Invisible Girls

by Patti Feuereisen

  WHAT TO DO IF YOU WANT THE OPTION TO REPORT A RAPE

  The first thing to do is not shower. It may feel absolutely awful to have to wait, but if you want the police to have evidence of the rape, you simply can’t wash. Try to find a loved one or friend to come over and be with you and take you to the hospital. Once you get to the hospital, they will call the hospital’s rape crisis unit.

  In the 1970s nurses and feminists led the anti-rape movement as advocates for survivors of rape, and they developed rape kits in hospital emergency rooms and for rape crisis units. Those units include advocates and specialized nurses. Things may vary by state, but usually you will be met by a rape crisis counselor/advocate, who will walk you through the process of being examined and be there with you and for you throughout the examination. At that time, you and your rape crisis advocate or friend or loved one should request a sexual assault nurse examiner be assigned to you. These are nurses with specialized training to provide trauma-informed, patient-specific evaluation and treatment, which can include forensic evidence collection. These nurses will also test for and give treatment for sexually transmitted diseases and the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and for pregnancy prevention. The hospital will then ask to collect what’s called a “rape kit.” Rape kits are intended to assist in the criminal prosecution or to collect evidence for prosecution of sexual assault cases; the goal is to prove rape with DNA.

  Many girls get very nervous at the prospect of having to go through this procedure and don’t know what their rights are. That’s where the advocate can help you. Basically, no one can force you to get a rape kit; the hospital will not collect one without your consent. Remember that. The choice is yours. Also, getting the rape kit doesn’t commit you to pressing charges; it only gathers evidence that might be extremely useful, and will sometimes be necessary, should you decide to prosecute. In any case, you can also expect follow-up services with community-based sexual assault advocacy, and medical and law enforcement partners.

  Even though some girls do get the rape kit, they do not often choose to go to court because of the added trauma. Please know if you do decide to prosecute after the rape kit, the rape crisis advocate and sexual assault nurse are both prepared to testify in a criminal or civil trial as expert witnesses if necessary. You should never feel pressured to prosecute. The girls I know who have gone to court against their abusers are usually protecting a younger sister or friend.

  If you do decide to get the rape kit, you should know what to expect. First of all, remember that you have the right to have your rape crisis advocate or loved one with you (or both) at all times. You also have the right to stop the process at any point.

  WHAT IS A RAPE KIT?

  1. You will be asked to disrobe, and a nurse will bag each article of your clothing—including, of course, your panties—to send to the crime lab.

  2. Your pubic hair will be combed for any foreign hairs, and a sample of ten to fifteen of your own pubic hairs will be collected for comparison.

  3. You will be examined for visible blood or semen stains. If such stains are found, samples will be collected.

  4. You will be given a vaginal exam similar to a routine gynecological exam. The nurse will use a speculum and swab your vagina and cervix.

  5. Your fingernails will also be examined for blood, hair, or foreign tissue. If the nurse sees any foreign matter, she will also swab under your nails. A sample nail clipping may also be taken.

  6. Your mouth will be swabbed for saliva.

  7. If you report anal penetration, your anus may be swabbed as well.

  8. The nurse will take a blood sample to check for infections and pregnancy.

  9. And finally, a head hair sample (ten to fifteen hairs) will be taken.9

  Whether or not you go to the hospital, you can still decide to press charges. Many times, for varying reasons, rapes are reported without a rape kit. Should you decide to report the rape or any other sexual abuse, here’s what you can expect from the legal system (procedures vary from state to state, but this is more or less the sequence of events):

  1. A detective will meet with you to take a report. You will be asked to describe what happened and to describe the suspect. (Remember, the decision to go ahead or stop is always yours. You can always request to have a trusted loved one with you during questioning.)

  2. The detective will follow up with an investigation and may talk to witnesses and the person who assaulted you, if that person can be found. That person may or may not be arrested.

  3. The detective will send a report to the district attorney’s office, and an attorney and advocate will be assigned to your case.

