Warning: graphic sexual assault content

I picked up on something in his text messages and emails — they were demanding, bossy, and paternalistic. This was a client who had been attempting to contact me since October, but I decided to ignore him. The client kept contacting me. He was persistent. I’m a sex worker, and as such, I confront decisions regarding safety and sanity and money on a fairly frequent basis. The client’s vibe was just too weird, even for me, a veteran in the field of absurdity, social outcasts, and patriarchs desperately reaching for the touch of a young girl. Unsure how to placate his aggressive energy, I finally told him that I had left the business.

But he found my advertisements online. “Everywhere,” he wrote to me in a text message three months later. “It’s clear that you’ve returned to the industry.” In the lull of the Christmas season, clients were feeling broke and weighing familial obligations — with the holiday season’s moralism, I was left with an empty schedule and a hungry wallet. I agreed to meet with him.

The man was very old. How old, I couldn’t tell. He had crow’s feet in his eyes and a potbelly that threatened to pop the buttons of the Ralph Lauren polo that lurched over his waistline. Fine white tufts receded into his hairline; dandruff coated the shoulders of his black blazer.

He wrapped his arms around my waist on the suede sofa in front of the TV and offered me a glass of wine; he ran his fingers covetously between the small slice of space between my stockings and my naked upper thigh. As I drew closer to him, I smelled something rancid. His musky underarms combined with the smell of feet, urine, cum, a day of hard work at the office, and god knows what else.

In a feeble, but valiant attempt to hold back my disgust, I traced the surface of his crinkled khakis. He took my small hand in his, kneading it like the soft limb of a Raggedy Anne doll, and explained to me that he was a dominant. That I should call him sir. But that before we began, he would like to know what my limits were. I told him I was extremely open, but for now the most important thing for him to know was that I needed him to use a condom when we had sex.

“Well, as we explore the world of BDSM together, we’ll see what your limits really are and if I can convince you otherwise.” A chill went down my spine, but I left the hotel room that day in one piece, with several hundred dollars extra in my pocket.

On St. Patrick’s Day, he contacted me again. I remembered how unpleasant he had been. I had just spent an obscene amount on advertising, and in my unrealistic state of financial mania, I agreed to meet with him. I had survived once. I had survived a lot. I had seen a lot. No one had fucked with me yet. “You can handle this,” I told myself.

He sent me a text message with his room number, and when I arrived, I rapped my cold knuckle against the door cautiously. He led me back to the suede couch where he had sat on my face months prior and we chatted, I’m not sure what about. I asked him vague questions about his business trip and how he had been. I giggled at the right times and smiled at others, trying to hold eye contact without collapsing like a house of cards. He said he had been to Tokyo and London. He said none of that mattered now, that this was his last stop, and that he had been looking forward to seeing me for months. He was so happy to see me. I couldn’t say the same.

I swallowed hard, clinked my glass to his, and said, “Well, cheers to that,” and opened my painted lips like a broken toy doll. It was the only thing I could think of to say. I held my breath to avoid inhaling too much of the scent that my memory had done such a good job of suppressing until now. He pushed the hair out of my face and informed me that we were going to the bedroom. I tried to push away my nausea. I thought about the money at the other end of this, grabbed his hand, and with put-on girlish excitement, skipped to the bedroom, his sloth-like body in tow.

“Take off your clothes,” he said.

I quietly complied. Wordlessly I unbuckled the straps of my favorite sandals, shimmied out of my skirt, and took off my sweater. I paused when I got to my bra and panties. Staring like a hungry wolf, he sat opposite me, wet circles of sweat swelling beneath the armpits of his dress shirt. My eyes met his, his pupils dilated, his hairy arm snaked across the firm mattress, and with two stubby fingers he pushed my sternum backwards into the gilded Egyptian cotton.

As he fastened restraints onto my ankles and wrists, I inhaled deeply and meditated on all the possible violence that could occur at this moment. I made some jokes and made him laugh because I knew the show wasn’t anywhere near being over yet. He brought out a huge Hitachi magic wand and buzzed its circular surface up and down my pelvic bone, where he seemed to think my clit was located. I managed some soft whimpers and feigned arousal. “Oh, he’s getting excited now,” my client said, stroking the bulge buried in his gray boxer briefs.

Fair enough. Hopefully that meant we’d be done soon. I arched my back into the mattress and opened up my legs, scanning down my naked body to the bedside table, where I’d conveniently placed several condoms in varying sizes. He started humping me, holding my knees into my chest. I got breathy, hoping to eschew any opportunity to prolong the session. He thrust into me with all his force. His pinky-sized dick slid up and down the lips of my tragically wet pussy. With increasing aggression, he throttled my pelvic region, finally sliding his uncovered penis inside me.

I placed my feet on his soft chest and, with all the force I could muster, kicked him backwards. He stumbled back a few steps before falling to the ground. “That is not okay,” I said, breaking with my script. “This cannot happen without a condom.” I spoke as if I was scolding a small child.

“This is not a joke. It’s my safety. There are condoms right there. If you would like to have sex with me, you need to wear one. I have absolutely no problem leaving.”

He looked at me, and then down at the floor, saying nothing. He looked back at me and kissed me. Pulling on the canvas restraints that held my ankles to my wrists, he flipped me over onto my stomach. I tumbled onto a heap of butt plugs that he had bought just for the occasion. Then I felt him on top of me. The long, yellowing nails of his hobbit fingers gripped my waistline, pulling me closer to his body, dragging my back into his sweating, hog-like body in hollow claps of slapping flesh. I felt something in my asshole. Maybe a finger or a butt plug. Something — I just wasn’t sure what.

Then I realized he was inside me. I realized he was anally raping me. I lay there looking at my nail polish, red like cherries in the spring on the white sheets. I stared beyond the ends of my long lashes and felt my nose crunch into the down pillow. I wondered if I was right — was he really inside me? Was this really happening? How could he be doing this when literally seconds prior, I had specified that under no circumstances was he to enter me without a condom?

I knew that if I wanted to, I could kick from behind. I knew I could get him on his back and even probably choke him if necessary. I had been taking kickboxing and self-defense classes and knew that the right calculated slither from beneath him could foil the violent desire of his pinky-sized, but all-powerful, penis. Completely clearheaded, I envisioned the exact movement of my limbs that would render him powerless. I knew I could push him off the bed, choke him, and throw a fairly decent punch.

But if I resisted, I mused, what would happen? If I was going to get him off me, it might mean injuring him. What would happen to me, a young girl working in an illegal trade, if I hurt this man? Scratches or marks were courtroom collateral that could be held against me. If I fought, I would be leaving without compensation. If I fought, he could retaliate and rape again, or worse. If I fought and ran into the streets, soaked by green beer, I could be followed by civilians seeking to save me from sex-trafficking, or worse, vigilante justice seekers looking to avenge my John for his injuries.

If I fought, I could be arrested. New York state laws explicitly exclude prostitution from rape protection laws. I didn’t think today was a day I would lose my life, and had I been at real risk of being murdered, I thought to myself, the situation and the risks incurred by my potential resistance would carry a far different weight.

