TRIGGER WARNING: This article contains descriptions of sexual violence.
In January of last year I was raped in my room in the University Cooperative Housing Association on Landfair Avenue.
I was bitter for a long time toward those of you who didn’t believe me, and even more so toward those of you who did. You, who pitied me. You, who asked, “How are you?” and actually sounded like you meant it.
And to you, for whom I never existed, because my story is both so awful and commonplace that you never wanted to hear it.
I forgive you. In fact, I apologize. I know you don’t want to live in a world where rape exists, and most of the time, you don’t have to. My very existence burdens you.
I would have gladly lived my life as a rape victim in obscurity. I was hopeful that with time it would become a distant memory and feel like something that happened to someone else. Then, two months afterward, it somehow became public knowledge in the Co-op. It spread like wildfire over dry brush. It consumed me.
Before, I had imagined rape to be the hooded stranger in the dark, and should I have had the bad fortune to stumble across him alone in an alleyway, I believed that I would fight for my self-preservation. I was sure I would resist him with every fiber of my being.
But chances are the person that rapes you will be someone that you know, and it will surprise you. Even if you were not particularly fond of that person you would never have questioned for a moment that they wouldn’t respect the basic sanctity of your body. It’s the friend of a friend, someone you’ve at least said hello to. And you will find yourself asking them politely not to rape you.
The person who rapes you might be another student who just moved in. You met him earlier that day at dinner because you sat down next to him in the cafeteria, mistaking him for someone else. In your surprise you actually tell him this, then laugh at your own rudeness, and in good humor decide to stay. He says he wants to see your room, ostensibly because it’s one of the few unshared singles, and he leaves his jacket there. Afterward he might follow you back after a party and say he needs to get it.
Later, when someone like me tells you that my physical body has been violated, some of you say no. I probably wanted it. I just regret doing it. Maybe I want attention. If it wasn’t consensual, why didn’t I scream for help, or fight harder? I couldn’t have grabbed my phone and called the police?
But you don’t understand. I begged. Not at first. At first I told him that I hoped he enjoyed the party, and said that I was sure he would love living in the Co-op and that I was going to bed now.
When he tried to kiss me I turned away. When he grabbed me and pressed his face forward I covered my mouth with my hands. Around the time that he threw me onto the bed I understood something was horribly wrong. I could hear the fear and desperation in my own voice as I asked him plaintively, repeatedly, to leave.
Over and over I asked him to leave. He shook his head no. Then I started begging. I told him I didn’t want to have sex. The more I resisted, the more he treated it as a game. I was being difficult on purpose. Every time I tried to stand up, he threw me back onto the bed and laughed. It was funny.
I thought I was a strong, physically capable female. But being raped gave me a newfound appreciation for how much larger and more powerful men actually are.
Before I had assumed that avoiding unwanted sexual encounters was a choice that I could make, and then I understood the reality of it: Men had not raped me before because they – not I – had made a choice not to. I understood somehow, even at the time, that the more I fought back, the more it would hurt me later, because the only thing that would make this rape is the extent to which I resisted.
I could have fought back harder. I pushed him with my arms and my legs and I twisted around and tried to wrangle myself out of his grasp, but I didn’t hit him. I honestly didn’t know how. I had never hit anyone. And what if he hit me back?
I remember looking at a vase on my desk next to the bed, an enameled Moser vase from Bohemia, and I wondered if I picked it up and hit him if it would kill him. It happens in the movies, I thought, but I didn’t know if it happened in real life.
But I wasn’t sure that I had it in me to hit him with it; I didn’t know if I would be able to swing my arm back and bring it toward him with all my strength. And I thought, “I really love that vase. I wouldn’t want to break it.”
For months I languished over the vase. Every time I looked at it I remembered that it was worth more to me than my body.
He had brought a bottle of wine – who brings a bottle of wine to pick up a jacket? I also had a glass of wine some hours earlier, and I decided that I must have been drunk, because I couldn’t explain to myself my obviously bad decisions. Whatever anyone else might have said about me, it paled in comparison to the horrible, awful things I told myself.
When the deepest, most personal aspects of your life become an object of public scrutiny, people question to what extent you were complicit in the things that happened to you. They tend to err on the side of it being your fault – not because they are unkind, but because everyone wants to believe that it is within our abilities to prevent bad things from hurting us. Taking away individual agency is terrifying.
People felt many things: concern, disbelief, anger, confusion. They had questions. In every question I was forced to relive what had happened. I had to reconsider it in new and different ways. Other people used the term “rape” long before I had, when I was too emotionally fragile to hear it, which shook me rudely out of a state of denial.
Before, I had not considered what happened to me to be “rape.” I had no word at all for it. It was a deep feeling of being violated, equal parts fear and anger toward the person who had violated me. (Being violated, it turns out, is an actual feeling, much like happy or sad – and even when I was overwhelmed by the force of it, I marveled that it was possible to feel something new.)
I felt a shift in my universe and my understanding of my place in it. I thought some things were given: I could make decisions about my body; people might value me for whatever sexual services I could provide, but I also had value outside of them; I was a person. More than anything physical, these were the things that he had taken from me.
I didn’t know it then, but that’s what rape is. It is not simply a physical act. Your body will heal, and your soul will too, but the latter will take time. You have lost something, but you will get it back. You will grieve, and it will hurt, but it will end.
I never thought it would happen to me, but it did. Considering how common a crime rape is, there’s a good chance it will happen to you too, if it has not already. Should you ever find yourself in my position, you will probably find that you need other people to champion your rights for you, because you feel so guilty and ashamed that you feel helpless to do so for yourself.
But unless they know what to look for, they won’t be able to help you.
It’s the same way people think that when you drown, you cry for help. In fact, you don’t. You can’t breathe, and certainly can’t yell.
And if it’s not you, it will be someone you care about. The fact is that bad people do exist in this world, and sometimes we are unlucky enough to meet them. Those things can’t usually be changed. What we can do is learn to recognize a rape victim when we see one, because otherwise we can’t even begin to help them, and they will drown in front of us.
Tice is a former UCLA student.