  4. If an arrest is made, the defendant may be able to post bail.

  5. The case will usually take a few years to prosecute.

  Needless to say, this is a very quick sketch. If you want to know more about the complicated process of prosecuting sexual-abuse and rape cases, check the Resource Center at the back of this book for further information, where you will find lawyers specializing in this.

  DATE RAPE

  When you are just walking down the street or riding your bike in the park or sleeping in your apartment and someone rapes you, there’s no question that you didn’t do anything to bring the rape on yourself.

  With date rape, it could be different, and you may have more choices than you think. I never blame the survivor of date rape. Even if you are fooling around and you want to stop him but you become mute from fear and cannot speak, even if you say no quietly and then do not have the courage or strength to stop him, even if you invite him to your room and start to want sex and then change your mind during sex and tell him to stop, even if you feel intense pressure to perform oral sex on him and he pushed you to it and you did not want it. Let’s get agency and avoid date rape at all costs, if at all possible. Again, I am not saying you don’t have the right to fool around, but have your posse with you, have a designated gal pal or good guy pal to make sure you all leave together. Watch your drink while you are out. Stay away from drunken frat parties.

  Several of my clients suffered date rapes between the ages of eighteen and twenty. The two you will hear from were both nineteen when they were date-raped. Iris’s date rape was her first and only experience of rape. Dahlia was date-raped after being violently gang-raped by acquaintances when she was fourteen. Both girls have come through these experiences to the other side, and they hope you will learn from their stories how important it is to take care of yourself. Understanding that you have the potential power to protect yourself from date rape by keeping your wits about you, by not getting so stoned or drunk that your decision making is impaired, having friends there to back you up, all can possibly protect you from date rape. That said, rape is rape, forced sexual contact is sexual abuse. It is never the survivor’s fault.

  IRIS

  I met Iris when she was twenty-two and a senior in college. She had been raped three years earlier but had only recently come to terms with the fact that it even was a rape. In fact, it was a male friend (one of the good guys) who convinced her that what she had experienced was date rape.

  Since the rape, she had been in a string of bad relationships with men who did not appreciate her. She came to therapy because she had a sense that her rape three years earlier had affected how she made choices in relationships. She also wanted to deal with her history of emotional abuse and connect the dots as to why she kept picking such losers.

  Iris had not been sexually abused as a child physically, but her older brother had subjected her to emotional abuse, verbal sexual abuse, and physical violence. Iris comes from an Irish Catholic family. She is the younger of two children; her brother is seven years her senior.

  Both of their parents worked, and her brother was left in charge of her beginning when she was seven and he was fourteen. That was when he started abusing her verbally. He would repeatedly taunt her. He would choke her, pinch her, make sexual comments about her breasts, her hips, and her rear en
d, and constantly tell her that she was a “worthless, ugly piece of shit.” By constantly talking to her in sexual terms and touching her in inappropriate ways, her brother taught her that she had no right to any boundaries, physical or emotional.

  As a child, Iris didn’t know how to stop the sexual innuendoes or the inappropriate touching. Of course, in front of their parents, her brother behaved like an angel. Her parents trusted and praised their son, and, when Iris complained about how he mistreated her, they ignored her.

  When Iris began dating at around fifteen, she seemed to seek out males who would treat her badly. In hindsight, of course, that’s no surprise. That’s what she knew; that’s what she felt she deserved. She put herself into many situations she should never have been in and struggled throughout adolescence with the feeling that she didn’t deserve good relationships.

  Fast forward. Iris is now twenty-two and graduating at the top of her class from a prestigious university. She came in to see me because of her recurring nightmares, heightened anxiety, and depressive feelings. She had hit bottom and wanted to understand why she kept having dreams about the rape.

  In Iris’s story, she tells what it’s like to be out partying with your friends and what can happen as you get more and more drunk or high, how your judgment can blur, and how quickly your situation can escalate and become dangerous.

