on the record
This is another guest post by Pigeon, in response to the huge mess going around right now in relation to the accouncement regarding the Duke lacrosse rape case. I didn't feel qualified to offer an opinion myself, certainly not one that's not already been offered by folk who know better than I do, but this is important to read. If this doesn't bring it home for you and hurt, I'm not sure you're a person.
Anyway. I should leave it at that.
Except this, considering how many trolls are out running around right now: if you so much as consider being an asshole about this, I will moderate you so hard your ancestors will feel it, capisce?
--ll.
i tried to write about this post a few days ago, a few days after the duke verdict came out.
i tried, and erased and rewrote and erased, and gave up.
i want this to come out right. i want this to be so many things, i don’t much think it will be. but i think i need to write this anyway.
i didn’t expect the duke case to shake me so much. i feel like i hear about, talk about, read about, think about rape every day. i like to think i’ve built up some callous at this point, a tough, thick covering to take the edge off.
the whole thing caught me off guard. i didn’t follow the case very closely, mostly just reading feminist analyses on various blogs, snippets on npr. closely enough though, to know that the whole thing was deeply fucked up, that something happened to that woman that night, whether or not it fit the official charges or was perpetrated by the three accused.
and now they’ve been proclaimed not guilty, and that’s fine. i don’t know if they did it, but let’s presume innocence. glad they got their names cleared.
except now you hear the news, following “three boys innocent” with “she was never raped” and liar and whore. and no one seems to notice that the accused men’s innocence has nothing to do with whether or not she was raped, only that they didn’t do it. she called 911 for a reason, she went to the hospital afterwards, the examination supported her claims of sexual assault. we have no reason to think those results were wrong, no new information to contest it. perhaps she picked the wrong guys from the line-up, but that has little to do with what actually happened to her.
(go to feministe for more intelligent, coherent and thorough thoughts on this. read the comments at your own risk. i wish i hadn’t.)
but no one seems to remember that. instead it’s just liar, liar, liar. as if survivors aren’t called liars often enough as it is. this case just adds fuel to the fire of news media crying out, “she says she was raped, but what if she’s lying!” perpetuating the idea that women routinely lie about sexual assault to deflect attention from their own misdoings.
i don’t know a lot of statistics, and am never quite sure when to trust them, but i do know a lot of women, and i trust them a whole lot. of all the women i know, more than not have been raped, sexually assaulted or sexually abused at some point in their lives. of these women, more than not never reported. and of the few who did, more than not suffered pretty intense negative consequences because of it.
and no, this is not just the women i know, and, yes, they are representative of a much larger trend that exists in equal numbers outside of the communities that i’m a part of. it is not just a queer women thing, a once-alcoholic-drug-addicted women thing, a feminist women thing, a young collegiate women thing, a femme women thing.
and so here's yet another very public rape trial which ultimately tells survivors that it's your fault because you put yourself in a vulnerable situation or let him buy your dinner once, because you were drunk or not wearing enough clothing or made eye contact and smiled, besides, you’re probably a slut. and if you do try to press charges, no one will believe you anyway.
so, whatever, i was raped when i was sixteen. i was at your standard someone's-parents-are-out-of-town-for-the-weekend-let's-get-wasted high school party, drunk way past the point of blackout, he was the 21 year old buying us the booze. i thought i had been stupid and irresponsible getting so drunk in the first place, talked about how i needed to “take responsibility” for my behavior. rape never crossed my mind.
i was in therapy at the time, and told my therapist about what happened. she mentioned, initially, that she needed to check the mandatory reporting laws, that she might be legally bound to report it as statutory rape. i told her i didn’t want it reported. i never heard about it again, so assumed the law agreed with me. we talked about reckless sexual behavior, how that tied into my other self-destructive tendencies. the word rape never came up again.
looking back, i realize she wasn’t that great of a therapist, but i’m still shocked and retroactively appalled that she didn’t identify what happened as rape, that she apparently bought into my insistence that it was my fault for getting drunk enough to be blacked out enough to kind of say yes to a guy i was still too dizzy to even see clearly. (the left side of his face had a massive scar running from the top of his cheek bone down his jaw, the aftermath of a drunk driving accident a few years back. it is the only part of him that i can still picture in my mind, and something i did not actually see until the next morning). she knew how much i’d drunk—after smoking a few bowls, i downed ten shots of vodka in less than ten minutes, then topped off with some beer, on an empty stomach, at 100 pounds—that it was something of a miracle that i hadn’t ended up in a hospital with alcohol poisoning. we talked about why drinking that much was really not a good option for me, but not about how you are totally unable to consent while in a blackout. looking back, i can’t decide whether it was a matter of gross incompetence or internalized victim-blaming, or both.
what i didn’t know until very recently was that she actually was legally required to report what had happened. apparently the law is pretty straight forward.
261.5
(c) Any person who engages in an act of unlawful sexual
intercourse with a minor who is more than three years younger than
the perpetrator is guilty of either a misdemeanor or a felony, and
shall be punished by imprisonment in a county jail not exceeding one
year, or by imprisonment in the state prison.
he was 21, i was 16.
