From Silenced to Survivor

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FROM SILENCED TO

SURVIVOR Sexual assault is one of the most horrifying traumas imaginable. But with tremendous personal strength and the help of on-campus resources, victims can transform into survivors.

BY GINA EDWARDS AND KELSI BOWES PHOTO BY LOREN CELLENTANI

What began as an average night on the town with friends became a horrific event that Maria Behnke would never forget—one that would change her life, irrevocably.

While walking home after the night’s festivities, Maria and her friend had been followed by a stranger. Upon arriving to the apartment, the man attacked and assaulted her—first in her bedroom while her friend was elsewhere in the apartment. Afterward, the attacker kidnapped Maria and took her back to his home. For the next 16-18 hours he held her captive.

There he raped her multiple times.

Determined to be in complete control, he talked to Maria and became violent when he felt like she did not want to be with him. He made her food and offered it to her, but she did not have an appetite. Her refusal upset him. He wanted her to like him, to stay with him. But Maria just wanted to get away from him and go home.

“Am I ever going to make it home?” Maria thought. “Am I ever going to see my family again? Am I ever going to see my friends again?”

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Back at the apartment, Maria’s conspicuous absence concerned her friend. She called Maria’s mom and said, “I can’t find Maria.”

“What do you mean you can’t find Maria?” her mom said.

“Her cell phone and her keys are in the apartment. It is like she just vanished.”

Maria’s mom told her friend to call the police. The police then contacted Maria’s professors and her friends.

But no one had seen her and she had not attended class that day.

Meanwhile, Maria looked for ways to survive using whatever logic she could to persuade her captor to let her go. She knew that her survival hinged on not inciting his explosive temper.

She told her captor that people would be looking for her and if he didn’t let her go, someone was going to find her.

Eventually, Maria convinced him to release her. She found her way back to somewhere familiar and eventually reunited with her family.

“At the time, I didn’t know if I wanted to file a police report. I was rather scared of the individual,” Maria said. “…After having spent so much time with [him], he knew where I

By the time you say 3,000 puppies, 3,000 puppies are born in the United States.

lived; he knew personal information about me.”

She also felt shell-shocked. “No, that did not just happen to me,” she thought.

“I knew there was no physical evidence. I had been forced to shower, and some other things,” Maria explained. And with a background in criminal science and knowledge of how trials and investigations proceed, she recognized the necessity of physical evidence for conviction.

In the end, she chose not to file a police report but years later, she still thinks about it. Not reporting left her feeling silenced.

SEXUAL ASSAULT ON CAMPUS Sitting in his stark white office on a wintry afternoon in Athens, Andrew Powers, OUPD chief of police, emanates collected, stoic focus; his weathered exterior speaks to his experience with many painstaking cases similar to Maria’s. He describes the sexual assault problem on campus, including OUPD’s role in informing students of potential threats to their safety using e-mail crime alerts. To comply with the Clery Act, a federal mandate, universities must issue notifications when a crime occurs affecting university persons or property. OUPD looks at each incident as it arises, often evaluating off-campus incidents and notifying them if they pose a potential ongoing threat to Ohio University students.

“We don’t necessarily have to issue a crime alert for something that happened on Mill Street,” Powers says. “But because it’s so close to campus and it’s a predominantly student neighborhood we’ve decided to issue an email crime alert in those kinds of situations.”

In 2010, the most recent year for which OU has statistics, 12 accounts of sexual assault were reported, with eight in 2009 and nine in 2008. However, Powers warns that sometimes numbers can be misleading. Even though the number of sexual assaults went up, the number of reported rapes actually decreased. He also stresses that the “stranger in an alley with a knife” type of reports, similar to Maria’s case are actually the least common type of

sexual assaults he deals with; on OU’s campus, a much larger phenomenon of “acquaintance rape” occurs.

“This is somebody that the victim trusts and it probably happens in the victim’s own room or the perpetrator’s room,” he says. And unfortunately, these cases prove the most difficult to prosecute and can leave victims feeling unsupported by the system, Powers adds.