  She talks about how she would get “buzzed” to deal with her insecurities and her very human need to fit in, and then she describes the date rape and its aftermath in precise detail. She does not gloss over her rape in any way. I warn you, this is rough stuff. This is the unvarnished story of a date rape.

  IRIS’S STORY

  But I Thought He Liked Me

  I was nineteen years old and had just finished my first year of college. A group of us were going out to celebrate the end of exams and the beginning of summer. We met at a club I had never been to. I loved the magic that took place when you entered a club. Through those guarded portals lay another world, a planet with an atmosphere all its own. Our group of three young women and two young men entered a room with swarms of people dancing to music, and I squinted as my eyes adjusted to the darkness. My head was fuzzy from the drinking I’d already done that night.

  Our group met up with some other friends I did not know. There were people everywhere, drinking, talking, popping pills. I was immediately attracted to a guy named Michael. He smiled a sweet, boyish smile when introduced to me, and I noted how handsome he was. He had large, dark eyes and a narrow goatee. I smiled back at him, more from self-consciousness than anything else. When I’d left the house that night I’d thought I looked good, but when I looked at the people around me, they seemed to have stepped out of the pages of a fashion magazine. I felt like an impostor in the velvet-drenched, smoky scene. For more courage, I got another drink at the bar.

  The bartender was a friend of a friend and had made us something special on the house. Sweet, fruity drinks usually made me sick, but I took a large gulp. It went down surprisingly smoothly, and I swallowed the rest of it quickly before my buzz had a chance to disappear. I wanted to drown myself in the stuff, let the pink liquid rise above my head as I danced and the alcohol pounded in my brain as if keeping time, my limbs gaining courage with every sip. Michael came over and danced with me. He was holding my back and swaying slowly from side to side, and my body responded. He was strong, and my lightness felt secure in his arms. The music got faster, and I started to move on my own in a sensual, drunken haze. He smiled down at me, grinding back. I was absorbed in the moment, in a capsule, all by myself. No external reality existed for me. All I knew at that moment was how good I felt, how good and free and light.

  We stopped dancing and got another drink and started talking, and I found him as charming and funny as he was handsome.

  My friends then joined us. Ezra, a guy I had some classes with, came over and put his arm around me. He had been Michael’s friend since high school, and after a while Ezra and Michael said, “Wanna get out of here?” I said good night to my girlfriend, who was also pretty drunk, and she winked at me, and we left.

  My head was spinning wildly now, and I was starting to lose my balance. I should have listened to what my body was telling me, to have them drop me off at home so I could sleep the drunkenness off. I was drunk and tired, but I trusted Ezra and I was attracted to Michael. I was dizzier than ever, slightly nauseous, and stumbling, but I still thought I was all right. Michael and Ezra took me by the arms and held me up, and we stood there, in front of the club, waiting for a taxi to take us home.

  The next thing I knew, I was in bed in my apartment with no idea how I’d gotten there. My head felt like a swarming beehive, and, as I opened my eyes, I saw Ezra crouched over me. He kissed me, the dry, alcoholic taste of his mouth mingling with mine, but I was dizzy. I wasn’t aroused. I couldn’t feel anything. Then, as quickly as he had begun, Ezra stopped kissing me. He pulled his face away from mine and looked down at me again. Michael came over. “I’m sorry,” he said, starting to make his way down my body. “I just have to eat you.”

  I was so confused, the words meant nothing to me. I couldn’t respond. Then Ezra appeared above me. I could feel my legs being pried apart and Michael sticking his face between them as Ezra shoved his tongue in my mouth. My body was numb and I felt nothing, as if my nerve endings had been severed. As the drunken fog in my head began to clear, I realized what was happening. With the little strength I had, I got up and away from them and ran into the bathroom.