I remembered the expressions on the faces of the doormen as I entered. Everyone knows what it means when a beautiful young girl in a trench coat and red lips walks into an upscale hotel room for exactly one hour and then leaves. I remembered the silence of the middle-aged tourists in the elevator, how they had looked at me, the ambient tension brought to the surface by a whore’s presence.

I had no choice but to summon my most convincing performance of clueless high-school girl and as I emitted the perfectly crafted moans of fake pleasure, I prayed to whatever god does or does not exist that my client would cum quickly and that all of this would soon be over. It was only a few seconds before I felt his hot cum inside me. After his final gurgle of exhausted ecstasy, he rolled over beside me. The liquid trailed the inside of my ass, and slowly drizzled down my perineum.

Without pause I hopped off the bed and flew as quickly and gracefully as possible into the bathroom to wash myself off. “Wow, that felt great,” he exhaled into the comforter. I wondered if he was aware that he had just raped me. “I love fucking girls in the ass. It’s almost the same as the other way; it’s just a little bit tighter. I don’t have the right size dick that’s ideal for ass fucking, but I sure do love it.”

“Uh-huh. Yeah that felt really good,” I half yelled from the marble bathroom. I looked at my naked body in the mirror. What the fuck was happening? I didn’t have time to think about it. I only had time to make sure I came out of this alive. “Sweetie, can you bring me a hot towel, while you’re at it?” he called.

“Sure thing!” I pushed away his moldy bag of toiletries and turned the hot water on. I took a deep breath, putting the fluffy hand towel under the lukewarm water.

“Here you go,” I said, sweeping off the remaining cum from his crotch with the white linen. I smiled because I felt like I had no choice. I giggled girlishly when he asked me to lie down and snuggle. I looked at the digital clock on the bedside table. We still had 40 minutes left of session. I sighed and laid my head on his heaving body because I felt like that was what I had to do. I didn’t have anything to say and I wasn’t in a position to make pleasantries. I waited for him to speak. He pinched my nipples and told me about his wife. I tried to keep breathing.

He went off about how he likes to take girls to Atlantic City for long weekends. He told me he liked playing with me, and he would write a review of my services; he would take me out to dinner. “That sounds nice,” I said, sweetly, smiling and batting my eyelashes as if it was possible to speak to god through the performance of beauty and perceived feminine purity.

I have never felt so powerless as I did within this moment. I cannot explain to you how it feels to have all of your human rights and physical and emotional strength eclipsed by the existence of bureaucratic structures, which quite literally do not recognize your personhood. At some level, I’m not upset that this happened. I’m not fazed by the fact that sex workers get raped, and that this time, I was one of them. I know this happens. At some level, I expected it to happen to me at some point. For me as a sex worker, the prospect of rape is a fairly mundane factor in the extremely dangerous and illicit work I do.

I enter every room ready to be killed. I meet new clients and I imagine what they can do to me and how I am going to escape. I look at everything they do. I watch their grip on glasses of wine and the way their eyes flicker from my body to the bed. I think about every word they send me in text messages and emails. I look at the speed of their wrists when they unsnap my suspenders or unzip the flies on their pants. I listen to the tone they use when they answer the door and when they suggest that we “get more comfortable.”

I reach for their dicks when they are halfway inside me to make sure that they haven’t slipped the condom off. I do this even with my regulars who I see on a weekly basis. I do this with clients who have told me their whole life stories, who I know everything about, clients who I actually enjoy seeing. I want to trust them, but the sad reality is that, due to the systems in place, I can’t afford to relax into the illusion of trust and safety.

Sex workers are soldiers. We never, ever get to turn off. If you don’t understand this, then you are fundamentally misunderstanding what makes sex work “work” rather than play. Period.

I most certainly don’t show up to work thinking that I’m about to have a great time. I’m providing a service at my own risk. No one even has to say that to me for me to know it’s true that women get raped every second of every day, and that even those who aren’t sex workers have trouble achieving justice. From day one, women are told that there are good girls and bad girls, and bad girls have it coming to them. The parameters of our existence as femme-identified people and women are strictly policed with ambient threats of persistent violence

Though I am emotionally equipped for the plausibility and total likelihood that I will be raped or even murdered at work, there is no amount of conviction, physical strength, or intuitive savvy that can protect me as a person who leads a criminalized existence.

Because I am a sex worker, even though I am a fairly privileged sex worker, I do not have the basic rights that all human beings should. Yes, assault is assault and rape is rape, and the stakes are high for every single person who encounters abuse and assault. We can acknowledge that all women experience these things, but it’s simply not true that sex workers have the same experience with sexual violence that other women do.

The part of me that walks away from this rape scenario knowing that it was a matter of time is, yes, deeply fucked up. My stone-faced blasé-ness in the face of this violence is an internalized victim blaming. But more than that, it’s the result of systemic injustice that is applied to all victims of sexual violence, and especially to violence against sex workers.

I know too many women who have been hurt. There’s a serial killer who targets sex workers in Long Island, there’s a serial rapist who calls girls to his house in New Jersey to then rape them. I’ve heard stories of police actually laughing in the face of workers who report violence on the job. I’ve been to vigils full of crying women and trans people and LGBTQ providers, many of whom are acquaintances or friends of mine. This happens, and it happens fairly frequently. I see the stories in my email inbox, hear about it from my loved ones; I see it on the news. I know that it happens, but more importantly I know that, in the majority of cases, no one gives a fuck.

Why? Because we’re whores. Because everybody knows we had it coming. Because we could have chosen a less dangerous profession like a retail job or a waitress position in lieu of sex work. Because a whore is a woman who has plummeted from her celestial virgin state to the rock bottom, to the sewers of despicable human existence. A whore’s life is meaningless. She and the pain she carries are irrelevant, save for the moment when her soft lips cradle your hardening dick. These ideas are hundreds and hundreds of years old, and they need to change.

Serial rapists and murderers often target sex workers, with full knowledge that those workers are the most vulnerable due to their lack of protection under the law, before moving on to target other women. It’s almost impossible to get real statistics on the subject of sexual violence against workers due to the criminal nature of our work, but estimates say that those in the sex trade have a 45% to 75% chance of experiencing sexual violence on the job. There are numerous examples of murderers and rapists who target sex workers — but what’s troubling is that, more often than not, we don’t take this violence seriously when it is recounted by those who experience it first hand. What’s troubling is that we know this information and have known it for quite some time, yet the powers at large begrudgingly refuse to acknowledge that it is necessary for serious change to occur.

I don’t feel like I can afford to be silent. As a person with privilege, I worry about the hundreds and thousands of sex workers who will be murdered and raped in the remainder of 2016, and I know that we are very, very far from achieving justice — even if decriminalization happens, that does not compensate for the fact that I will be living with this for a long time.

I will be thinking about all the women I don’t know who will be meeting with this man. I will be wondering about all the other women he says he has met with and wondering if they were also raped. I will be wondering if he has killed anyone before. Even as I write this I wonder what the consequences are of speaking out — what happens when my mother googles my name and finds this? What happens if my rapist finds this? What happens if the police see this? What happens when I want to apply for some normal ass job and this article pops up? What happens when x y z?