5 year age difference.
pretty clear.
there’s more too, about what does or does not constitute consent, and there’s the broader california rape law, both of which would have something to say about my blood alcohol level, but that’s almost beside the point.
whether or not i thought it was rape, whether or not she thought it was rape, she was legally obligated to report it.
and i can’t help but wonder why she didn’t, and what would have happened if she had.
as it was, my life was a mess. he lied about what happened a week later, my friends had known him longer than they’d known me, and i was quickly and quietly ostracized. although i didn’t see a connection at the time, my already not-so-great eating diminished from little food to no food, instead swallowing caffeine pills by the handful. more than anything, i was overwhelmingly disoriented. i could never remember how many pills i’d had at any given time, so would have another just in case. i remember throwing up and nearly collapsing at the park down the street from my house, laying on the sidewalk because that was all i could do. some of the neighbor stoner boys helped walk me home, and i made it up stairs in my room just in time to start shaking and convulsing uncontrollably, then puking some more. i was mentally and emotionally completely checked out, but my body knew and my body reacted, shaking and collapsing and puking where i couldn’t scream or cry or feel anything. (of course, the combination of caffeine pills and ephedrine and no food and no sleep helped that along nicely). i have no idea how i went to school, did homework, had conversations. i was utterly and completely wrecked, and i truly had no idea why. i maintained then and for years afterwards that the event had not affected me at all.
i can only imagine how much worse it would have been if she had reported. whether or not i would have given her his name, she would have had to tell my parents and the DA or the police or whoever these things are officially reported to. my parents would have made me tell them who it was, and would almost certainly have pressed charges. the friends who had quietly ostracized me would have then been forced to pick sides—and really, we all know whose side they were going to be on—and what was an incredibly lonely and isolating time might instead of been one of public shaming and humiliation. i imagine a hospital examination would have been required, which would have been terrifying and humiliating, followed by having to recount the events over and over and over again to the litany of people who inevitably get involved in official investigations—doctors, social workers, police, lawyers, we can probably add school officials because let’s face it, gossip gets round real quick at an all-girl’s catholic school. and there are all the ways in which they could try to discredit me—i’d had previous sexual partners (read: promiscuous), i’d lied to my parents to go to an unchaperoned party (read: dishonest, rebellious, put myself in a vulnerable/dangerous situation, irresponsible), had a mix of drugs and alcohol in my system (read: blatant disregard for the law, reckless behavior, self-destructive), history of self-destructive behaviors (read: emotionally unstable, mentally ill). it wouldn’t matter that i was an honor student with good grades, that i had never been in trouble before, that i was well-rounded in my activities, and generally pretty responsible. it wouldn’t matter that was i good kid, and really, just a kid even though i would have hated you for saying so. it feels cynical of me to assume that i would have been accused of lying, of trying to get attention, of being emotionally unstable, etc, etc. but i’ve been around long enough to know that it would mostly likely have gone down that way, especially since he was lying about it to begin with.
and sixteen year old me, who did not call it rape, did not even consider that it might be rape, would have been forced to choose between going along with charges that i didn’t want pressed in the first place, or saying it didn’t happen, or that i had wanted it, or something else that was not true, to try to put an end to it, which would only add to the opinion that i was some stupid, lying girl trying to get attention.
i know it might seem irrelevant to go down that road, create a reality that did not and will never now occur. it’s all guesswork, anyway, my best guesses of how it would have gone down knowing what i do about the people who were involved and the process of reporting sexual assault. but there is a point. ultimately, that therapist did me a huge favor by not reporting, however ethically questionable and illegal that decision may have been. it would have torn my life to shreds.
but here’s why this matters. i am the kind of girl who is privileged by our legal system. light-skinned, well educated, well spoken, from an upper-middle class family. my mother is even a lawyer. i was a good student & generally responsible kid on top of that. i was also pretty fucked up, but those battles were kept very private. on the outside, i had both institutional privilege and the approval of popular culture on my side. not to mention, i had a loving and supportive family, and a decent friend-base, even if most of them lived on the other side of the country at that point.
and it would still have turned out really fucking ugly. at best, i would only have had to face social consequences at school, among my peers; at worst, if it actually went to trial, if the media got involved (as cities go—if you could even call it that—the place was pretty small, so it’s entirely possible), i would have been surrounded and questioned and examined from all sides. and that would only be the outward assault—i have no idea how i would have held up emotionally under that kind of scrutiny. and who’s to say what the outcome would have been, i could very well have ended up a liar and a slut who almost ruined some poor boy’s life.
yeah, reporting sure is not looking too appealing.
and then imagine that you didn’t have a supportive family, maybe you risked physical abuse if your parents found out. imagine you’re black and the people you’re reporting to throw back racist stereotypes about how black women are promiscuous and sexually aggressive. imagine you’re a drug addict, imagine you’ve been in trouble before, maybe a lot, maybe you’ve got a record. imagine that he was actually your boyfriend, and that you’d been having sex for a few months now. imagine that your whole high school calls you a slut already. imagine that you really like to wear short skirts.
and how much worse does reporting sound now?