  I was crying hysterically when Ezra came in. “What’s the matter, baby?” he asked. I couldn’t stop crying, couldn’t talk, my body was shaking as I tried to speak. I tried to explain to him that I didn’t know what was happening, that I was drunk and didn’t want to do this. “Don’t cry, baby, don’t cry. I thought you liked Michael. You really want us to stop?” I nodded my head yes, suddenly exhausted, and he said okay, leaving me alone in the bathroom. The next thing I knew I was lying on the bathroom floor alone, with closed eyes, having passed out again. My body was leaden, too heavy to move, and I wasn’t sure where I was. The alcohol seemed thicker in my bloodstream now, moving slow as syrup, disorienting me. Before I could figure out where I was next, I felt my underwear being pulled off my body.

  Realizing this was no dream, I opened my eyes and found Ezra gone. I had been dragged out of the bathroom and pulled to the floor in the bedroom, and Michael was kneeling in front of me. He was pulling my legs up around him and shoving his penis inside me. I was so tired I was paralyzed. I felt like a rag doll, a limp creature with no skeletal structure or will of my own. It felt as if he was splitting me in half. I was torn between numbness and pain, and I asked him to stop. I opened my mouth to say no, but he rammed his tongue into my mouth hard. He kept pounding into me. I faded in and out, unable to stay awake. I kept trying to push him off me, I kept crying and struggling, and at one point I managed to get away.

  I ran into the kitchen and hid behind the refrigerator. I was huddled back there shaking like a frightened animal. He followed me in and pulled me from behind it, lifting me like a feather and slamming me back down onto his penis. He propped me up against the countertop, driving me up and down on him like a butter churn, slamming my spine into the rough tile. Finally, he carried me back to bed to finish what he’d started. I realized I wasn’t going to get away, and I almost willed my body to stay limp so I could disappear.

  When he was done, he rolled over. I was allowed to fall back to sleep. I passed out from fear, exhaustion, and shock. When I woke up, the sun was up, and I heard noises in the apartment. I found myself on the floor. Michael was at the edge of the bed. He seemed large and awkward, mean spirited, uninterested. He was putting on his shoes.

  “Hey, do you have a T-shirt I can borrow?” he asked.

  I looked at him for a minute, confused, before lifting myself up from the floor. I rummaged through my dresser drawers for something that would fit him. “Thanks,” he said, barely glancing up.
Suddenly I felt ashamed. He continued dressing. I felt stupid and pathetic, and frightened at the same time. He wasn’t friendly; he wasn’t nice at all. He grabbed his knapsack from the messy floor, littered with clothes—my clothes from the night before.

  “See ya,” he said, slamming the door behind him.

  I stood for a moment watching the door, amazed that he could have disappeared so quickly. Tears were suddenly falling from my burning eyes. I smelled like smoke and my mouth was dry and pasty, my vagina was bruised and burning, and bleeding. There was dried blood all over my legs. The remnants of the alcohol were nauseating me. My inner thighs ached, and my lower back stung. I saw bruises on my upper chest and my legs. I crawled back into bed, trying to figure out what had happened. All I wanted was for someone to tell me it would all be all right. I wanted to be held tenderly. I pulled the covers high over my head and lay like that for a long time, until I finally cried myself to sleep.

  It took me a long time afterward to recognize what had happened to me. Unable to face the truth, I said to myself that I had been “rejected,” a much easier pill to swallow than having been date-raped. I didn’t talk about the experience to anyone. I basically put the incident in the back of my mind. I would run into Ezra from time to time, but he acted as if nothing had happened.

  About one year after the incident I was describing it to a friend, and he said, “Iris, you were raped!” I can honestly say that it hadn’t hit me until then. I had been date-raped.

  Three years after the incident, at twenty-two, I began therapy. I didn’t know where to start. So I started to rehash the abuse I had experienced at the hands of my older brother. I began to understand that I had believed his lies; I had believed that no one would want me, so I was susceptible to any attention. In retrospect I think I kept drinking that night because I was insecure and wanted Michael to like me. I came to therapy because I knew I needed to change. I was feeling insecure about graduating and finding a job, I was having nightmares, and my therapist explained that I needed to appreciate myself before I could commit to any relationship.