This sexual assault awareness month it’s my goal to bring attention on campus to the men who need to have those difficult conversations with their friends about sexual assault— to give a story to the statistics.
I was raped the fourth week of my freshman year. By someone I knew and trusted. Not a random drunk frat guy at a party at 1AM–a sober football player on a Monday afternoon.
It was traumatic, yes. But a major part of the trauma I didn’t anticipate was the way I felt dismissed by our mutual friends.
“I don’t know what you expect me to do; he’s my teammate,” people said to me repeatedly on campus. I felt like they couldn’t see me. How could they not see that standing with him was personal for me?
“My sisters would have fought back,” his teammate, my friend, told me as I begged him to just listen to why I felt angry, to understand how hurt I felt by everyone yet still needed them to understand how unjust and humiliating this all was for me.
“You’re just the girl who cries wolf,” my own sister said to me in a moment of anger. I had never felt more alone than in that moment.
It was like suddenly everyone knew of the rape, and they didn’t want to get to know me for anything beyond that.
The athletes I always hung out with started coming up with excuses for hanging out with my rapist. I didn’t feel like I could count on anyone; it was surprising how little support I received. The rape happened too close to the beginning of the year–any of the new friendships I had started to foster slowly dissipated. I had no control over how the people on my campus perceived me. Everyone knew my assault, but no one knew me.
And I was further isolated by the fact that so many aspects of the aftermath of my sexual assault weren’t included in the orientation training four weeks prior. There were questions about things happening to my body that I couldn’t talk to anybody about. For example,
What was I supposed to do when I was constantly bleeding afterwards?
I couldn’t leave my room except for the occasional meal for fear of seeing him. My life consisted of being curled up in bed all day, with my legs constantly pressed together tightly. My only movement for hours was the anxiety-filled rocking back and forth to calm myself down.
My friends didn’t know how to interact with me. They didn’t know how to help me when tears silently streamed down my cheeks, tainted pink from embarrassment when I couldn’t walk down the stairs of a campus building because of the pain he inflicted upon me.
My own body was the crime scene. I couldn’t escape what had happened to me: I was living inside the biggest reminder of it.
I felt guilt for putting my life on hold and grieving the person I was before the assault. I became a ghost of myself.
There felt like nothing more to me than being “the girl who was raped.” I didn’t know where the trauma ended and any part of me began.
The summer before my sophomore year had lasted two months, but it felt like a short, blissful, few weeks knowing my body was safe from my rapist. I spent my days dog walking and painting again. Then one humid summer night, a few weeks before the school year started again, the football team walked into the restaurant where I worked, arriving back on campus for summer camp. I was terrified.
I stopped in my tracks. The hair on my arms rose as my thoughts started racing, and my breath quickened. I quickly asked my coworker to seat the team as I ran off to the bathroom. I suddenly became self-conscious of the leggings I was wearing, worried they were too revealing. I wasn’t ready to face the football team again, him again. I felt just as exposed as I had that night, nobody there to help protect me as I rushed to the bathroom stall to take deep breaths.
This soon? I kept thinking.
After seeing all his teammates walk in, I quit before I had the chance to see him too that night. It felt like no matter what I did, I saw him in every face, turned head, or deep voice. Even my job wasn’t a safe place.
My fear of not being ready to face him again led to me being in a psychiatric hospital for the first time.
For the next week, group therapy at the hospital was my safe place to prepare for school starting again in a few weeks. The sterile smell and moss-colored walls were a welcoming environment from the one I had been living in for a year full of terror and distress. My nervous system was finally able to take a break.
My therapy group was full of women: Women who were mothers, students, and nurturers. These were women who saw the world through the same lens as me. I was able to connect with older women on the shared basis of both being assaulted and victims of the shame that accompanies it. Seeing that their world didn’t end after assault, but their rage remained, even decades later, served as a roadmap for how I wanted to approach entering my sophomore year of college.
I became aware of how little control I felt I had over how I was perceived on campus. If I was going to be associated with rape, I wanted to use that to foster a community of change. I created a survivor support group through a class initiative. I found there were too many girls who had gone through the same experience as me. We were bonding over sexual trauma instead of our shared love of Barbie like most girls our age. I was making connections with people I would not have otherwise interacted with.
This led to a deep desire to educate the men on campus about what happened to me and why they should care in the first place. The college never taught them what to say when they learn their friend was sexually assaulted, or how to navigate the changing relationships and uncomfortable team dynamics that would accompany solidarity with a teammate’s victim.
With the help of like-minded women, I had found my voice. And I wasn’t just using my voice to talk about sexual assault on college campuses. I was running a student organization centered around liberating the Palestinian people, holding protests, talking to community leaders, and helping open the eyes of my peers. I wasn’t just an advocate for women who had been sexually assaulted; now I was a social activist who was proud to take up space and piss off a lot of people on campus.
My resilience is a salient reminder of what I’ve come to recognize: I am not just a victim; I have a lot to offer. Every morning, I look at a painting I made during my seminar freshman year of college: I’m curled up with the influential words that dominated my life surrounding me after my rape. It’s a simple piece, but it shows the core of me didn’t change when I look at what I’m accomplishing now.
Yes, being raped at college was an event that changed my life, but it didn’t change or diminish my value and contributions as a human being.
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