BY SABRINA*
TRIGGER WARNING: This article contains descriptions of sexual violence.
I was 18 years old and a freshman at UCLA when I was sexually assaulted. It is a night I have been trying to piece together for a long time.
A friend and I went out to party in Westwood. As is normal in college culture, my friend and I accepted glasses of wine from a stranger, a guy I had been talking to for a while. He was sober, except for his glass of wine he was drinking with us. He seemed really cool, and we were getting along well.
We kissed. Just a peck. We laughed. It started to get late, and we were getting ready to go home. He offered us a ride. “It’s not safe to walk home so late in Westwood, I’ll drop you off outside the dorms.” He seemed responsible, trustworthy.
But he didn’t take us home. And in his car I started to lose awareness. I was not thinking, not feeling, going limp. We were in his car, I was losing consciousness, and I had the sick feeling we were going the wrong way, but I couldn’t say anything about it, I was incapacitated, either from the alcohol or something he might have put in it. Everything from here becomes a blur.
He took us to his apartment. We, incapable of anything else, were led inside by him. He put my friend on his couch. I’m in his bed. I don’t want to be in his bed. I want to go home. I want to sleep. He starts to take off my clothes, I say no. I’m laughing as I say, “No, sorry I don’t want that.” Why was I saying “sorry”? I’m too afraid not to. I don’t want to make this man angry. The alcohol made me weak, I am tired, I am just over 5 feet tall.
He proceeds to start touching me, to do things to me. I try and push him off. I become filled with terror. My arms are too weak, they’ve become like rubber. I say no. He is smiling. I am too weak to push him off. I am drunk. I want to go home. I want to sleep. I don’t want him to touch me. I say no, no, no.
He keeps trying to touch me, to do things to me and I am losing consciousness. I can’t say no anymore. I am just watching this nightmare from what feels like a thousand miles away, laying limp with no covering except the bed sheets tangled in my feet. I see him put on a condom. “Do you want to have sex?” I could not respond. I was silent. Everything goes black. I passed out. I don’t remember. I don’t remember. I don’t remember.
Every time I stood up that morning the world would spin, my legs would shake and I would start to cry. I had bruises on my legs. I decided I needed help. At UCLA orientation they said that if you were going to the Rape Treatment Center, you weren’t supposed to shower or brush your teeth, and you should bring the clothes you were wearing as evidence. So I did that.
Our on-campus health system, the Ashe Center, does not have rape kits, so I had to walk through campus to the main bus stop, wait for the bus and then walk through Santa Monica to the UCLA Medical Center there to get an examination. I was dizzy, dirty, weak, in huge amounts of pain and under extreme emotional duress. No one had told me (not even clearly on the Rape Treatment Center website) that I could have had a free and anonymous form of transportation to the Rape Treatment Center from UCLA rather than standing on a full bus for half an hour.
I almost did not go at all. I wonder how many other survivors never wind up going.
Once I got there, I was completely lost. I walked up to the front desk of the medical center, and asked in an exhausted whisper, “Excuse me, where is the Rape Treatment Center?” I was mortified. I wanted to die, to melt into the floor. A man led me down two flights of stairs and down a corridor with harsh hospital lighting. Why is one of the best Rape Treatment Centers in the country located in a basement office? All I wanted was to get in there, find out what happened to me, go home and shower. Why was this so difficult?
It is 10 a.m., and it is the worst day of my life.
They gave me a smock and asked me to take off my clothes. I did not want to take off my clothes. I did not want to be naked – vulnerable to another stranger. The process of evidence collection is necessary but difficult for many survivors. I had to lie in the same position I was in when I was assaulted. On my back. Legs open.
The nurse listened to my story and found the examination “inconclusive,” but in the same breath she assured me that it was possible for there to be minimal surface evidence, especially if your assaulter wore a condom. In other words, she did not know what happened to me. While they were taking swabs and looking all over my body I kept asking them over and over, “Do you have a test for the date rape drug? For anything? Can you tell me what happened to me?”
“There is no accurate test for the date rape drug.”
I was livid.
“So, you’re telling me that we can send people into outer space, but you can’t tell me if that man put something in my drink? Are you serious? You’re supposed to have the answers!”
I was tired, I wanted to vomit, I wanted to shower, but more than anything, I wanted to scream. My questions about wanting to know about what happened to my own body bred further questions about how little we actually invest on an academic, national, scientific and public health level in understanding and preventing sexual and gender-based violence. Really? No accurate test?! Does this not matter?