I don’t have any answers or brilliant ideas. I can’t sit here and allow myself to get tangled in a web of criminal paranoia while other, less privileged members of my community get abused, threatened, killed, raped, and jailed. What I can do, however, is seek healing in telling you my story, and hope that within it, you see some refraction of humanity’s struggles and joys that are worth fighting for. I can hope that you will understand that I am a person whose pain is real, and that there are millions of others just like me, and that this will encourage you to re-examine your ideas about sex work and join us in the fight for our rights.

I’ve been watching the social media fallout surrounding the trial of Brock Turner, the swimming champion from Stanford who received a six-month sentence for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman in January of 2015. As with any other case that deals with violence against women, the reactions have been equal parts depressing and encouraging. Depressing because even now, the narrative persists that young white men convicted of rape are being unfairly denied their potential bright futures. Encouraging because every time this happens, it feels like we get a little closer to exposing the framework of rape minimization and acceptance that supports incidents like these. This case has made it clearer than ever that we as a society condone rape by privileging men’s feelings over victims’ trauma — and more people than ever have objected.

Most of the discussion has centered around two letters. The first is the impact statement written by the victim herself, which she read out loud in court on June 2 and which was subsequently published by Buzzfeed on June 3. The other is letter written by Turner’s father asking for leniency in his sentencing; Stanford law professor Michele Dauber brought this one to public notice when she tweeted a portion of it. The former letter is as gutting as the latter is tone-deaf. The woman that Turner attacked speaks of what it felt like to wake up in the hospital with pine needles and debris inside her vagina. Meanwhile, Turner’s father laments that his son no longer enjoys pretzels, and argues he has been forced to pay too high a price for “20 minutes of action.”

To read Turner’s father’s letter is to feel an immediate rush of pure fury. It’s tempting to just go full snark on it, because there is lot here to snark here: from Turner Senior’s lyrical description of Brock’s lost love for steak to his obstinate refusal to actually name his son’s crime, the letter reads like a bad parody of how someone might talk about a rapist. It’s much harder to read the letter earnestly; it feels almost impossible to comprehend that this man truly believes his son is the one deserving of pity. It’s more comfortable to mock — but we can’t just mock. We have to look at — really look at, unsparingly and in detail — all the ways in which Turner’s father’s letter exemplifies how rape culture works.

This case has made it clearer than ever that we as a society condone rape by privileging men’s feelings over victims’ trauma.
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Rape culture is the idea that sexual assault does not happen in a vacuum, but rather occurs because we are socialized in a way that normalizes and even celebrates sexual victimization of women. In my experience, most men have a twofold reaction to that definition: first they’ll ask how it can be true that rape is normalized if rape is also understood to be one of the worst crimes a person can commit, and second they’ll swear that they, personally, would never. When they say these things they will absolutely believe that they’re speaking the truth. And then a case like Brock Turner’s will come along and present some very uncomfortable challenges to those ideas.

Everyone can agree that rape is objectively wrong, but problems crop up when we try to parse exactly what rape is and under what circumstances it occurs. I’m willing to bet that more than a few men read the victim’s letter and had a pang of recognition — not of her experiences, but his. Because most men have done at least some of what Turner did. They’ve gone to parties with the intention of hooking up with someone; they’ve zeroed in on the vulnerable girls, the drunk girls, the girls who seem like they’d be easy to take home; they’ve assumed that silence or a lack of clear refusal is the same as consent. And when these men read the account of what Brock Turner did, even if they recognize it as awful, there’s a louder voice in their heads saying something like this could have been written about me.

And the brutal truth is, they’re right. A lot of men, a lot of self-professed good men, have done something like what Brock Turner did: maybe not after a frat party, maybe not on the ground behind a dumpster, maybe not with a girl so intoxicated that she was losing consciousness, but maybe not so far off. Perhaps in their case the girl was drunk, yes, but not so very much more drunk than they were, and she seemed to like it and the next morning they went out for breakfast. Perhaps the girl said yes to kissing and touching and even though she froze up when he tried to penetrate her she never actually said no. Perhaps he thought that every yes starts out as a no because someone told him so, or because every movie or TV show he’d seen showed a women having to be cajoled and worn down befor she agreed to sex. Whatever the circumstances, Brock Turner’s story forced them to look at their actions in a new light and what they saw didn’t jive with how they felt about themselves.

And it’s so much easier to say neither of us are rapists than it is to say both of us are rapists.

Rape culture is the idea that sexual assault does not happen in a vacuum.
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Most rapists aren’t monsters who lurk behind bushes and in dark alleyways waiting for unsuspecting women to walk by. In fact, statistics show that a woman is far more likely to be assaulted by someone she knows than by a stranger. Most rapists are men we know and like: our neighbors and our colleagues and sometimes even our friends. Men who might admit that things got a little bit out of hand, or that they didn’t mean to go that far but they got caught up in the heat of the moment. Men like my friend’s boyfriend, who once referred to beer as liquid panty remover only to declare minutes later that rapists deserve to be castrated. Men who think that consent is a one-time binary, yes or no, and not an ongoing process of checking in with their partners.

Men we think of as nice guys.

Men who look just like everybody else.

And the worst part is, this feels like a best case scenario. In fact, there’s a small part of me that is still somewhat shocked that a white man from a well-connected family was convicted at all.

But please, tell me again about how our society takes rape very seriously.

Brock Turner’s father might be right that he does not have a violent past. It might, in fact, be accurate to say that up until the events of January 17th, 2015, Brock Turner had led an exemplary life. It’s possible that at the time Turner did not consider what he was doing to be sexual assault. But it was. The fact that he’s not a violent monster doesn’t mean he isn’t a rapist. He’s a rapist because he committed a rape. If these nice men who kind of sort of identify with what he did committed rapes, they’re rapists too.

And this is what we need to talk about over and over: the fact that nice boys from nice families commit rape. The fact that assault can happen even when the rapist does not “feel like” he is committing rape, because someone told him that attacks like the one Brock Turner committed are just normal romance. The fact that Brock Turner’s feelings seem to have greatly trumped those of the woman he assaulted.

We need to talk about how so many reactions to stories like these center the mens’ feelings.

And then we need to talk about how we can drown out those voices with the voices of survivors.

Explainers everywhere are working overtime to preserve patriarchal values. One popular strategy that continues to crop up states that, “rape is different from other crimes because it’s a ‘he said/she said’ situation.” This faulty line of reasoning reveals three things: an assumption that in disputes between men and women, men must be given the benefit of the doubt; an assumption that all rapists are men and all victims women; and glaring ignorance about how the U.S. justice system actually operates.

The justice system runs on testimonial evidence, which is exactly what “he said/she said” is. What makes a “he said/she said situation” different from any other dispute between witnesses? In a word: Nothing.

Whether it’s a small claims case between neighbors over dog poop, or a death penalty case of murder in the first degree, witnesses will give testimony, and each side’s testimony will usually oppose the other side’s testimony. If everyone agreed, there would be no reason to be in court to begin with.