Anyway. I should leave it at that.
Except this, considering how many trolls are out running around right now: if you so much as consider being an asshole about this, I will moderate you so hard your ancestors will feel it, capisce?
--ll.
i tried to write about this post a few days ago, a few days after the duke verdict came out.
i tried, and erased and rewrote and erased, and gave up.
i want this to come out right. i want this to be so many things, i don’t much think it will be. but i think i need to write this anyway.
i didn’t expect the duke case to shake me so much. i feel like i hear about, talk about, read about, think about rape every day. i like to think i’ve built up some callous at this point, a tough, thick covering to take the edge off.
the whole thing caught me off guard. i didn’t follow the case very closely, mostly just reading feminist analyses on various blogs, snippets on npr. closely enough though, to know that the whole thing was deeply fucked up, that something happened to that woman that night, whether or not it fit the official charges or was perpetrated by the three accused.
and now they’ve been proclaimed not guilty, and that’s fine. i don’t know if they did it, but let’s presume innocence. glad they got their names cleared.
except now you hear the news, following “three boys innocent” with “she was never raped” and liar and whore. and no one seems to notice that the accused men’s innocence has nothing to do with whether or not she was raped, only that they didn’t do it. she called 911 for a reason, she went to the hospital afterwards, the examination supported her claims of sexual assault. we have no reason to think those results were wrong, no new information to contest it. perhaps she picked the wrong guys from the line-up, but that has little to do with what actually happened to her.
(go to feministe for more intelligent, coherent and thorough thoughts on this. read the comments at your own risk. i wish i hadn’t.)
but no one seems to remember that. instead it’s just liar, liar, liar. as if survivors aren’t called liars often enough as it is. this case just adds fuel to the fire of news media crying out, “she says she was raped, but what if she’s lying!” perpetuating the idea that women routinely lie about sexual assault to deflect attention from their own misdoings.
i don’t know a lot of statistics, and am never quite sure when to trust them, but i do know a lot of women, and i trust them a whole lot. of all the women i know, more than not have been raped, sexually assaulted or sexually abused at some point in their lives. of these women, more than not never reported. and of the few who did, more than not suffered pretty intense negative consequences because of it.
and no, this is not just the women i know, and, yes, they are representative of a much larger trend that exists in equal numbers outside of the communities that i’m a part of. it is not just a queer women thing, a once-alcoholic-drug-addicted women thing, a feminist women thing, a young collegiate women thing, a femme women thing.
and so here's yet another very public rape trial which ultimately tells survivors that it's your fault because you put yourself in a vulnerable situation or let him buy your dinner once, because you were drunk or not wearing enough clothing or made eye contact and smiled, besides, you’re probably a slut. and if you do try to press charges, no one will believe you anyway.
so, whatever, i was raped when i was sixteen. i was at your standard someone's-parents-are-out-of-town-for-the-weekend-let's-get-wasted high school party, drunk way past the point of blackout, he was the 21 year old buying us the booze. i thought i had been stupid and irresponsible getting so drunk in the first place, talked about how i needed to “take responsibility” for my behavior. rape never crossed my mind.
i was in therapy at the time, and told my therapist about what happened. she mentioned, initially, that she needed to check the mandatory reporting laws, that she might be legally bound to report it as statutory rape. i told her i didn’t want it reported. i never heard about it again, so assumed the law agreed with me. we talked about reckless sexual behavior, how that tied into my other self-destructive tendencies. the word rape never came up again.
looking back, i realize she wasn’t that great of a therapist, but i’m still shocked and retroactively appalled that she didn’t identify what happened as rape, that she apparently bought into my insistence that it was my fault for getting drunk enough to be blacked out enough to kind of say yes to a guy i was still too dizzy to even see clearly. (the left side of his face had a massive scar running from the top of his cheek bone down his jaw, the aftermath of a drunk driving accident a few years back. it is the only part of him that i can still picture in my mind, and something i did not actually see until the next morning). she knew how much i’d drunk—after smoking a few bowls, i downed ten shots of vodka in less than ten minutes, then topped off with some beer, on an empty stomach, at 100 pounds—that it was something of a miracle that i hadn’t ended up in a hospital with alcohol poisoning. we talked about why drinking that much was really not a good option for me, but not about how you are totally unable to consent while in a blackout. looking back, i can’t decide whether it was a matter of gross incompetence or internalized victim-blaming, or both.
what i didn’t know until very recently was that she actually was legally required to report what had happened. apparently the law is pretty straight forward.
261.5
(c) Any person who engages in an act of unlawful sexual
intercourse with a minor who is more than three years younger than
the perpetrator is guilty of either a misdemeanor or a felony, and
shall be punished by imprisonment in a county jail not exceeding one
year, or by imprisonment in the state prison.
he was 21, i was 16.