They brought in a UCPD officer to “make a report.” I asked for a woman. They said that wasn’t possible, unless I wanted to wait for what could be a few hours. So I, someone who was raised in a family where I never once heard my parents say the word “sex” out loud, had to tell a male policeman the same age as my father in excruciating detail about what happened to my private parts. I was at the point of passing out. I was so weak and dizzy, and I was being asked so many questions when I still had yet to process a lot of what had actually happened to me.
I began to tell him the story the best I could. I started by talking about accepting drinks from the man, and then when I got to the part where we consensually kissed, I saw the policeman’s face drop. He seemed unconvinced. “I understand you are a freshman. Was this your first time drinking?”
Are you serious? I stood on a bus for 30 minutes wearing the skirt that was ripped off of me last night without my consent, and you are asking me about my alcohol consumption as if I were a child? Why aren’t you asking how much my assaulter drank?
I felt so small, so stupid, so guilty, so filthy, in front of the nurse and the policeman and my friend who came with me, as if I was an idiot for letting this happen to me. I wanted to break into a million pieces, I wanted to sleep, I wanted to die, but more than anything I just wanted to go home and shower and cry. As the questioning proceeded I felt like I was being questioned myself, rather than being questioned about what actually happened to me.
I did not feel like the survivor, I felt like the accused. I broke.
I told the rest of the story in a rush and placed the blame on myself in the narrative. “Yeah, I was drunk. I don’t know what happened.” For a year after the incident, that is the narrative I internalized. I thought it was my fault. I wonder how many other survivors do the same thing.
I don’t actually know if a report was filed. I was in a fragile, confused state. I wanted to know my options. I wanted something to be done, a statistic to be added, something to validate that something happened to me, some way to keep the evidence in a freezer if I ever actually remembered something more than a blurred mental image, in case I ever wanted to file formal charges. But I did not want to file formal charges yet. I just wanted to file a report. Whatever that meant.
But the officer kept dissuading me, “If you choose to file a report it would be really difficult for it to ever see a courtroom. It would be really difficult for you.” He made it sound like if I filed a report, I would lose control over my case and it would be sent to go to court without my consent or control. I did not understand my rights nor the workings of the legal system. I did not have a legal advocate with me. To this day I do not know whether or not what happened to me was ever written down as “rape” or “sexual assault” or “forced fondling” or even written down at all. I just don’t know.
Nothing was ever made clear to me. But what was made crystal clear to me over and over and over was the extremely slim chance of my case ever seeing a courtroom, let alone a verdict. Why bother?
I had midterms the following week. No one told me I was entitled to special extensions because of Title IX, and I failed all of them. The policeman, a UCPD officer, knew I was a UCLA student and did not tell me I was entitled to that even with a case as “inconclusive” as mine.
My grades plummeted. I stopped going out. I stopped hanging out with friends. I became a ghost. I do not have memory of the months following my assault. It exists as a gap in my memories, a black hole in what was supposed to be the happiest days of my young life – “College.” Whatever that means.
After I told my best friend her response was, “Are you sure you didn’t just regret it and want to call it rape?” Another friend I opened up to said, “You shouldn’t have gotten so drunk.” Attitudes like theirs pervade our culture – and our culture is a “rape culture,” when sexual violence is normalized and tolerated culturally and institutionally so as to blame the survivor and excuse the assaulter, especially so in cases that include alcohol.
If we are going to take sexual assault seriously, we need specially trained detectives who understand not to re-victimize a survivor, especially when they are in such a fragile state, like I was. We need to raise awareness of existing resources and make sure that survivors aren’t falling through the gaps, failing their classes and feeling unsupported. We need rape kits in every medical center. We need to fund centers like the Rape Treatment Center and conduct research to understand things as simple as a test for the date rape drug. Investigations need to be proactive with survivors and guide them through the system, rather than scaring them away.
The police, the district attorneys and the universities in our country need to be held accountable for their methods of processing and reporting cases. We need to listen to and support survivors.
No one should ever feel as alone as I did.
*This article was published under a pseudonym in order to protect the identity of the survivor. It is the Daily Bruin’s policy not to publish the names of the survivors of rape or sexual assault unless specifically instructed otherwise by the survivor.