Over recent months rape has moved to the forefront of conversations. Maybe it's time to listen to the victims.
Note: The story below is an excerpt from our March/April 2015 issue. For the full story download our FREE iOS app or view our digital edition for FREE today!
The identities of the women who agreed to talk about their rape and near-rape experiences for this story are hidden at their request.
Francis is a tall, attractive, 59-year-old, never-married owner of a small Roanoke company. When she was in 9th grade, she was gang-raped by a group of boys on the track during gym class.
“The boys cornered me, beat me and then one of them took his penis out. It got ugly,” she recalls.
“I was crying and another boy forced me to [his penis for oral sex]. They all took a turn, one after the other. Fortunately, they were young, so they didn’t last long. When they’d finished, they zipped up and proceeded to kick me. The bell finally rang and they all went back to class, happy as clams. I lay in the high jump pit, crying, disheveled, dirty.” They had not been missed by the gym teacher.
Francis cleaned up the best she could and went back to the gym.
“I was dirty, walking like a zombie and didn’t know what to do. There was no one I could tell, no one anywhere. So I went to class.”
There she met a second indignity: “I was late for class and the teacher took it as an affront that I would be late and disheveled. She berated me, gave me an F for the day and told me to sit in the hallway for the period and contemplate the error of my ways. It was a horror. I sat in the dark hall just blank. Fortunately, it was the last class of the day.
“I walked home – about three miles. I’d stopped riding the bus because of bullying. My parents saw that something was wrong and thought I’d just had a bad day. The next day, the boys who raped me were full of themselves and they beat me again.
“Then, in earth science class, the teacher, who was the husband of the teacher who had punished me the day before, called me in front of the class, said I had insulted his wife and proceeded to beat me. I was like a chunk of wood, numb. I got up and went back to my seat. Something died in me that day.”
A brutal rape at the University of Virginia reported in late 2014 brought one of our most savage, life-changing and hidden crimes screaming to the conscious surface.
It forced many of us to take a close look at a crime that for far too long has been hidden, denied. Sexual assault – of which rape is a subset – is one of the most underreported and one of the least understood of all crimes.
Sexual profiler John Perry, a 40-year career police officer who now consults with police agencies in the Roanoke Valley, says studies are lacking on reporting of rape, making it even harder to understand, predict and prosecute. The generic term “rape,” he explains, implies sexual penetration of the victim who either didn’t know it at the time (because of drugs, alcohol or other issues) or was unwilling to submit.
“Sexual assault,” says Perry, “is a broader topic, a larger umbrella.”
Perry is at the front line with the victim early in any investigation. He works closely with those pursuing the case and advising the victim in trying to create a profile of the rapist when that fact is not known – though most victims know their rapists.
“Sexual assault serves a non-sexual need,” says Perry. “You have to put sex into the formula because the rapist chose rape. ‘I want to do the worst thing I can to her,’ he thinks. It is a life-changing event.”
Perry’s best estimate is that 35 percent of rapes are reported to police. “What chance does the bad guy have of going to prison? About one in 10,” he says.
He says the criminal justice system has to take “some of the responsibility” for the low level of reporting, that in his experience, police officers rarely believe the victim is telling the truth about the rape. His own experience tells him that 60 to 80 percent of officers don’t believe the charge.
“The term ‘false allegation’ is huge, but research in false allegation is not politically correct, so we don’t have the data that could help,” Perry says.
But “this is broader than the criminal justice system. It involves society as a whole. The system just doesn’t deal with offenders the way victims believe it should.”
Perry mentions, almost as an aside, that there is no statute of limitations on rape.
Francis’ experience stayed with her for a long time. She retreated into herself, let her grades slip and finally graduated high school 400th in a class of 440, but she made a 1440 on the SAT test.
“I was sleep-walking through school, riding behind the kids on the short bus, but I was an incessant reader. I’d read anything to make the pain go away. I skipped a lot of school and discovered drugs by the time I was a senior. I hated people. Still do.”
It took “20 years of play-acting every day and several attempts at suicide” in order to “make any sense of it.” She went through “a number of different careers, screwing up again and again.”
She feels free of the rape finally. “It took 41 years,” she says. “What I went through was the classic response. It was my fault, I asked for it, I deserved it, I was of no value. Today, I’m happy, strong, confident, comfortable and I have no pretense left in talking about the rape. I had to go back and look and I’ve come to some conclusions.