5 year age difference.
pretty clear.
there’s more too, about what does or does not constitute consent, and there’s the broader california rape law, both of which would have something to say about my blood alcohol level, but that’s almost beside the point.
whether or not i thought it was rape, whether or not she thought it was rape, she was legally obligated to report it.
and i can’t help but wonder why she didn’t, and what would have happened if she had.
as it was, my life was a mess. he lied about what happened a week later, my friends had known him longer than they’d known me, and i was quickly and quietly ostracized. although i didn’t see a connection at the time, my already not-so-great eating diminished from little food to no food, instead swallowing caffeine pills by the handful. more than anything, i was overwhelmingly disoriented. i could never remember how many pills i’d had at any given time, so would have another just in case. i remember throwing up and nearly collapsing at the park down the street from my house, laying on the sidewalk because that was all i could do. some of the neighbor stoner boys helped walk me home, and i made it up stairs in my room just in time to start shaking and convulsing uncontrollably, then puking some more. i was mentally and emotionally completely checked out, but my body knew and my body reacted, shaking and collapsing and puking where i couldn’t scream or cry or feel anything. (of course, the combination of caffeine pills and ephedrine and no food and no sleep helped that along nicely). i have no idea how i went to school, did homework, had conversations. i was utterly and completely wrecked, and i truly had no idea why. i maintained then and for years afterwards that the event had not affected me at all.
i can only imagine how much worse it would have been if she had reported. whether or not i would have given her his name, she would have had to tell my parents and the DA or the police or whoever these things are officially reported to. my parents would have made me tell them who it was, and would almost certainly have pressed charges. the friends who had quietly ostracized me would have then been forced to pick sides—and really, we all know whose side they were going to be on—and what was an incredibly lonely and isolating time might instead of been one of public shaming and humiliation. i imagine a hospital examination would have been required, which would have been terrifying and humiliating, followed by having to recount the events over and over and over again to the litany of people who inevitably get involved in official investigations—doctors, social workers, police, lawyers, we can probably add school officials because let’s face it, gossip gets round real quick at an all-girl’s catholic school. and there are all the ways in which they could try to discredit me—i’d had previous sexual partners (read: promiscuous), i’d lied to my parents to go to an unchaperoned party (read: dishonest, rebellious, put myself in a vulnerable/dangerous situation, irresponsible), had a mix of drugs and alcohol in my system (read: blatant disregard for the law, reckless behavior, self-destructive), history of self-destructive behaviors (read: emotionally unstable, mentally ill). it wouldn’t matter that i was an honor student with good grades, that i had never been in trouble before, that i was well-rounded in my activities, and generally pretty responsible. it wouldn’t matter that was i good kid, and really, just a kid even though i would have hated you for saying so. it feels cynical of me to assume that i would have been accused of lying, of trying to get attention, of being emotionally unstable, etc, etc. but i’ve been around long enough to know that it would mostly likely have gone down that way, especially since he was lying about it to begin with.
and sixteen year old me, who did not call it rape, did not even consider that it might be rape, would have been forced to choose between going along with charges that i didn’t want pressed in the first place, or saying it didn’t happen, or that i had wanted it, or something else that was not true, to try to put an end to it, which would only add to the opinion that i was some stupid, lying girl trying to get attention.
i know it might seem irrelevant to go down that road, create a reality that did not and will never now occur. it’s all guesswork, anyway, my best guesses of how it would have gone down knowing what i do about the people who were involved and the process of reporting sexual assault. but there is a point. ultimately, that therapist did me a huge favor by not reporting, however ethically questionable and illegal that decision may have been. it would have torn my life to shreds.
but here’s why this matters. i am the kind of girl who is privileged by our legal system. light-skinned, well educated, well spoken, from an upper-middle class family. my mother is even a lawyer. i was a good student & generally responsible kid on top of that. i was also pretty fucked up, but those battles were kept very private. on the outside, i had both institutional privilege and the approval of popular culture on my side. not to mention, i had a loving and supportive family, and a decent friend-base, even if most of them lived on the other side of the country at that point.
and it would still have turned out really fucking ugly. at best, i would only have had to face social consequences at school, among my peers; at worst, if it actually went to trial, if the media got involved (as cities go—if you could even call it that—the place was pretty small, so it’s entirely possible), i would have been surrounded and questioned and examined from all sides. and that would only be the outward assault—i have no idea how i would have held up emotionally under that kind of scrutiny. and who’s to say what the outcome would have been, i could very well have ended up a liar and a slut who almost ruined some poor boy’s life.
yeah, reporting sure is not looking too appealing.
and then imagine that you didn’t have a supportive family, maybe you risked physical abuse if your parents found out. imagine you’re black and the people you’re reporting to throw back racist stereotypes about how black women are promiscuous and sexually aggressive. imagine you’re a drug addict, imagine you’ve been in trouble before, maybe a lot, maybe you’ve got a record. imagine that he was actually your boyfriend, and that you’d been having sex for a few months now. imagine that your whole high school calls you a slut already. imagine that you really like to wear short skirts.
and how much worse does reporting sound now?