Inevitably, some of these disputed cases will pit “he said” testimony against “she said” testimony. We hear the “he said/she said situation” line exclusively in sexual assault cases because men have been accustomed through history to the benefit of the doubt (if not outright commendation) in heterosexual rape cases.

Cases are decided every day based solely on witness testimony. The “lack of corroborating evidence” for testimony — cited by Senator Susan Collins and others during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings as a potential violation of Kavanaugh’s rights — doesn’t mean a denial of due process, the fair procedures that the  all citizens are entitled to, nor does it void a presumption of innocence.

To be clear, testimony by a competent witness is sufficient evidence on its own.

The legal definition of “competent” has evolved over the last one hundred fifty years to mean, simply, being able to perceive and communicate what happened. The “he said/she said” line is likely a holdover from when certain groups of people were classified as incompetent witnesses by virtue of their status. In ancient Athens, for example, women were excluded from courts entirely. And in the 21st century, Jewish law in Orthodox and Conservative communities still holds that women are not competent witnesses in most cases.

To be clear, testimony by a competent witness is sufficient evidence on its own.
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Excluding people of color from testifying was a common practice in the States, and it was legal until passage in 1868 of the 14th Amendment. Why? As one court held, it was because of “their crude and monstrous superstitions, which rendered them incapable of feeling or appreciating the obligation of an oath, as felt and appreciated in a Christian community; and it was not, therefore, deemed safe to receive them as witnesses, even against one another.”

Under similar rationale, atheists of any color were also deemed incompetent to testify, beginning  in the States during colonial times and extending in many jurisdictions through the mid-nineteenth century. Denying people the right to testify, or questioning the credibility of a particular demographic, has always been a way for courts to strengthen social hierarchies like institutional racism and sexism.

The 'he said/she said' line is likely a holdover from when certain groups of people were classified as incompetent witnesses by virtue of their status.
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While women and people of color are now, legally, competent to testify, barriers against them persist. Leigh Gilmore, author of Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives and a distinguished visiting professor at Wellesley College, writes that sexual and racial violence are seen by some as “belonging to a separate ordered of judgment.” Moreover, gender and race stereotypes are “sticky judgments,” so ubiquitous that we can’t see them, so prevalent that they seem “neutral.”

When asked to share some thoughts about how doubting women’s testimony creates a benefit for men in the justice system, she says,  

“[G]ender bias makes doubting women feel rational and virtuous rather than unjust. ‘He said’ carries more weight than what ‘she said’ because women’s testimony is demeaned and discredited in ways that men’s testimony isn’t. . . .We have vividly seen with the #MeToo movement the effects of this bias: the lack of transparent and fair processes for women to report sexual violence, the blaming of victims for bringing forward accusations of sexual assault both “too soon” and risking men’s reputations and also “too late,” which disregards all the mechanisms for silencing and shaming victims.”

In this view, witnesses from the dominant group get the benefit of the doubt. Even though it’s a legal truism that “most facts are proved by testimony,” and that even in cases where physical evidence exists, “the human recital — viva voce — is often crucial to the establishment of its authenticity or significance,” testimony from members of marginalized groups in the States and elsewhere has often been cast as unreliable, or simply excluded from consideration.

As a former trial attorney, I’ve seen how the he said/she said dynamic is replicated in cases involving parties from opposite ends of a hierarchy. It could be “white cop says/black kid says,” or “boss says/employee says,” or “priest says/choirboy says,” or “corporate polluter says/environmental group says.” In any case, the member of the dominant class gets the benefit of the doubt. Dr. Gilmore connects this bullshit phenomenon to the “reasonable man” standard in U.S. law:

Take the legal fiction of the ‘reasonable man’ whose motives and actions juries are instructed to consider as the standard for deciding, for example, cases of self-defense. When women claim self-defense in cases where they kill a man, often a violent intimate partner whom they know is intent upon inflicting violence on them — an act that meets the self-defense standard — juries often fail to apply self-defense accurately because they doubt women were justified in using force to defend themselves for two reasons: the assumption that the woman overreacted or that the man’s life, to be blunt, is worth more. We see this in rape cases in lenient sentencing for men like Brock Turner whose father was outraged that his son would be punished for raping an unconscious woman, an act he described as ‘a steep price to pay for twenty minutes of action.’

Just imagine reactions to someone claiming that a prison term was a “steep price to pay” for a woman who took only twenty minutes to torture a man. Flipping the script on cultural assumptions is one way of highlighting their injustice. Dr. Gilmore expects a backlash.

Gender and race stereotypes are 'sticky judgments,' so ubiquitous that we can’t see them, so prevalent that they seem 'neutral.'
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Bias is woven into all the processes for judging what women and people of color say about their lives; so is the unfair privilege that powerful men receive in all aspects of life. In the leveling of this imbalance, men will likely feel aggrieved by the loss of this unearned and undeserved testimonial credit, as will all of those habituated to thinking that male elites deserve this credit.

Victims of racist and sexual assaults will continue to risk further abuse in police stations, courtrooms, congressional hearings, and the media until we explode all versions of “he said/she said” dynamics. And that means a constant, close examination of how media and justice systems treat women and people of color when they come forward to testify.

Sixty-year-old Hajiya Hamsatu Allamin—popularly referred to as “the woman that speaks with Boko Haram”—is the mother of 8, winner of the 2016 Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice’s (IPJ) Women Peacemakers, and is one of the most powerful conflict mediators in Nigeria today.

Boko Haram (which loosely translates to “Western education is forbidden”), was formed in 2009 by a group of radical Islamic fundamentalists who violently oppose Western forms of government, education, and society. Since they began an insurgency in northeastern Nigeria, more than two million people have been displaced, at least 20,000 killed, and thousands of women and girls are believed to have been subjected to horrific sexual abuses.

The militant terrorists’ sprawling power and destruction continue today; on Sunday August 19th around 2 a.m., Boko Haram stormed Malari village in the Borno state with guns and rocket-propelled grenades, claiming the lives of more than 60 people in their continued attempt to establish a so-called Islamic state governed through fundamentalist Sharia law.

Hamsatu’s activism—which started about the same time as the insurgency—focuses on gaining justice for raped women and girls, re-integrating the ex-wives of Boko Haram, and rehabilitating former child soldiers.

In this interview, Hamsatu discusses her potent human rights work, her persistent fears, and the ever-evolving fate of the Northern Nigerian women who have suffered under the terror of Boko Haram.

Orji Sunday: What factors influenced the rise of Boko Haram and your activism against Boko Haram?

At some point Boko Haram lived among us in various communities throughout Maiduguri, Nigeria. Whenever they attacked on the military, they would return to the community and we would absorb and hide them—to expose them is to ask for death. And when the military came for counter insurgency operations, they would arrest every youth in the entire community, including the innocent. When the violence escalated, the military started burning our houses too.

At any rate, the military was a threat and Boko Haram was another threat on the other hand. It was in this crossroad that I decided to speak against the silence. I encouraged the communities to stop hiding the insurgents. This made me popular with the people and the insurgents, too, and those encounters made me gradually embrace full time activism. The Boko Haram were all living with us, they were the children of the people we knew, but you couldn’t talk about it, and nobody could go and report it.

