve made some really good points, about innocent until proven guilty working both ways, and also about being sensitive about the identities of the accused. I wonder, if we did pursue anonymity of the accused, whether that could lead to rape cases being taken more seriously, if we could then throw out the argument that it’s a vindictive woman ruining a man’s life, and reduce the media circus that exploits our cultural ambivalence about sex and rape and women and “perfectly nice” men.

I guess I wanted to say something about what being believed means personally to me, though I don’t want that to take away from what you’ve said, or what being believed means to other women.

For me, being believed is more about safety than it is about validation or support. The validation is important, the support is great, but I know that in the end this is all mine to cope with, and mine alone, so I can’t count on or expect validation or support from anybody but myself.

I don’t require the world to validate or support me, for no reason other than I said so. Nobody has to believe me. But the reasons why a person does or does not believe me tells me a lot about who I am and am not safe around. If I tell somebody — a friend, an acquaintance, a coworker, the internet — that I was raped, and their immediate response is to ask me whether I reported it, and whether I fought back, and whether maybe I’m just vindictive, and whether maybe it’s my fault, too, or how could it be rape if he was your husband, that is a person it is not safe for me to be around. That is a person capable of rationalizing any number of reasons why rape is not rape, and so that is a person who is capable of raping me or somebody I love.

I didn’t report my rape. I did not feel safe speaking to the police or a judge. I did not think they would believe me, because he was my husband, because it wasn’t “violent,” because I was pursuing a divorce at the time and must surely be vindictive. I realize now how unsafe the entire legal structure of the U.S. is to me, and that has been one major thing that has changed since the rape. I do not trust this country to value my life. I do not trust it to consider me human. I can no longer be optimistic or involved in politics or changes in administration, because I do not think it will fundamentally change the fact that my body is property.

Beyond that, though, I have not been particularly quiet about my rape. I don’t have the luxury anymore of pretending that rape is something that happens, out there, somewhere, that it is not somebody you know, that it is not something you will deal with, viscerally, the rest of your life. I don’t see why I should give anybody else that luxury. I don’t see how anybody has earned the right to be ignorant. So I tell a lot of people. And I’ve found that in the times when I do not wish to tell a person, there are two reasons: either I just don’t feel like talking to this particular person about it, or I am afraid of how they will react. If it’s the latter, that is a person I have to take out of my life, for my own personal safety. If I ever find myself in a workplace, or social event, or relationship where I fear to talk about my rape because I fear having to defend myself and my right to not have sex, I need to leave that place immediately, because I am surrounded by people who do not think I own my body.

This is not to say that anybody who doesn’t believe a rape accusation is themselves a potential rapist. There can be a lot of legitimate reasons not to believe a rape accusation. And I have had some friends who, I felt, were going through something similar to what I went through: disbelief, shock, denial, this-can’t-really-be-happening. That, I felt, was an inability to process this new information about how dangerous and horrible the world really is. That was different than being disbelieved because of subtle insinuations that perhaps I am a whore who deserved it.

If the reasons that somebody doesn’t believe me are because they suspect I secretly wanted it, or it wasn’t that bad, or it’s not rape because I didn’t call the police, or any other way to make rape not-rape, then I will say that person is a potential rapist. The sheer epidemic of rape in this country cannot possibly be maintained solely by deranged strangers in the bushes and alleys. For a country to have 1/6th of its population sexually assaulted, and to not have the corresponding 1/6th in jail, the epidemic must be maintained by people who manufacture reasons why it wasn’t rape at all, or not a bad rape, or not a rape anybody should be punished for. People who believe that there is any circumstance or context in which a man having sex with a woman who has said no is not rape are people who may easily rape others, because they don’t consider what they’re doing to be wrong. And they are people who will support other rapists, because they haven’t done anything wrong either.

This is why I think believing a rape victim is the most important thing you can do. You are telling her that you will not hurt her, you will not rape her, you will not allow somebody else to rape her, if you can possibly stop it. You are telling her that in this world where she is statistically likely to be raped again, she can know it won’t be by you. This is crass and cynical and frankly fucking horrible, but it’s the world I live in now. I cannot meet or speak to a person without putting them into one of two categories in my mind: is this somebody who would call rape consensual, or is this somebody who would call it rape? I don’t have the luxury of not thinking this way anymore, because I know it could be anybody. I know it could be anybody, and I know I have to be prepared.

It’s late and I have another post to make, so I don’t really want to type anymore about this, or put together some kind of masterful conclusion. This is, really, part of an ongoing dialogue, both in my head and with the outside world, so I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to try to conclude it or tie it together anyway. Rape is so broad, so prevalent, and it touches so many people in so many ways. This is just one piece of my rape, and how it continues to be in my thoughts, and be a part of my life and personality, nearly two years after the fact.