Labels: body politic, feminism, guest posts
posted by little light | 2:18 PM
32 Comments:
Thank you for sharing your story, Pigeon, and thank you, little light, for giving Pigeon a forum.
This comment has been removed by the author.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
I would just like to remind folks--especially friends who've been directed here who know the two of us in real life--not to use names or identifying information when commenting on this post.
There are a lot of personal details already; please keep in mind that part of the point of this piece is to do with the consequences of privacy breaches, and consider accordingly.
Thanks.
Thank you for relating your experiences to us, Pigeon.
I wonder if the trolls at Feministe would be so quick to accuse if they were aware of the number of women in their lives who have been sexually assaulted. It’s easy to wave a hand of dismissal until this affects someone close to you. Ironically, the trolls at Feministe are likely to be the last people that any woman would want to relate her experiences to.
I keep coming back to this trying to figure out how to say what I need to say to it, and failing, and looping around and around some more.
I'd add to that list of consequences -- running the risk that the world will try to treat one as The Rape Victim, the Object, rather than as a whole person from then on. Because "everyone knows" that rape ruins a person forever, makes them not really able to be a whole person anymore, so it's legit to unperson the survivor.
I could ... just ... spit.
Dw3t-Hthr--
i hadn't even thought of that, but that's so, so true.
i remember being so shocked, hearing a story related to me within the queer community (i know it's naive to assume that this will be better in the amongst queer women, but i often do anyway) about a woman sharing at an open-mic, going off about how she's tired of all these women who won't just fuck her, who have "issues", who can't just have sex.
and yeah okay, so it sucks not to get laid, but seriously? get. over. yourself.
and i just remember how it set off all these feelings in me that i've got, that i'm either able to be sexual and therefore Okay, or shit's coming up, ptsd is kicking in, and i can't, and i feel super fucking broken. sure, most of those standards are self-imposed, but the notions came from somewhere and i think you hit it on the head.
you either have to be super-survivor who is Over It and Moved On and Okay, or you're irreversibly and forever a little bit broken and tainted.
i'm with you on the spitting.
That was one of the major reasons I never reported the time I was assaulted -- I didn't want to be a Thing. I knew that being assaulted wasn't the be-all and end-all of my being, and the only way I was sure to not have the assault take over my life would be to never mention that it happened. I think I first talked about it three or four years later, to the person who is now my husband.
(The other reason I didn't do anything about it was that I was too dissociative from trauma for the following about two years to connect to that bit of my personal reality, but that's neither here nor there ...)
Thanks Pigeon for telling your story.
I have a couple of similar stories from my own life. I chose not to report them. Sometimes I feel guilty that I didn't report, that I'm possibly allowing these men to continue hurting women. But I know that because I'm "promiscuous," because the situations were "borderline," etc. etc., it wouldn't stop them anyway and it would make my life a living hell, at least for a little while. So I get over the guilt. Not reporting was the right decision for me.
Thanks for posting this, Pigeon.
If I had it to do over again, I would have never reported it, never told anyone except people I was intimate with (a short list) and I never would have spent a moment counseling other women who came to me because I had been raped and wanted to tell me their experiences and when they realized that my taint would rub off on them promptly ignored or harassed me.
I would have kept silent rather than having to go through what I suffered for three years in high school from my peers and from adults.
And that is a sad statement of affairs, I think, that even now, 17 years later, I know I would have been better off not saying anything in many ways.
Thank you piegeon, for sharing this. It helps me to understand better what my friends have gone through.
Thank you for sharing your experience. I had never thought about how traumatic the decision about whether or not to report can be.
Pigeon,
Thanks for doing this. Posting honestly, I mean. My sexual assault took me years to acknowledge, my own bad therapist, and although I "came out" about it - to friends and a rape crisis center -
the stigma and the fallout was crushing. I was in a relationship with this person, went to a small school, and once the word was out, well, I felt like I had the word LIAR across my forehead.
Except that I didn't lie.
But that experienced shamed me into never reporting it to authorities (my counselor was under no obligation to do so, although I did have to tell my parents in order to receive crisis counseling - a debacle in itself).
What I am trying to say is I understand, I've been there, and reading others' stories makes the burden somehow lighter. In short, thank you.
I certainly stand fully behind any woman who does not want to go through the torment that "reporting" starts. She isn't exaggerating even one bit.
It's terrifying to me how many stories like this there are, how many of us feel a connection with them to a truth from our own lives. I just keep hoping that attitudes and laws will change. I have to believe they will, over time, because anything else is too terrible to contemplate.
Thank you for sharing your story.
Thank you so much for sharing.
On a practical note: It's probable that it would have been illegal for your therapist to report what had happened. In California, therapists (and other care providers) can only break confidentiality in certain, almost bizarrely specific situations; with minors and sex, mandated reporting (that is, the therapist must report it to law enforcement even if doing so is against the client's wishes) is required only when one participant is younger than 14 and the other is older than 14, or if one participant is 15 or 16 and the other is more than 10 years older. Even if other situations are officially statutory rape, mandated reporting does not apply.
