The Effects of Victim-Blaming in a Rape Culture: A Journal By Krista Davis
Krista Davis 11th grade English Mrs. Smith April 10th, 2011
Imagine, you are eight-years-old sitting on your biological father’s lap in a nightgown and shorts reading him a story by candle light. You don’t know why until you feel him touch you where you were told no one should. You don’t like it so you say you have to go to the bathroom. You do, you cry, but then you go back because you are scared. As the night progresses, you move to the couch where he covers you with your baby blanket, a colorful crocheted blanket that you love; then he gets on top and you tell him you don’t like this so he lays back down and does what he did to you earlier. You still don’t like what’s happening and you feel a little sick inside so you roll off and say you’re going to the bathroom again. You cry, stop, and go back out again; after all, you were promised coffee and candy if you did what he asked. This time you go to the other side of the room, on the loveseat. Your father sits on the arm of it crying and asking what you want him to do. You cry and ask him to stop. He does. Two days later, your biological mother draws the truth out of you and calls the police. You have to answer so many questions and draw pictures of what you were wearing. You have to play with dolls in a dollhouse and set up the room just the way it was in your father’s room and then show what happened. You get to bring your favorite stuffed animal with you, Snoopy. You and Snoopy are asked to wave at the mirror: we have friends inside of it. You also have to go to the hospital and answer even more questions from strangers. You have to undress; you’re cold. You have to spread your legs while someone looks inside you, where you had already been hurt. But that isn’t good enough. They don’t see what they want so now you must
do something even scarier. You have to get on your hands and knees and bring your butt up so they can touch you more, and take pictures of your most private places. The doctors say there’s damage, so you must be telling the truth. Why wouldn’t you be telling the truth? You move in with your biological mom, her boyfriend, and his two kids. A couple months later you’re playing in a large closet with your mom’s boyfriend’s kids, Tim and Tiffany. You’re wearing a dress and tights in the dark. Tim says you can’t ever play with him again if he can’t see your private parts. You have no friends so you agree. He does the same to his sister. You go downstairs and tell your mom. She says you shouldn’t have let that happen, friends aren’t that important. You were eight with no friends. How were you supposed to know? You cry, you stop. You go to a courthouse and talk to the police and your lawyer about what happened with your biological father. You’re told you might have to testify, and you can bring your stuffed animal. This time it’s your tiger. You’re told that people are going to ask you a lot of questions that you won’t like. That they will say things to make it sound like you’re not telling the truth. Why wouldn’t you be telling the truth? You’re now ten and you live with your great aunt and uncle. They never ask about what happened so you do not think they believe you, or know what happened, so you never talk about it either. Your great uncle’s family member comes to visit and asks you to sit on his lap. You do because your family trusts him so why shouldn’t you? He puts his finger down the back of your shorts and into your underwear. You say you have to go to the bathroom. You go, you don’t cry, and then make an escape for your room. You don’t tell anyone because you shouldn’t have sat on his lap.
You’re fourteen and with your boyfriend. He’s cute and known to do sexual things with a lot of girls, but he’s yours now. How lucky. He tries to put his hands down your pants but you push off a fence and tell him “no”. You fall on the sidewalk and he gets on top of you; he forces his tongue into your mouth. You don’t like it but you’re supposed to. A couple days later, you’re hiding out in your sister’s playhouse in the backyard. Your boyfriend pulls out his penis and forces you to give him a hand job; you don’t like it and grab a hammer. He stops. You weren’t supposed to be with him, so you don’t tell anyone, plus, you’re supposed to like it. About a week or so later you’re sitting outside in the dark with him waiting for your mom to get home. He puts his hand down your pants and you don’t like it, even though you’re supposed to. You stop him and soon after you break up with him. You still don’t tell anyone because they would tell you that you knew what he does with girls, you should have expected it, and if you didn’t want to, you shouldn’t have gone out with him. But why wouldn’t you go out with him? You just wanted to be loved. You’re fifteen and your biological mother hits you because that’s what she does when she drinks, which is always. She then rips off your shirt and bra while screaming about how easy it would be to rape you and that’s why you went through what you did in the past. She then continues to claw at your hair and chest in front of other people until someone pulls her off you. You’re seventeen and “unfriend” an aunt off of Facebook. This turns into a huge argument that later leads to what your father did to you. Your aunt doesn’t believe you, because she “doesn’t know what really happened.” You tell her but she says, “That’s beside the point.” What’s beside the point? You just told her what she said she didn’t know. Your uncle holds the same view but if you told him, he might actually kill his brother, so you can’t. You have to let
him not believe you. Your grandma doesn’t think that her son could ever do something like that; you must be lying. Your other uncle, who you call your dad, never tells you how he feels.