Also, students typically do not receive crime alerts regarding acquaintance rapes because OUPD knows who the assailant is and determines that he or she is not an ongoing threat to the campus community. Students received one raperelated crime alerts in 2009, three in 2010 and three in 2011.

To raise awareness and provide education about acquaintance rape, OUPD has worked in conjunction with the Office of Health Promotions on campus. Powers believes that this growing awareness has allowed people have become more comfortable coming forward to the police in the last few years. To him, this explains the increase in number of reported sexual assaults as opposed to the occurrence of more incidents. He credits the Survivor Advocacy Program, a service on campus, for helping to cultivate a more survivorfriendly environment.

“They have someone to talk through and process it with and that increases the chances that they’re going to find that reporting and prosecuting is part of the healing process for them as a survivor,” he says. Since its inception in Fall 2010, the Survivor Advocacy Program has served campus community members who have undergone sexual assault, dating/domestic violence and stalking.

Former SAP coordinator, Lindsey Daniels, has worked in the field of sexual assault and related violence for about a decade, and discusses the matter with an obvious passion for helping survivors overcome the aftermath of their traumas.

After an incident has occurred, victims can come to the center to find help.

Once there, the survivor advocates talk with each person, and figures out what the right next steps to take are, if any at all. Daniels emphasizes that they do not try to make decisions for people, but serve as confidential sounding boards and resources to help survivors find clarity and encourage them to take any

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DID YOU KNOW? Legally speaking, in the state of Ohio you must get consent before impairment. Both parties must be sober to not be in sexual violation.

-Terry Koons, Office of Health Promotions

You can use the Survivor Advocacy Program services even if the assault, relationship violence or stalking behaviors occurred before coming to college, while at home or while abroad.

-Lindsey Daniels, Survivor Advocacy Program

If you are sexually assaulted and choose to have a medical evidentiary exam, you will not have to pay for it and it will not show up on your insurance.

The Ohio Attorney General’s office pays for the exam.

-Lindsey Daniels, Survivor Advocacy Program

If you have been engaging in illegal activity (such as underage drinking or drug use) when the assault occurs, it is highly unlikely that OUPD will actually investigate or bring any charges against you.

-Chief Andrew Powers, OUPD backdropmag.com

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60% 73% 43% of sexual assaults are not reported to the police.

of sexual assaults were perpetrated by a non-stranger.

of rapes occur between 6:00pm . . and midnight.

1 in 6 women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime.

and 1 in 33 men will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime.

Every 2 minutes, someone in the U.S. is sexually assaulted.

There is an average of

207,754

victims (age 12 or older) of rape & sexual assault each year.

http://author.oit.ohio.edu/womenscenter/advocacy/SAinfo.cfm | http://www.rainn.org/

action they deem necessary. “‘Encourage’ is a very different word than making a decision for somebody or even swaying somebody down that path… maybe reporting to the police is not the right option for them,” Daniels says.

In their conversations with survivors, the advocates provide helpful information and services that they may not have known about that can help make the recovery process easier.

For example, the Ohio Attorney General’s office will pay for the medical evidentiary exam so that it will not show up on the survivor’s insurance. Also, if the survivor is in an uncomfortable housing situation, they can facilitate a move to make them feel more at ease. Or if a student has a class with the perpetrator

OHIO UNIVERSITY POLICE DEPARTMENT 22

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or one with upsetting subject matter, the advocates can assist them in making arrangements.

“Some people have barriers or they think they have barriers to accessing different services, and if you can talk to them about why they feel there’s a barrier, maybe you can overcome that,” Daniels says. Because the program offers its services to anyone who has dealt with these things regardless of when they happened, in the mere year and a half that the program has existed, it has served 60 survivors.

According to SAP’s website, 60 percent of sexual assaults go unreported, and approximately 73 percent of rape victims know their assailant.

(740) 593-1911

88 University Terrace Athens, Ohio 45701

The brain is the one part of the body that does not feel pain.