With rape, rather than statutory rape, it looks like only medical practioners are required to report.
Outside those circumstances, the therapist must by law and ethics keep everything you tell her confidential, unless you instruct her otherwise.
I don't know if that information's helpful... maybe it at least makes her actions (if not her lack of help) a bit more comprehensible...
occhiblu--
i can't say i'm super well versed in the law/rules around mandatory reporting, but i'm pretty sure she was required to report. it was my current therapist-- who no longer works in california, but did for years, including the year in which this took place-- who told me that that therapist was required to report it, as those were the rules that applied to her in that time.
also, the rules around confidentiality are totally different when you're a minor. i mean, she couldn't have shared that information with just anyone, but i know she could legally tell my parents pretty much whatever she wanted to. i don't know if my being the minor in question (as opposed to say, a perpetrator talking about it in therapy) changes how those rules work?
i'd be interested in looking at the actual laws around mandatory reporting, though, because it sounds like there's some ambiguity there, and it'd be good to know what's actually on the books.
She couldn't have told your parents just anything; there are actually rules about what can and can't be shared. (Abortion- and pregnancy-related issues, for example, are legally protected so that minors can seek counseling for them without fearing it will get back to their parents.)
I don't have the references in front of me... I'm training to be a therapist and I'm in a class where we're currently talking about some of these issues, but I'm certainly not an expert. And, as you imply, the rules very well may have changed between then and now.
I'll post more once I'm at home and can look over the info I have.
OK, finally have some actual information in front of me!
I'm looking at the UNDERSTANDING CONFIDENTIALITY AND MINOR CONSENT IN CALIFORNIA booklet from the Adolescent Health Working Group website. This booklet is what my professor gave our class as the official reference for CA law; it looks like it's meant to be distributed to all CA healthcare providers who give services to adolescents.
The short summary looks like, if your therapist thought the sex was rape or in any way coerced, she was required to report it (though I think she may not have been required, or allowed, to tell your parents). If it was consensual sex, she was not allowed to report it.
If you look at section A-2 of that pdf (p. 10), there's a chart for consensual sex and whether it needs to be reported (which, for a 16yo, is only if the partner is younger than 14), then beneath that it says:
Mandated reporters must report sexual intercourse or other sexual activity with a minor under 18 years old when the activity appears coerced, exploitative, based on intimidation, or in any other way resembles abuse -- regardless of claimed consent by the minor and regardless of partner age.
I would have a really hard time believing that anyone hearing your story would not think the sex was coerced, so assuming these laws were in place at the time, it certainly does sound like she was wrong. It also sounds like there's enough gray area that if she had decided it wasn't rape, which is certainly the message it sounds like she sent you, then she wouldn't be required to report it.
Which means, basically, that her ignorance or disbelief or biases basically gave her a legal escape route from reporting. If she called it consensual and un-coerced in her mind, then she didn't have to report.
What a convoluted situation... I'm glad it worked out for you in a way that you're ok with, but it does seem like the system, overall, sucks. I'm sorry you got caught up in it, and I'm both sorry and angry that there are so many crappy therapists out there.
thanks so much for the information occhiblu. that actually makes a lot of sense-- that somehow, she didn't think it was rape, and so didn't think she had to report it. i'm still astounded at this point that she could have thought it was anything but-- i mean, the most basic, basic training on sexual assault and consent would make it abundantly clear but. i guess that takes it back to the question of gross incompetence vs. internalized victim blaming, or both.
yeah, it is pretty astounding just how bad some therapists are. really, all the ones i saw as a minor were pretty terrible. i'm planning on going into therapy myself-- probably an LCSW-- and i guess that's another place where we can start to change the system as feminists, if only by not blaming survivors.
anyway, thanks again for the information. it's good to know.
Glad I could provide it, and good luck pursuing your MSW.
oh man pidge, having been in that same town? yeah, you're 100% right. it would have been a circus.
*hug*
This is moved from above with a slight edit for name. LL, you have my standing permission to delete my comments here if I goof and use y'all's names, I'm real sorry about it.
I just read through the comments at Feministe, and I think I'm going to be sick.
I know four women besides myself who've been sexually assaulted in some way (ignoring people I knew only in the looney bin). I am sure there are others among my friends who I just don't know about. The general outcome of the situations has ranged from something I'd objectively call "kind of ok" and comparatively call "nearly great" -- a monetary settlement -- to things I'd call "godawful", and a bunch of nonreporting (it took me ten years to tell anyone, and longer to tell anyone In Authority). Why? Fear. And some people claim that false accusation of rape is the worst thing that can happen to a person, than more often than not women are lying if they say they've been raped, that men and women are and are considered equal these days. It makes me sick. The deliberate ignorance and vile hatred that people still harbor about sexual assault is unimaginable.
Thanks for writing this Pigeon, and I'm sorry.
Thanks for sharing your tough story. Too often women are afraid of sharing for the same fears you have laid out.