August 1st, 2013 Dear Diary, Wow, I just found that paper in my box of stuff from 11th grade. I can’t believe I opened myself up like that to my high school teacher! I remember if felt somewhat good though. After all, one in three girls and one in six boys will be sexually assaulted by the time they’re eighteen (“Rape Culture”). Someone has to talk about it. I looked into why people don’t usually talk about their assaults and I found that a lot of the time the victim is blamed for their attack (Miller). People tend to blame the victim because maybe she wasn’t dressed modestly or she was drinking. Maybe she even invited the person back to her room. But I know that if the person doesn’t “stop and ask” and receive an “enthusiastic ‘yes’” (Gruber 432-433) they are on a dangerous line of possible rape. I was reading I realized how much I hate it when people say, “Oh well, maybe if she wasn’t drinking,” “she shouldn’t have been dressed that way” or ‘she should have known not to trust someone she didn’t know” (“Victim Blaming”) because all the times I was assaulted I knew the person, trusted them, and was dressed appropriately. What do those people have to say to me? Well, my teacher didn’t say a thing. She gave me a B- because of my grammar and apparently I didn’t quite grasp the assignment. I felt so upset that I told her so much and didn’t get any response, and got a B- on top of it. I felt like Mrs. Smith was saying my life, my personal story, was a B, not my paper. October 29, 2016
Dear Diary, I went out last night for Halloween and drank excessively. I don’t remember very much, which is unlike me. I’m glad I had my boyfriend Seth there to take care of me though. However, even though I had him, I still had my knife on me like always just in case someone tried to attack me. My knife makes me feel safe. Plus, if I was raped and I tried to use the knife, no one could possibly find a way to say I was asking for it or didn’t say “no”. I trust my boyfriend with all my heart (almost). I hate that I can’t trust him with all of it. Even though I know he wouldn’t touch me without my consent, I still had to ask questions to get answers without being obvious regarding what I was asking. He passed the test of course, but there’s always a little voice in my head saying “what if...” with everything I do and everyone I’m around. No one is safe from that little voice. One thing I learned in counseling is that “…rape is not perpetrated solely for sexual purposes but is a sexual act used to channel the offender’s emotions of power, anger, and control” (Jamel 279). This was a huge thing for me because I felt guilty in the past. I thought there was something I could have done. There wasn’t. The people who abused me in my past only wanted power over me. They wanted to use me to take out their anger, to exert control, to express violence. February 14th, 2018 Dear Diary, Seth and I just celebrated our 2-year anniversary yesterday and he proposed today!!!! I’m so shocked and happy I found someone who knows my deepest darkest secrets and all the horrible things that happened to me but still wants to spend his life with me. He knows I’m hard to handle and react irrationally at times because I’m triggered by the smallest of things, but he
doesn’t care, he helps me through it. I never thought a day would come when someone could want to marry a person like me, a person stitched back together after being ripped apart. July 18, 2025 Dear Diary, I just found out I’m pregnant with a baby boy! Seth and I are so nervous but know that we will do just fine. I hope we can instill in him to respect women even when we aren’t around. We hope for him to not blame any victim of assault just because it shakes his belief that only bad things happen to bad people and that we do not live in a just world (Bernard 501). I know it is very possible, if he has a girlfriend, that she will have probably suffered some type of sexual assault. I would hate for him to blame her on some level. Seth and I also hope that he will willingly stand up to his friends who perpetuate rape culture in hopes of educating them about respecting women as humans and not objects. I intend to be open to an extent about my assaults to him, as well as any other children I may have, so they can know that it can happen to anyone, and understand the way I act sometimes around men or why something small bothers me more than the typical person. March 13, 2027 Dear Diary, I’m pregnant again and it’s going to be a girl! Seth and I have decided to name her Joanie, after the woman I call my mom. I hope that we can keep her safe as she goes through this world and that she won’t experience assaults as I have. I’m a little nervous because I was assaulted by my father… will I worry every time my husband changes her diaper or gives her a bath? Will that always be in the back of my mind? May 30, 2045
