I have told personal stories here in the past about a childhood of abuse, an unwed pregnancy beaten out of me by my own mother, being screwed while I cried by men who didn’t care about me, and a brief period prostituting. I don’t think I’ve talked about the friend of my roommate’s husband who insisted that I ride with him on a trip to Las Vegas where it was understood that my girlfriend and I would be sharing a room, since I didn’t even know him. He drove off into the desert, tried to rape me, got scared, I guess, when he knocked me unconscious, dumped me in the 110 degree heat, and left me there. But that’s not what this is about.
Because of that expirience, in the early seventies I was involved with a Rape Hotline. In addition to helping the victims, we were determined to get some of these cases to court. Rape prosecutions were very rare in those days. Knowing how badly victims were treated, we offered support, but never encouraged anyone to go to the police. Because I was the grind of the group, I studied everything I could find that would be of use to a woman reporting rape and going to trial.
Our first volunteer was a middle aged woman who had been repeatedly raped by her landlord. This was and still is very common in low income and assisted housing. It is talked about in support groups but almost never reported for reasons that are obvious.
She was willing to go to the police because she wanted it to stop, and because there were so many young girls in the complex that she feared were being abused as well.
This man had keys to her apartment. He would come in at night and get in bed with her, as if they were having an affair. He said she couldn’t tell on him because she was behind that month, and he’d just say that she was trading sex for the rent. Nobody would take the word of a welfare whore over a businessman like himself. Her nerves finally got so bad, after weeks without sleep, that she couldn’t take it anymore. I went with her to the police station.
We were walked back to a detective’s cubicle hung with Playboy centerfolds. She took a long look at those naked women on the walls, and turned to me. We stood there, looking into each others’ eyes, and I knew she could never talk to this man, this representative of law and order, this man paid by our taxes to protect and serve.
She didn’t report the rape that day. I doubt she ever reported it. I know she never went back to her apartment because I tried to find her for weeks.
I hate to post and run, but I have to go home. See you all Monday.
I am not at all surprised by your story. I was asked to go with a young woman who had been sexually assaulted, to be with her when she reported her attack at our police station. For reasons I won’t go into, she had to go there rather than to a hospital. She was in shock, very frightened.
The officer at the precinct desk would neither take her statement nor allow her to go into a more private area to wait for a detective. Instead, he sat with his feet on the reception desk, and read the newspaper. He proceeded to make comments in a loud voice to an unseen colleague in the back, commenting on the previous day’s football game, including “the size of the yavos on that red head at half-time. . .” My complaints and requests to see the Precinct Captain had no effect whatever except to produce a “You two both working girls or what?” as he gave us the fish-eye.
We waited over an hour before the young woman was interviewed. Mercifully, the cop who talked to her was excellent and kind.
There was some revenge for her horrible treatment. A friend of mine was the chair of the precinct’s citizen review board. I complained strongly. There was a major shakeup at the precinct and the Captain and that particularly offensive officer took early retirement.
as accurate rape statistics. I have been told by people who work with vicitms that things have improved, that in the US, because it is so advanced and modern, that over 10% of rapes are reported.
But I can’t really regard that as anything but an educated guess. As we have seen here over the past few days, women who have never been raped may be a rarer bird than many of us imagined.
And for the most part, the stories we have heard here are relatively affluent women who were victims of relatively affluent men. The situation of poor women cranks it all up several notches. That lady was brave to even go to the police station at all. Poor women who are raped by authority figures of any kind are accorded even less credibility than their more affluent sisters who are raped by their peers, if that is possible, and even more at risk of untoward consequences of having the temerity to complain, and thus have good reason to avoid police stations.
I’m sad that I cannot be shocked by this story. And I’m just too drained to write anything adequately angry or usefully thoughtful.
I do have the greatest respect for people like you and Street Kid, who work in the trenches for months or years, without losing either their moral compass or their sense of hope for a better world. Thank you for your many contributions here this week.
Doesn’t surprise me. When I was working security at the University of Michigan in the 70s, I objected to the fact that the officers in one of the dorms had nude pictures in the security office. Of course, I was called a prude, a feminist (horrors), and a lesbo by the men in the department. When I pointed out that we would bring victims of sexual assault into the office to be interviewed, they grudgingly gave in with a little prodding from management. They really believed that their rights had been trampled and were highly resentful for a long time.
(The ideas of professionalism and sexual harassment never entered their macho little heads.)
My story is in the hopper at Kos….I will post it after five. I hope you post this over there at some point if you are willing, then perhaps some people may understand why the pie wars hurt so many so badly.
Mine, going up tomorrow, also refers to the pie wars..you just can’t separate these things…
Just don’t forget to give us a head’s up. Will be there with bells on. đŸ˜‰
Even if you report the rape you might not be reporting the rape. We found out last year that many women who reported a rape to the St. Louis Police ended up being given a waiver to sign that said they WEREN’T reporting a rape.
Why?
It is almost unbelievable that this could happen, but it did.
Based on this investigation, the department ended up revising its rape statistics from 111 reported rapes to 175. And they no longer use this “memo” system. But WTF were they thinking all these years?
I’ve heard from several women and men who love women who say the statistics of reporting are way off.
We see the the words of our own troops raping their own soldiers “Govt Issued Pussy”…
We are now seeing so many who are now judging the dead and most brutally raped and mutilated woman in New York… “how much did she drink that night?”…
But.. I won’t give up hope or fighting. The comments and stories shared here are the REAL humans.