Unfortunately, you have some of the facts of the Duke case wrong, though. If this woman was raped that night, it was not by any lacrosse members- as all 46 white members of the team (the one African-American one was excused since she said her attackers were white) were tested and none of them matched the 4 different semen samples inside of her that night.
Perhaps something terrible did happen to the woman before she went to the house. Perhaps she is mentally unstable and actually believes the 3 different versions of the story she told (as suggested by the A.G. who used this as a reason for not charging her with false allegations). Or perhaps she was in a bad situation (about to be arrested for public drunkeness) and lied without realizing the full extent of the consequences.
The bottom line is that this woman has done a MAJOR disservice to all women who ever have and ever will be assaulted. Her untruths have made it even harder for others to come forward, and that Nifong fan the fire to make the case what it became is very much to blame. All the evidence cited by the A.G. indicate that Nifong had all of the issues laid out right in front of him to see that there was no evidence of rape by the accused. Nifong should have responsibly sat down with the woman and tried to figure out exactly what she had done from the start to finish of that day. If she was raped that day, maybe taking some time to talk it out EARLY ON would have clarified who did what.
We have all suffered because of this woman and this DA. I certainly hope that women who have been raped not fear coming forward because of the lies and political games that were played in this situation.
We have all suffered because of this woman and this DA.
Wow, that's funny. And all this time I thought we suffered because of rapists -- damn, thanks for clearing that up. Note to self: As a rape survivor, I suffer because of women who report rape, not because of rapists or a system that ensures that rape continues unpunished. What kind of mental gymnastics did you have to go through to come to that conclusion, anyhow? And seriously, you don't even have the guts to post under a pseudonym? You hide behind "Anonymous"?
And also, why don't people consider that it's likely that the lacrosse players weren't the only ones at the party -- they could have had friends at the party who raped her, and seeing as it's pretty certain she was drugged, she wouldn't remember who it was. She, or more likely the AG, just assumed it was someone on the lacrosse team because it was a lacrosse party. Cripes.
anonymous--
We have all suffered because of this woman.
you seemed to have missed the point entirely.
there are so many things i want to say about this, i don't even know where to start. because this all comes back to survivor's credibility and victim blaming.
let's start by pretending for a minute that you're right, that she was in fact lying.
bad on her. for sure.
but the guys *did* get their names cleared. they are Not Guilty. they're going to be okay.
but even if she did lie, that does not justify printing her picture, name and contact information in newspapers under the heading LIAR. there is no excuse for the humiliation and degradation she's been subjected to, during or after the investigation. because let's be honest, they've been calling her a whore and liar from the beginning, if weren't bad enough that she's poor and black, she's a stripper and everyone knows that strippers are greedy, money-grubbing liars. and i mean, if you're willing to take your clothes off for money, there's probably a lot more you'd do if they pony up a little more cash, right?
so, for those of us viewing at home, this says sluts can't be raped and she put herself in a stupid, vulnerable position, so let’s hope none of that could apply to you. and it says, you better be able to prove it if you want anyone to believe you, and if you can't, if we can cast just a shadow of a doubt on your credibility, this is what will happen to you.
so we are not suffering because of that woman. we are suffering because our reporting system, from the police to the media, is a victim blaming system, it begins with skepticism and generally goes down hill from there. we are suffering because even if this woman was lying, the system ate her alive and spit her back out, and those of us watching at home all know that that could be me, even if we were telling the truth.
but the thing is, we have no reason to believe she lied about being assaulted. we even have a hospital examination whose results showed signs of sexual assault. as i said in the post--we have no reason to believe those results were wrong. maybe she got the who wrong, but that doesn’t change the what.
and there are a million possible explanations for the inconsistencies in her story, only one of which is that she lied.
to hear me tell the story of what happened to me the day after, a week after, and then a month after, you would have heard three very different stories.
the night i was raped, sometime after it was through, we stumbled back downstairs, still drunk, and i told my friend whose house we were crashing at that i’d just had sex.
then a week later— it was friday night. i had stayed home from school that day, still sick with the side effects of the day-after-pill (is anyone surprised to hear that he didn’t use a condom?), so i wasn’t allowed to go out that with my friends. the whole group was hanging out at someone’s house, and the guy who raped me—let’s call him joe—was there too.
my friends started to give him a hard time, telling him that he’d taken advantage of me, that he was an asshole, etc., all things they had said to me earlier in the week, all things that i dismissed with, no, no, it was my fault for getting so drunk, i said it was okay. none of us used the word rape but we all pretty much agreed that he was kind of a douche, and that going for the super drunk girl was a shady move.
so yeah. they start to give him a hard time, he tells them it never happened. that we fooled around some, but didn’t have sex. needless to say, they’re upset and confused. one in particular is livid, as she’d dropped everything a few days prior to help me get emergency contraception before the 72 hour window passed. they call me up and ask me point blank if it was true, if we’d really had sex.
i was so caught off guard by the question, i froze, stuttering out, yeah, i mean, i think so, i don’t remember it that well.
needless to say, that didn’t go over so well.