“Males are not taught what to do with lust, not taught how to shape and modify it. The porn culture teaches them to look at girls as objects and girls are taught to be objects. The girls are punished by both sides. Men are acting out of their own patriarchial hatred for women. Most men do not like women.”
Melissa Harper is a forensic nurse at Carilion who sees rape victims shortly after the event to treat and evaluate them. She is well-known in the field and speaks on sexual assault at conferences. She is on a governor’s commission on sexual assault.
“The information we collect is vital in guiding the patient’s care first and foremost,” she says. She estimates that two to eight percent of reported rapes are false, a number Perry disputes. “A great majority of rape victims are not lying. Society, though, tends not to believe them. Victims blame themselves.”
Harper says rape rarely happens with a stranger jumping out of the bushes: “Most of the offenders are known by the victim. They’re not strangers … Accusations are easiest to believe by society when the victim has been physically brutalized, although this is uncommon. Five percent of victims suffer a life-threatening injury and less than one percent die in connection with their sexual assault.”
If there is no immediate health threat, victims are taken to a forensics room where they are examined in depth. “There is a full physical exam and skin assessment,” as well as a full history of the event, says Harper.
A victim’s advocate group like SARA (Sexual Assault Response and Awarness) is brought in to counsel the victim and work further. “Society thinks women are not strong,” says Harper, “but these women are incredibly strong mentally.”
Rapists are often involved in other high-risk behaviors that could increase risk of HIV and Hepatitis B. All sexual assault victims are screened for pregnancy risks and offered emergency contraception.
Some of the victims “don’t want the police involved,” she says. There are a lot of reasons for that, most of them involving one fear or another. “The level of trauma is similar to the trauma experienced by those who walk out of war.”
The whole process “hurts our hearts, but if we cry we can’t help.”
Lizetta is a 30-something writer and mother of two, who spent much of her youth being raped by a relative. She finally reported him.
“While I had a small handful of people I could trust with my story, I didn’t have anyone of authority to talk to. I got a lot of hugs and shared fear and anger, but nobody could really do anything to the bastard without breaking any laws.
“I was scared of reporting the assault to police, mostly out of fear that they wouldn’t believe some dumb teenager. I’m lucky that someone spoke up for me and notified the police on my behalf. That could have easily been mistaken as meddling, but not to me. I felt like I had the right people around me, looking out for me, and wanting justice just as much as I did.
“I kind of assumed I’d eventually get a phone call, or in a few weeks I’d get a letter asking me when I could meet for an interview with an officer to go on record about everything that happened. I was way off. I drove home from school but couldn’t pull into my own driveway because two police cars were parked in it within two days of their being notified.
“A sheriff, not a deputy sheriff, but a sheriff and a social worker from the county where the attack happened, greeted me and told me to have a seat. They each had a tape recorder ready, and briefed me that they’d be recording everything. I said, “let’s do it.”
“It was about three hours’ worth of interview and I felt safe the entire time. They were gentle yet powerful, and took a lot of pride in making sure to get every bit of detail they could. The sheriff, even with the tape recorders rolling, said, ‘I know who this guy is and I knew he would mess up again. I know you’re telling the truth about this creep. Let us handle everything from here.’
“The bastard was arrested the next day. He pleaded guilty. The problem is that he was given a light sentence – no jail – and to this day, most of my family believes I was lying.”
Teresa Berry founded the Sexual Assault Response and Awareness program while a student at Radford University 30 years ago. She had developed a sensitivity to rape victims that has remained strong through these years of counseling, learning and teaching about sexual assault.
SARA is a non-profit program that works directly with rape victims. Berry says that “If you’re looking for the criminal justice system to right the wrongs, you’ll be sorely disappointed. The universe will take care of it.”
Berry has discovered that rapists “have a sixth sense … an agenda.” Their crimes “are scripted.”
Rape “is the most traumatic experience outside death.” She deals with 350 to 400 calls a year at her Roanoke office, ranging from people seeking information to those needing direct help. By comparison, the Carilion forensic team sees 250 victims of all ages a year.
Berry says that about 75 percent of rapes in the Roanoke Valley are family/acquaintance rapes: “A stranger is a rarity, maybe 5 to 10 percent.” Rape is “often a crime of opportunity, one where the environment is manipulated. Sometimes the opportunity presents itself.”
Berry says that in recent years, there has been a change in the approach to rape prevention. The Virginia Department of Health, she says, has shifted some of its emphasis to working with young men and educating them. “That’s the next step,” she says. “We have to talk about changing societal norms. A lot of this is ingrained and we have to step outside our preconceived ideas.”
