On the rape of a friend

A friend of mine was raped several weeks ago.

It might seem self-indulgent to muck through my feelings about this, since it didn't and hasn't happened to me, and because I haven't seen her in almost a year, but I can only speak for myself. And when a criminal commits violence against one person, the crime emotionally victimizes the people around the physical victim, whether they're close by or far away.

I know several people who have been raped or otherwise sexually abused before I met them. It's the kind of thing that you eventually come to find out after knowing someone closely for a while. You begin to understand that person a little better, and soon you tend not to think about it unless it's specifically brought up. But I can't stop thinking abou the fact that this friend was raped so recently. Instead of already being part of the person I had come to know, it's altering her life now. Rape has pushed itself out of the abstract and into a reality that I still can't quite comprehend. I'm not quite sure how to deal with it. I can't imagine how horrible it must have been for her. I'm glad that I don't have first-hand knowledge of rape, yet somehow I wish I could know her pain so that I would know what to say.

The friend who told me about it said that she'd sort of felt invulnerable before it happened (even though our house had been burglarized when we were housemates), but that she didn't feel that way anymore. I mean, how many times have we all heard that most rapes are perpetrated by people known to mthe victim, that random violence is rare? Our little group was made up of feminists, women with strong personalities, women who would never walk alone at night if we could help it, who lock the doors at home and are friends and/or lovers of men who would never do anything like that. We took back the night and refused to be silent. We chalked anti-rape slogans on the university sidewalks together under the cover of night. We wrote angry, eloquent letters to the school newspaper when their resident reactionary schmuck columnist questioned the concept of date rape and lamented the demise of the"noble art of seduction." We read the statistics and the posters in the food coop that asked us to think about our six closest friends and guess which one of them would be raped that year.

But she wasn't date raped, and she wasn't walking alone on a dark street. She was in her own house when a stranger broke in and assaulted her. Her home proved no defense, and she's such a tiny woman -- I doubt she could have defended herself against the man the police believe is a serial rapist. Where can you run when you're trapped in your own home?

The police caught the man whom they think did it. I hope that they got the right man. Even if they did, though, it's hard to have much hope of justice. Will he get what he really deserves? Probably not. Funny how people like the Rev. Jim Bakker can get a 40-year sentence and rapists and murderers get fewer than 10 years all the time.

Fortunately, she is a strong person. She has a support system of her boyfriend, friends, and family to lean on. She is well. She refuses to keep it a shameful secret; she wants the people around her on a daily basis to know what happened to her. She feels lucky that she wasn't ootherwise seriously injured, lucky to be alive. She is.

I'm glad that she can say so. It has always seemed rather unhelpful at the very least to remind a rape victim that she is also a survivor, but I take it as a good sign that she thinks so herself. I've heard that she seems to be doing okay, considering her order. I can only wonder how long it will take before she stops thinking about it all the time, as I imagine she does...as I imagine I would. How long will it take for those close to her to be able to push it into the backs of their heads, to stop worrying about her well-being, about whether they might accidentally do or say something that might bring it all back in a flash?

I can't know the answers to these questions. As I ponder them, I will try not to think about her as a victim, but as the person I remember from classes, the Women's Center, and our parties -- smart, fun, caring, strong. We will all go on with our lives. But we are all the worse for her experience.

Sometime around June 1994