i spent the next few hours racking my brain, desperately grasping for the already much-faded memories. it had not occurred me to doubt myself, but once the possibility was out there, the holes in my memory seemed huge, and i found myself terrified, that maybe, somehow, i’d created the whole thing in my head, that none of it had really happened.
after an hour or so, i was able to put enough pieces together to be sure that it had happened, to be sure that i wasn't imagining or making things up.
but the damage was already done. that minute of hesitation said more than anything i could tell them after that.
and they wanted to believe him, it was easier that way.
then ask me again, a month, a year, even two years later, and the story is even less recognizable. the basic facts were still the same—that he was 21, that i’d been plastered, that he was kind of a douche. but it was a story i told in passing, it was No Big Deal. i didn’t mention the details that would reveal how predatory he was or how premeditated the event. although i probably could have remembered those details if i’d tried, believing as thoroughly as i did that it was both my fault, and that the event hadn’t affected me at all, they seemed irrelevant. and i would not have told you that i hadn’t known what was going on much of the time that night, that i had been confused or disoriented or scared. i almost certainly would not have told you that i’d never had sex with a guy before him. it was too embarrassing. and i was very good at seeming much older than i was, at seeming more together and collected and experienced than i was— and like any precocious kid, told the story in a way that maintained that image.
although the facts as i knew them never changed, the way i told the story changed so drastically that i’m sure if the same person were hearing the telling each time, the stories would seem contradictory indeed. for a long time, i was terrified to talk to old friends about the fact that i was raped, because they had heard the story in its older, No Big Deal version, before i recognized what had happened for what it was. i was sure they were going to accuse me of lying.
now i realize my experiences and the experiences of the woman in the duke case are by no means identical. but it makes sense to me that her story changed, seemed jumbled, uncertain. trauma does funny things to your head. you feel confused, you feel disoriented, you feel crazy. i still feel crazy sometimes, nearly five years later, trying to make the pieces fit together. to have to talk about it, to relay the story over and over again to the necessary authorities, while the trauma was still fresh— i can’t even imagine. then add the pressure of the media & the 24-hour scrutiny on top of that--
that she could even talk at all is a wonder to me.
so until there’s evidence to suggest that she wasn't assaulted, i don’t really care if she has contradicted herself, if she didn’t identify the right guys.
what i care about is that something happened to her, and instead of getting help, she’s been publicly harassed and humiliated.
what i care about are the survivors who need support and protection, and are attacked instead.
because even if she did lie, calling her a liar and a whore doesn’t help survivors.
and taking care of survivors is what matters, more than anything else.
that is the point.
anonymous, I'd have moderated you much more thoroughly if there weren't good responses to you. What you've said so far counts as conversation, and I'm letting it through, but there are paths you're treading that, if continued, lead to very thin ice. So, to clarify for everyone:
If you want to participate in this conversation, especially in an inflammatory manner, use a name. Sign and stand by your arguments or don't make them. With things this charged and in light of this post's content, the next anonymous comments to appear here, without some kind of name attached, will be immediately deleted.
The Duke case is not the point, here, and I will absolutely not tolerate turning this into another endless go-round about who had what proof for what when. That's not the subject being discussed right here.
Victim-blaming is not acceptable while I am moderating. I have never yet had to delete a comment on my blog for content--excepting personal information, with the consent of the commenter--but make no mistake, if I see arguments go down that line here, they will not last. The ones who do the greatest disservice to victims of sexual assault are the assaulter, period. The ones responsible for the assault taking place are the ones who perpetrated it.
This holds ironclad. It holds double when we're talking about my partner.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
shibaridevotee, your comment has been moderated. Issues of a rape victim's "accountability" are not germane to this discussion--which is primarily about the consequences for an assault survivor who chooses to report her assault.
I will take your interest on your son's behalf at face value, but point-blank asking a rape survivor with PTSD if it was really her fault for putting herself in the situation--no matter how unwise or compromising that situation may have been--is not the way to get the information you're looking for. It also tidily proves the point of the original post.
If you would like to continue here, I ask that you redirect your queries along a more constructive path.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Nobody here is arguing that we live in an ideal world, shibaridevotee. Nobody is arguing that rape doesn't happen.
However, whatever choices pigeon made that increased the danger she was in, she did not choose to be raped; the choice for the rape to happen was entirely her rapist's; and it was, incontrovertibly, rape. Keep in mind that I am privy to more information than you are, and my partner, further still.
I have asked two or three times in this thread that we remain on the topics brought up, and you have been asked specifically to stop derailing this thread by insisting on discussing pigeon's supposed contribution to her sexual assault. You have no idea to what degree my partner "takes responsibility" for her actions, because that is not what this conversation is about.
I have stated clearly what my moderation policy here is, and that it is stricter than I ever apply elsewhere. You have chosen to directly violate those rules without so much as an apology. Welcome to making the first, and second, comment I've ever had to delete.
To Pigeon: Thank you so much for speaking.
To little light: Thanks for your great blog, for this important post, and for facilitating a space for discussion.
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