Rachael is a middle-aged owner of a technology company in Roanoke. At the age of 20, she had a run-in with a Roanoke County sheriff’s deputy that was a large step beyond an uninvited pass. She says she was at a psychiatric center “getting my first husband evaluated for suicide threat. While waiting, I talked to the county cop who had brought in a neglected child and parent.
“The next day, I was driving to my in-laws’ house and that cop drove by me in his [personal] truck and waved me over to side of the road. I pulled over because I wanted to find out what happened to the child. He leaned into my car, stuck one hand down my pants, the other under my shirt, and his tongue down my throat. I was confused, angry, scared and had no idea what to do.
“He was a cop; I didn’t want to get in trouble. He stopped sucking my tonsils long enough to tell me where he’d take me [to finish what he apparently thought was a romantic encounter] and what we’d do there. I finally said my in-laws were expecting me and I had to go. I drove off. Didn’t want him to follow me.
“I was afraid he had run my plates and would stalk me and was anxious about being pulled over in the future. I developed a general fear of cops and became very formal if I had to deal with one. I felt like I’d asked for it because I pulled over when he waved and I was afraid of consequences if I fought back. I felt unclean, guilty, ashamed, but didn’t report it for fear of retaliation.”
An American University study by Callie Rennison and Lynn Addington recently concluded that, “Women at the margins are the ones who bear the brunt of the harshest realities, including sexual violence, and they do so with the least resources.”
The study found that college students are raped at a rate 30 percent higher than other women and that poor women are victims of sex crimes at a jaw-dropping six times that of high-income women.
Women in rental housing are assaulted at a rate more than triple that of women in homes they own and single women with children have the highest rate of sexual assault, an astonishing nine times that of married women with no children, more than three and a half times that of married women with children and triple the rate of single women with no children. Women without a high school diploma are sexually assaulted at four times the rate of women with a bachelor’s degree.
“The one risk factor that remains consistent whether women are advantaged or disadvantaged is age, and women ages 16 to 20 are sexually victimized at the highest rates,” says Rennison.
Berry says that people who have been raped are more likely to be raped a second or third time than people who have never experienced a sexual assault. Sometimes it begins very early.
Donna, a married woman in Roanoke who is near 50, had a family problem that came up short of rape, but put her on alert early. “From puberty I was uncomfortable around my father and made it a point not to be ‘attractive’ near him.
“I discovered a few years ago that my cousin was molested by my father when she was 15 and he was visiting her family. I was 16 at the time. Later, I asked my half-sister, who was my age, if my father had ever ‘done anything’ to her. She said he had not, but said she didn’t like to stay at his house and that it had always felt creepy when he hugged her.
“One Father’s Day, my brother, my husband and I met my father for lunch. My father kept trying to hug me, even when I stepped away. Even my husband noticed. When we got in the elevator to go to our table on the second floor, my father kept trying to get closer and closer to me. I finally backed into a corner of the elevator and pulled my husband in front of me. Even then my father kept trying to reach around my husband to touch me. That was the first time my husband actually believed me when I told him that my father behaved inappropriately to me.”
Later in her life, the problem continued. “My father entered the world of the Internet in the 1990s and because I knew a little about computers, he came over and asked me to teach him how to use his. He was constantly moving close to me and I just tried to create as much distance as I could. I finally had to just leave.
“One night I dreamed that he stood too close to me and, in my dream, I slapped him across the face and told his to stay the hell away from me. I wasn’t afraid of him – awake or asleep – after that.”
Louisia is a Roanoke Valley professional woman who learned a valuable lesson early, though it has troubled her since.
“When I was 18, I got a summer job at an architect’s office. One of my job duties was to run copies of blueprints. Because the machine used ammonia, it was in a room off the main work room. There wasn’t much room to move around in there, and when I was working the machine, there was a space of only two feet behind me and the table was against the wall.
“The boss, a married, middle-aged man, often made it a point to ‘have to’ get something on the other side of the room when I was running prints. He would squeeze behind me, grab me around the waist (or higher) when he went past, and make it a point to rub his penis against my buttocks when he did so.
“I never said a word. What could I say? He was my boss. He wasn’t ‘really doing anything,’ and he could get me fired or make my work days miserable if I made a big deal out of it. After a while, I just got used to it. It was one of those things that was going to happen, and saying something about it wouldn’t help. Later, I wondered why do girls have to get used to things like that?”