The Boko Haram lived among us and whenever they attacked the military, we would absorb and hide them—to expose them is to ask for death.
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Can you talk about your activism with the sexually abused women and girls in northeastern Nigeria?

When Boko Haram seized some communities and small settlements in Banki, a Nigerian town bordering Cameroon, many residents fled to Cameroon. The Cameroon soldiers captured them, collected all they had, and allegedly stripped the women naked, asking them to spread their legs wide and open so they could molest the women as they so desired.

Later the Cameroonian army handed over the refugees to the Nigerian army. At Bama, a city in Borno state Nigeria, the Nigerian military separated women and children and husbands—the women and children were moved to an IDP facility in Bama, Borno state, Nigeria.

It is during their stay in the Bama IDP camp that they suffered huge sexual abuses; they alleged that military officers demanded sex before offering them food and relief materials.

We organized these women and girls into a group called Knifar Movement to collectively seek the release for their husbands after years by the military, in addition to getting justice against the alleged rapists. The violated women are over 1,600, and some of them had babies out of those sexual violations.

But nobody listens to us or cares to look at their situation.

Can you talk more about confronting Boko Haram insurgents?

Whenever there is such incident, I go to the women in those communities, get the details and report to the government sponsored security agents. In all honesty, it was very risky. And sometimes, the insurgents would come to me brandishing their guns, but I still kept talking to them.

Gradually even Boko Haram came to understand that I was neutral and harmless and they started opening up to me. They apologized for the threat and started telling me their own version of the story. They would tell me, “Mama, your government does not value life.”

There are more than 1,600 violated women— some of them had babies out of these sexual violations—but nobody listens to us or cares to look at their situation.
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Why does Boko Haram respect and trust you to lead negotiations with the government?

It is very easy. They know who is honest and not. They tell me:

“Mama, we are not willing to listen to any man, much as we are ready to listen to you. When our leader was killed in 2009, and we went underground and those who were shot during a harmless burial ceremony were allowed to die because the military refused to allow us donate blood to some of them who were just injured. The government did not care about justice then, but you did. So why should we listen to them when nobody listened to us?”

In this war against insurgency, I don’t take sides. If some military personnel suffer violation and injustice and he is willing to speak up, I would join him to fight for justice. I know that the ordinary Nigerian soldier too is a victim.

Can you speak about your other project targeted at ex-wives of Boko Haram?

I want to engage the former wives of Boko Haram next so that they wouldn’t go back. I have started in a small scale, but I want to assist them in every possible way to get back to their life and society. Because of my little resources, I need to create a small social network amongst a small number of them and we can take it further from there. And some of them are pregnant from Boko Haram. The plan is to send the younger ones to school and train the older ones on the trade of their interest, in addition to providing start-up stipends for them. Then I would engage the communities on the danger of sidelining these people. But I don’t have the resources to do this all alone or to do more than this.

What are the mistakes in the current handling of the Boko Haram issue?

We have a lot to do to get this war over. And a whole lot more to do after a truce has been reached. Almost every person and institution tackling this war is focused on humanitarian issues. We have not turned our attention to the root causes. How can a society saturated by former child soldiers, aggrieved women, aggrieved suicide bombers, and aggrieved survivors—people who have lost a stable psyche—sustain peace?

My prayers and pleasure every day is to touch the lives of my people. And to change the little I can change. Making a difference in their lives.

What are your fears and worries especially looking at the nature of your work—you are almost confronting death daily?

I am not afraid of speaking or dying. Many people warn me not to speak because my work is dangerous. Sometimes I worry that my immediate family could be targeted. But, I worry more about the women and the children because they have lost everything. They don’t have a future. They are living a completely hopeless life.

How can a society saturated by former child soldiers, aggrieved women, aggrieved suicide bombers, and aggrieved survivors—people who have lost a stable psyche—sustain peace?
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How do U.S. policies, leaders, and legislation dovetail with the situation in Nigeria?

The United States and the United Nations could do much more and I already said that when I addressed the United Nations Security Council a few months back. But a lot depends on Nigeria—a principal partner in resolving the conflict. While I blame the U.S. partly, I truly understand their position. If the Nigerian government had created the platform to deserve support, perhaps the U.S. could come in. This is a country that is not interested in her own progress. I have done politics in Nigeria and I know it does not work.

Nigeria is a country that is not interested in her own progress.
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What does the future hold for these women?

The women don’t have future unless we decide to give them one through collective actions as humanity. They have lost everything—their husbands, their children, their relatives and all the people that meant something to their lives. It’s sad, but in truth, the future is particularly bleak because even the government does not care.

Who is your hero?

My father is my hero. He taught me to read. He gave me everything to succeed. And he believed in me. My mother did not want me to go to school, but my father held firm and encouraged me. 

If you’d like to help support Hajiya Hamsatu Allamin’s work please consider donating to ICAN (International Civil Society Action Network) which supports women’s rights, peace, and security.

*This article has been edited to remove a quote from “sexologist Damian Jacob Sendler, PhD, MD” who was revealed to be a “serial fabulist.“

In October 2013, shortly after I moved to New York, a hot Londoner struck up a conversation with me in Starbucks. We had dinner that night and met up for breakfast two days later, then I followed him back to his Airbnb while he packed.

I didn’t want to get too involved because he was leaving, and I barely knew him. So, when he leaned in to kiss me, I said, “Let’s not go further than this.” When he took off my shirt, I said, “No further, OK?” He didn’t seem to listen, because he then took off my bra and started kissing my chest.

Although I didn’t agree to what was happening, I was physically getting aroused by it. Once it became clear that my attempts to stop it weren’t succeeding, I figured all I could do to make the situation less unpleasant for myself was try to enjoy the arousal I felt mounting in my body.

So I laid back and made little sighs of pleasure. It was only when he grabbed my hand and put it on his crotch that I jumped up and told him to stop. “Sorry,” he said. “I guess it’s a guy thing.”

“At least he apologized,” I thought. I didn’t want to believe I’d been violated. And because of the satisfied noises I’d just made, it was a difficult thing to convince myself of anyway. Telling myself I’d just engaged in a normal, consensual hookup, I made out with him and gave a heartfelt goodbye as he hiked his bags onto his shoulders and caught a cab to the airport.

But I returned home confused about what had just happened. I had not consented to parts of that encounter, but I had gotten pleasure out of it. I didn’t want to go that far for emotional reasons, but physically, I wanted it.

My mind raced back to that infamous line from Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”: “I know you want it.” Perpetrators often justify sexual assault by saying the victim secretly wanted it. But did the fact that part of me desired his touch mean I had consented to it? Even if I hadn’t wanted to act on that desire?

As it turns out, many individuals describe feeling arousal and pleasure during sexual assaults. In one study—“Problems With Sexuality After Sexual Assault”—21% of women said they had a “physical response” to their assaults, and 10% felt attracted to their perpetrators. Additional research and clinical reports suggest that four to five percent of women have reported orgasm during sexual assault, but the numbers could be higher because people may not report this, according to a paper in the Journal of Clinical Forensic Medicine.