Dear Diary, My daughter just married her long-time partner, Sarah, today. I’m so happy for them both! June 4, 2045 Joanie... Hospital... June 21, 2045 Dear Diary, My daughter has finally left the hospital. She was attacked. I hoped this would never happen to my children. Her “friend” decided to “convert her” to “show her what a man feels like.” I can’t process this still…. she and Sarah are staying with me for a little while until she feels comfortable going home (where she was attacked), she still won’t stop crying and blaming herself… June 29, 2045 Dear Diary, After Joanie told me about how her friend tried to convert her I researched acquaintance rape, as well as conversion rape, and here is what I found: Conversion rape is actually called “corrective rape.” Corrective rape is a hate crime where someone rapes another because of his or her sexual orientation or gender identity. The rapist’s intentions are to turn the victim heterosexual, which is not possible. Acquaintance rape is, “rape that is perpetrated by a person who is known to the victim” (“Acquaintance Rape”). Hopefully I can use this information when talking to those who may not understand our situation. June 30, 2045 Dear Diary,
Almost everyone is blaming my daughter for what happened. I can’t believe how uneducated people are. All I can do is to stand up and tell them, “No, there’s no way my daughter could have stopped it, how was she supposed to know he would do this? She trusted him because they had been friends for so long.” I have also been trying to educate people on sexual assault via social media by telling them about corrective rape and acquaintance rape. On top of that I reassure my daughter that it’s not her fault so hopefully she won’t sink into any of the guilt others are trying to make her feel (“Avoiding Victim Blaming”). I’m trying to find other ways to combat this victim blaming, but it’s so hard. People say my daughter “incited” it, and that she should just “forget” her rape. They also say she reacted the wrong way and that in a year she will be back to normal. All of these things are untrue. “Research has found that a vast majority of rapes are planned,” and that since “each rapist has his own pattern, the best thing a victim can do is follow her instincts.” Also, “victims who are not allowed to talk about the rape have a much more difficult time recovering from it” (“Sociology of Rape”). And to those who say that Joanie will be back to normal in a year, read what Szalavitz and Pruessner say: If abuse was of a sexual type, we saw changes in the somatosensory cortex, the area that processes input from the body to create sensations and perceptions,” says Jens Pruessner, associate professor of psychiatry at McGill University in Montreal. Somatosensory areas create a map of the body on the brain, with each region processing sensation from specific body parts. As compared with nonabused women, women who were sexually abused had thinning in the area where the genitalia were located. (Szalavitz n.p.)
They also say that: …abuse can interfere with development. To cope with overwhelming experiences of distress, the brain can alter patterns of signaling from the pathways involved, which can ultimately leave those regions underdeveloped from reduced input. The brain of a child who is raped, for example, may react by reducing the connectivity of the regions that were hurt… Although the prevalence varies depending on the severity and the amount of abuse, many sexual-abuse survivors report sexual problems in adulthood, including reductions in desire and sensation; sometimes they suffer from chronic genital pain. (Szalavitz n.p.) I was already so angry with those who said my daughter will be fine within a year, but once I found this information it made me want to scream. I am so frustrated at how uneducated this world is. Why can’t they see what they are doing to me, my daughter, and anyone who has experienced sexual assault? July 2, 2045 Dear Diary, I thought I should add in why my daughter was in the hospital for so long. Rape does not only affect the brain but the physical body as well. She had two black eyes, a broken nose, and a cracked rib. She also had tearing of her anus, and cuts in her vagina. Lastly, she had rope burns around her wrists from being tied down. July 5, 2045 Dear Diary, I’ve noticed that more men blame my daughter than women for her rape. I wondered why this was and decided to do more research. I found a journal that researched this and found that
“male participants generally reported more victim blame” (Bernard 503) when a woman was sexually objectified. This must be what is going on; Joanie has been sexually objectified, and not seen as a human being. I also found that “students with lower knowledge [of sex] and [a] higher acceptance of social norms that accept risky behavior are more likely to hold rape-myth attitudes” (Aronowitz 175). This leads me to believe that this is an educational issue as well as societal. Aronowitz writes, “sexual knowledge is an important factor in leading to prosocial attitudes” (179) and I intend to educate whoever I can so I can play my part in ending victim blaming. March 10, 2050 Dear Diary, Joanie is doing better. She and Sara decided to move to a new home, closer to me. They have a wonderful daughter named Sabrina, who is 2 ½. We are all worried for her future but are well educated on sexual assault and will never blame her if something were to happen. We know the psychological effects, we know how to take a stand, and we know how to fight.
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