MOVING FORWARD

PREVENTION

After the incident, Maria tried to continue on as though nothing had happened.

“It happened in the middle of the week. I had a test a few days later, got the highest grade in the class,” she said. “Continued on with a 4.0 that quarter and continued on with my classes and graduated.”

Her high grades masked Maria’s emotional turmoil.

She attended therapy, receiving a diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). One symptom of PTSD is the repression of traumatic events—something Maria had done by throwing herself into academics. To Maria, her school life felt like the one thing she could manage.

“I felt like every other aspect of my life was outside of my control,” she said. “And I felt very powerless after it happened.”

After the assault, Maria had recurring nightmares and didn’t want to be alone; even though she had survived, she still feared that he would come after her again. But he didn’t.

When Maria eventually began to process what happened to her, she had difficulty reconciling the fact that she had been raped by a total stranger and held captive for nearly 24 hours.

Despite these emotional hardships, she eventually moved forward.

Now, Maria is the Women’s Affairs Commissioner for Graduate Student Senate and a graduate student in the Philosophy department of Ohio University.

As the Women’s Affairs Commissioner, she seeks to create a safe and healthy environment for women on campus, primarily focusing on graduate students. She took part in “Take Back the Night” and “Walk a Mile in Her Shoes” this fall quarter. Maria’s commission also raised over $500 for the Survivor Advocacy Program so that it could bring in Alex Leslie of the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center, to host a “Men Can Stop Rape” event.

And in a recent letter-to-the-editor in the Post, Maria found a way to get her voice back. She wrote in to raise awareness about the programs such as “Walk a Mile in her Shoes,” hoping to turn her traumatic experience into something positive.

“Writing the letter, it felt good because my voice…I had felt very silenced. My power had been taken from me,” she said. But writing the letter gave her back her voice and her power.

Other organizations on campus have also made fighting the sexual assault issue a main priority through prevention. Terry Koons, Associate Director of Health Promotions at OU, is the main man behind the ever-familiar “Beyond the Buzz” and “Don’t be that guy” posters. The images and slogans on the signs seek to inform students about the consequences that can arise from high-risk behaviors like binge-drinking.

“They’re kind of exaggerated. And people might look at them and they might laugh at them but the idea is that people can see themselves in the picture,” Koons says. He adds that their audience surveys about the posters indicate that 80 percent of people who read them believe the message. The overriding message that they attempt to send is that friends should look out for one another and try to prevent sexual assaults from occurring.

“We would rather focus on how do we stop it from happening rather than waiting until it happens and then dealing with the consequences,” he says. Koons adds that the posters and other promotions also tie together alcohol use and sexual assault since many students use alcohol to engage in sexual activity. That puts both parties at risk for sexual assault since, legally, consent must be obtained before impairment. This has lead Koons toward the idea for the next poster campaign, which plans to have the slogan “Hook up, Then have fun,” meaning that students should engage in sexual activity before consuming alcohol.

Other student-based preventive measures also exist on campus. OUPD offers Rape Aggression Defense (RAD) training at Ping and the SAFE-T patrol, a service which provides walking escorts for those walking to and from different points on campus. According to statistics from OUPD, the service was used 383 times in the 2010-2011 school year—271 in 20092010 and 185 in 2008-2009.

SURVIVOR ADVOCACY PROGRAM It is illegal to throw a snake at anyone in Toledo.

HELPING OTHERS Through what happened to her, Maria strives to promote education and advocacy on Ohio University’s campus. And through her letter-to-the-editor, she hoped to create a catalyst to empower others to do the same.

She also wants to give hope to other victims of sexual assault that becoming a survivor, although it may be difficult, is possible.

“I was victimized at the time, but by no means do I consider myself a victim anymore. I’m a survivor,” said Maria. “…even though it’s a struggle. That success and happiness, getting your life back, is entirely possible.”

740-597-SAFE

44 University Terrace Athens, Ohio 45701 backdropmag.com

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