“I didn’t think of it as sexual assault for years because I had an orgasm, because I didn’t try harder to stop it when it started to feel good,” says Stephanie, a content creator in her 30s. “To this day, I call it ‘nonconsensual sex.’ And I’m a former rape victim advocate. I know what assault is. I didn’t want this to happen, I said no, I was very drunk and past the point of consent—there are so many ways I know this was assault.”

I had not consented to parts of that encounter, but I had gotten pleasure out of it.
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And it’s not just survivors themselves who discount their assaults because of their bodies’ reactions. The professionals charged with the task of helping them often do the same.

The Journal of Clinical Forensic Medicine paper quotes a doctor responding to a post in an online forum about a survivor who orgasmed during her rape by her estranged husband:

“For a woman to have an orgasm, she needs to be at least on some level, mentally and emotionally invested in the experience…Fear, repulsion and pain are not conducive to orgasm. Psychological acquiescence or complacency does not mean the woman did not enjoy the experience, and on some level, love her husband.’’

Similarly, male survivors of assault are very often doubted due to the misconception that if their penis was erect enough to have intercourse, they must have consented. I once told a sex educator about how I’d guilted an ex-boyfriend into sex, and she replied, “Guilted? Really? Was his dick hard?” 

“Survivors’ genital response has quite literally been presented as evidence in court that they ‘consented,’ even if they said no, even if they were too young to give consent,” says sexologist Emily Nagoski, PhD tells me. This type of thinking is proffered all over the media as well. In 50 Shades of Grey, Christian claims that Ana’s wetness shows how much she enjoyed a spanking that she wasn’t actually into, Nagoski points out.

Such depictions reflect a widespread myth about how sexual arousal works: that in order to be physically aroused, you have to be mentally and emotionally into the whole experience.

“‘Liking’— pleasure—is one system in our brains, the opioid system; ‘wanting’—desire—is another, mediated by dopamine; and ‘learning’—physiological response to learned cues—is a third,” explains Nagoski.

“Genital arousal is the third—a learned response, the way Pavlov’s dogs salivated in response to the bell. The salivation didn’t mean the dogs wanted to eat the bell or that they found the bell delicious. It just meant that the bell was a cue that was associated with food. Genital response can happen in response to sex-related cues, whether or not those cues are wanted or liked. I’ve been doing work related to sexual violence for over two decades, so I’ve met many, many survivors who’ve experienced arousal and even orgasm.”

In fact, because fear activates the sympathetic nervous system, increasing blood flow throughout the body—it’s possible that it could even facilitate genital arousal, according to the Journal of Clinical Forensic Medicine paper.

Sometimes, perpetrators make a calculated effort to turn their victims on. “Pedophiles often groom children for sexual assault by first using ‘appropriate’ pleasurable touching (stroking hair, rubbing a hand) and then pushing and pushing boundaries, working up to sexual assault,” educational psychologist and sex educator Kathryn Stamoulis, PhD, LMHC tells me. “I have heard accounts in which a rapist tried to give their victim pleasure, perhaps as a way to rationalize their crimes.”

It’s even common for people to have feelings for their perpetrators, especially if they’re assaulted by someone within a romantic relationship.

“It is possible for two opposing feelings to coexist: on the one hand disgust, rage, fear, or terror, and on the other, a genuine desire to merge with the assaulter, feelings of desire for them, and even longings to be taken care of by a person who seems more powerful,” psychoanalyst Claudia Luiz, PsyaD says. Sometimes, getting aroused can be a defense mechanism when the painful feelings resulting from the assault are too much to bear.

Many survivors feel as if their bodies have betrayed them for responding to unwelcome stimulation, says Nagoski. Some even view it as a moral failure to get turned on by something so horrific. “Can you imagine, walking around all day, every day, inside something that betrayed you? Needless to say, it comes as a tremendous relief for them to learn that their genital response just means something sex-related happened.”

Many survivors feel as if their bodies have betrayed them.
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Often, people don’t even realize they’ve been assaulted, since they assume their physical pleasure must be evidence of consent.

“[People] have told me about an experience from childhood or college and what they are describing is rape, but they never viewed it that way before because of the physical response they experienced,” Stamoulis explains. “In fact, some straight males have wondered if they were gay because they had a physical reaction during an assault by a male abuser.” Even when people recognize the event as an assault, they may hesitate to report it out of fear that their arousal could be used against them.

This shame, self-blame, and confusion could be avoided if we learned about the complexities of sexual violence: that it doesn’t always involve a morally unambiguous criminal who the victim despises, and the victim can experience emotions other than pure disgust.

“If, while in sex education teaching people about sexual assault, we were taught about all the varied reactions to assaults, both physical and emotional, we would normalize this and people wouldn’t have to suffer in silence,” Stamoulis says..

Sometimes, getting aroused can be a defense mechanism when the painful feelings resulting from the assault are too much to bear.
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Because I hadn’t learned about any of these aspects of sexual assault—physiological or psychological—I, too, thought my encounter that day in New York was consensual. I Facebook messaged with the man who violated my boundaries and felt a mixture of excitement and anger as he talked about potentially moving to New York and seeing me again.

But when he actually got a job offer there and proposed we meet up when he arrived, something clicked inside me. “Actually,” I replied, “what happened at your Airbnb last time wasn’t OK with me, and I’m not interested in seeing you again.”

“You’re joking, right?” he replied, as if my attraction to him made that statement unbelievable. But then, I thought back to his apology after that incident. He knew he’d done something wrong. And I wasn’t going to let him use my physical desire to eclipse that knowledge. I may have been aroused, but arousal is not consent.

No amount of blood flow to someone’s genitals should override what their mind—and mouth—is telling you.

For the longest time I felt like it was my fault. My fault for letting this man form a manipulative relationship with me, my fault for letting him groom me since I was 14 years old, my fault for not realizing he was just using me, my fault for being so lonely that I kept in contact with him for so long, my fault for needing attention.

And of course, my fault for taking the photos.

I found out I was a victim of what’s commonly called “revenge porn” in 2015, when a friend informed me that someone had been using my photos for a fetish Twitter account that shared links of fake profiles with my face and body on them. The account also actively encouraged people to share my images and make up horrific stories about them.

Through tracing the IP addresses of some of the images, we discovered they were posted by a man I’d been in a sometimes flirtatious off-and-on friendship with since I was a teen, who I was never physical with and had only met once.

At that point, the law for “revenge porn” in the UK had only been around for four months. It covers the sharing of images showing people engaged in sexual activity or depicted in a sexual way or with their genitals exposed, with those convicted facing a maximum sentence of two years in prison.

Should Women Trust Facebook With Their Nude Selfies?
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Victims and others are able to report offences to the police to investigate, which I promptly did. But when a case officer came to see me after I reported this violation, and I explained to her in detail what had happened, her response stunned me.

“Well I guess you’ve learned your lesson now then.”

She treated my case as possession and distribution of underage images, believing that this couldn’t legally be “revenge porn” because I was never technically in a relationship with the man who did this to me.

After that initial visit, I sat on the sofa in a state, crying profusely and fearing for my safety, convinced I deserved to die. If the police didn’t see me as a victim, then who would?

It turned out, the answer was very few.

After sharing my story on websites like Elite Daily and Huffington Post, the onslaught of negative comments I received forced me to spend hours in bed, unable to get up. Many people agreed that it was my fault, and that if I hadn’t taken the photos in the first place, this never would’ve happened.

When my colleagues found out, they very quickly went from not understanding and not really caring to cracking blithe jokes. My manager even said that “it was as if she worked with a porn star now.” I quit that job a few months later, when my depression intensified.

My experience as a victim destroyed my life. It triggered severe depression, anxiety, and social anxiety. I no longer felt worthy of anything — friends, family, love, or life. I was suicidal.

My pain was rooted in the humiliation and degradation of the act itself, of course. But it also stemmed from feeling like I was at fault for my own victimhood. And so much of that, I think, has to do with the way my experience was framed.

My experience as a victim destroyed my life.
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What the courts and media call “revenge porn” is defined as “the sharing and publicizing of sexual images with the intention to embarrass.”

The dictionary’s definition of the word “revenge” is “the action of hurting or harming someone in return for an injury or wrong suffered at their hands.”

To contextualize this issue in terms of “revenge” is, plain and simple, to resort to victim-blaming. It says it right in the first word: This crime is something that somebody is doing in return for being wronged. The perpetrator, it’s implied, has cause to retaliate.

This framework plays into broader efforts to blame women for the violent actions of men. The refrain of she asked for it fuels those who dismiss women who are raped (her skirt was too short, she flirted too much, she should never have been in that situation), domestically abused (she was too obstinate, she should’ve left him), and on and on. This ideology can most recently be seen powering the “incel” movement, which suggests women deserve to be hurt for not offering sex to any man who wants it.

Like all those women unfairly blamed, I did nothing to ask for what happened to me. Nor did my experience stem from revenge. The story of my perpetrator was, instead, a familiar one: A despicable man did something despicable to me because he thought he could get away with it.

There is, moreover, nothing I possibly could’ve done to warrant his response. Even if there is a messy break-up, a scorned ex-lover, pain, hurt, anger, jealousy — that does not give anybody the right to retaliate via degradation, just as no one should ever have the right to resort to any violent act. (If somebody was to commit a murder because they felt betrayed by that person, would we call it a “revenge murder”? Should there be “revenge assaults”?)

Instead of acting like this act is some sort of tit-for-tat situation between attacker and victim, I ask that we call this crime what it is: image-based sexual abuse. Maybe that way more victims will come forward when this has happened to them, rather than feel like it’s their fault, and that they are too at blame to report it.

I ask that we call this crime what it is: image-based sexual abuse.
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Since sharing my story, many women (and a small number of men) have contacted me. Many have discussed how they, too, have been blackmailed by exes regarding intimate photos of themselves — some even felt unable to leave their current partner because their partners had threatened to share photos or videos if they left them.

I’ve given them as much advice as I can give, sending them helpful links to supportive websites like the Revenge Porn Helpline and Victim Support, and tried to lend an ear.

Most have expressed feeling isolated, believing they couldn’t tell their family or friends because it was embarrassing and shameful and their fault, fearing that others would judge them.

But it is not their fault, and it was not mine.

We are not the recipients of revenge porn. We are the victims of image-based sexual abuse. It’s time we be treated as such.

When Wendi Lubin thought of her upcoming custody battle, it made her dry heave. It wasn’t just the fear of having her child taken away, it was the fact she’d see her rapist attempt to fight for custody — and relive the trauma all over again.

The 25-year-old Floridian’s case certainly isn’t unique — at present, there are seven U.S. states where women can legally be forced to share custody with their rapist. As there is no legislation stopping rapists from pursuing custody or visitation rights, this legal loophole means that rapists are legally allowed to claim partial or full custody in states such as Mississippi, Alabama, New Mexico, and Wyoming.

According to statistics from the Department of Justice, the number of children conceived from rape each year in the U.S. might range from 7,750–12,500, but the statistics may well be understated. Given this reality, there is a clear need for legislation to protect victims and children so they are not tied to their assailants for 18 years.

But this year saw even further erosion in women’s rights—Arkansas passed a law allowing rapists to sue victims desiring an abortion. This February, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan signed a bill that would allow rape victims to terminate the parental rights of their assailants — but the decision followed a fierce battle to reject such a law.

Comparatively, it is a far bleaker picture compared to 2015 when President Obama signed the Rape Survivor Child Custody Act. Although it did not ban rapists outright from having parental rights, the act incentivized states to pass laws to seek court-ordered terminations of the parental rights of rapists.

Lubin’s custody battle began in 2012 after attempts to convict her rapist, and, later, to get him to pay child support; he was never convicted and the case was dismissed in September 2016. She recalls being devastated when, in retaliation, he filed for partial custody of her daughter and later, full custody. Although the courts granted Lubin full custody, this victory was short-lived, as he currently has visitation rights.

“In any civilized society, it should be unacceptable for a rapist to have paternal rights when there is clear and convincing evidence that a rape was committed,” she said.

It’s not hard to see why there is so much rage and frustration surrounding this issue. As maddening as this situation is, without a rape conviction, it is even harder for victims to cut ties with their assailants. And each U.S. state varies—California, for instance, requires a conviction whereas Kansas will only allow the termination of parental rights of a rapist if the child is given up for adoption.

Yet as many of the women I spoke with can attest, it is rare for charges to be brought for rape in such circumstances. Most criminal cases, including sexual assault, are resolved with plea bargains to a lesser offense—if charges are even brought at all.

According to RAINN, out of every 1,000 rapes, 994 perpetrators will walk free — only 11 cases get referred to prosecutors, seven cases lead to a conviction, and only six rapists are incarcerated. Moreover, perpetrators of sexual violence are less likely to go to jail or prison than those who’ve committed robberies or assault and battery crimes.

Given that a rape conviction is required for the termination of parental rights, for women who choose to keep their baby, there’s the risk of being tied to their rapist for 18 years.

And the need for a criminal conviction is disproportionately applied to rape victims — comparatively, a criminal conviction is not required to terminate parental rights in cases of child abuse, neglect, or habitual parental drug use.

Lubin finds the legal loophole most difficult to contend with:

“My daughter has spent zero time with him, but at any time in her life, he can claim to seek a relationship and time with her. He is within his rights to fully communicate with me under the guise of co-parenting and visitation.

I do not have the luxury of cutting contact with my rapist due to his parental rights by the very state of Florida. What the legal system has done has ruined my integrity, ruined my dignity, ruined my personhood rights.”

She is adamant, however, that it is not custody he actually seeks, but power and control. While this may seem shocking, it is unsurprising that rapists use the threat of parental rights to continue to torment their victims. She says regular contact from her assailant when negotiating possible visitation leaves her with a “deep terror and sadness.”

“When I spend hours negotiating child custody with him, I feel chained. I can scrub the disgust off my body but it becomes a different type of personal hell to repeatedly face your rapist. This is torture in the most sinister form.”

Given that women such as Lubin have to contend with the trauma of seeing their assailant, it’s not surprising that many people question why victims would choose to give birth to their rapist’s baby, considering it could be a daily reminder of the assault. But for the women I spoke to, abortion or adoption simply wasn’t something that crossed their minds.

Although many of these women were unaware that they would face their assailant on a regular basis, all are adamant that abortion or adoption wasn’t an option, even with the power of hindsight. For Analyn Megison, it was her religious convictions that led her to keep her child.

“My decision to keep my child was based on belief through my personal relationship with God. Many of a more conservative religious view did not respect my choice to have my child and raise her as a single parent. Adoption or abortion was all they thought could be done in the case of a child conceived via rape. But I chose to love and raise my child.”

Refuting the notion that she loves her child “less” because of how she was conceived, Lubin says she is often asked how she feels about her daughter. “I never associated the rape with my daughter, and I’ve never loved my child any less because of her biological father. Raising my daughter has been completely worth it.”

Lubin does explain that her decision was met with cynicism from others and says facing stigma is an ongoing battle, as many question whether she’d faced a “legitimate rape.”

“Choosing to love and raise a child in these circumstances can be met with suspicions and distrust,” she says.

Megison later worked to change Florida’s laws and in 2013, successfully ensured that rape survivors retain full custody of their children. The Rape Survivor Child Custody Act was sponsored by Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and passed nationally to terminate the parental rights of rapists with clear and convincing evidence.

Even so, state law variations mean that for others, the reality can be far bleaker. In some cases, victims can be forced to co-parent with their attacker.

Given that a rape conviction is required for the termination of parental rights, for women who choose to keep their baby, there’s the risk of being tied to their rapist for 18 years.
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This is an all-too-real reality for 19-year-old Noemi. The teenager is currently fighting to terminate the parental rights of her assailant in her native Nebraska. Although a restraining order against her assailant was in place, he showed up when her daughter was five months old. She recalls the fear and panic over his motivations of wanting to spend time with the child.

Although parental rights vary state by state, in Nebraska, a rape conviction is needed to terminate them. This meant Noemi’s assailant would have had his parental rights terminated if he’d been convicted of sexual assault in the first degree (categorized as sexual penetration without the victim’s consent). However, as he was convicted of third degree assault (categorized as the offender causing serious personal injury to victim), he was able to share custody and parenting decisions.

Visits with his daughter started out supervised, at a half hour every other Saturday. The emotional toll Noemi faced, however, increased when the visits became unsupervised. She is devastated by the lack of protection U.S. law offers her: “It feels hopeless right now. Like there isn’t a way out of the situation.”

Although Lubin and Megison were raped by strangers, many rapists take the form of family members. For K.C. Banning* from Tennessee, she ended up fighting for custody for her children with her own husband. She says that as they were married by the eyes of the law, everything that took place between them was considered consensual by law despite being “tied up, often handcuffed and raped multiple times daily.”

The Many Faces Of Trauma
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She recalls the financial headache of the custody battle: “One of the hardest things about fighting for custody is paying a lawyer. I lived as a sex slave for 20 years — he stole every penny I earned. I had no real job history or money. How could I get a lawyer? That’s why I lost.”

As the custody fight raged for a year, Banning says seeing him in court felt like relieving the trauma again and again:

“It felt like I was being raped—again— like he had power, a piece of control over me still and that should never have happened. The custody fight took a huge toll — I lost a job, was unable to qualify for benefits, he refused to pay child support. He was granted full custody for a while but eventually, I got them back one at a time as he got tired of them.”

She is adamant that the system is stacked against the woman: “No matter what she does and when she does it, she is not to be believed. I have PTSD and I have to be treated for it. Certain smells and sounds will put my body on high alert.”

Banning has since written about her experiences.

For many of the women I spoke to, post-traumatic stress disorder is an enduring battle. For Lubin, her PTSD has further repercussions concerning her faith in the law:

“Today if I were to be ever attacked, robbed, mugged would I even bother to contact law enforcement? Would this make me feel freer to know I could dial 9–1–1 in the event of my life being in danger? Probably not.”

Even so, despite the ongoing trauma, Lubin is adamant in her efforts to keep fighting.

“The law has left me alone to fend for myself and deal with this situation one-on-one. My goal, whatever direction this may go, is for my daughter to grow as a strong woman. I want her to know she is powerful and loved — no matter who her father, is and no matter what her mother went through.”

Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to reference a recently signed bill in Maryland.

Content warning: sexual violence

The other day I walked to work in a rage, for no reason exactly, except for every reason. And as I walked, I prayed for someone to say it to me. I scowled and stomped. One foot, two foot, up then down, hard and harder: Say it. Say it. Say it.

Will some motherfucker please just say it?

Tell me to smile.

And oh, how magnificently I would have blazed. The bus would’ve stopped mid turn; women pushing strollers would’ve cheered; some man would’ve called me a crazy bitch and I would have laughed. Yes, I am. Today I sure am.

But the street left me in peace. And I remembered a woman I know, pregnant and past the assigned due date, anxious, not wanting to be induced. Since I couldn’t fight, I thought I’d try and be of use, and called her. Listened. Then, she went off to finish a painting, and I walked into my school to teach Horror Writing to teenagers.

What is the thing you fear? That one thing. Write it down on the page, your eyes only.

Now, come up with an image for that thing. Write it down.

Anyone want to share?

Oh, how magnificently I would have blazed.
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A white room with white walls that morphs into a long white tunnel with no end. A doppelganger that is you, but not you. A locked door, without escape. Someone in your home, waiting for you when you arrive.

Now, what is the idea behind the thing? What are you really scared of?

I name mine: fear of enclosed spaces; a sealed wooden box like a coffin; fear of the loss of control.

The students nod. They write down the fear behind the fear in their notebooks. For their eyes only. In an oft-cited quote of Stephen King’s, there are three types of horror: the gross-out, the horror (aka the supernatural), and the terror — that feeling that the unknown has been made manifest; that those secret, intuited fears are in fact a reality.

The Dropped Trump Case Reminds Us That No Rape Is ‘Believable’

One of the women who has come forward, and retreated, with charges against our president says she was 13 when he raped her. She says that at a party he tied her up (he would have had to use ropes, maybe belts, perhaps his tie) and forced his penis into her vagina over and over again until his pleasure at this act — this tied up, terrified, naked child — peaked into an orgasm and he ejaculated. I suppose he then untied her. She has said she’s repeatedly dropped the suit because of death threats, to her and her family.

Before you get all righteous and Democratic about the fact such an individual is our president, remember how very many allow it, participate, are not outraged. And think of this: When articles of impeachment were introduced in the House in December, the House, Republicans and Democrats united, voted to table the article, effectively sidelining it, 364–58.

At lunch, the woman-identifying students gather in the library for our weekly affinity group. They fill me in, how last Friday, S. went to the deli and a man on the street tried to talk to her. She ignored him, and crossed the street. He followed behind her. He said, “Are you going to ignore me? I’ll punch your fucking face in.” She ran, and he chased. She made it safely into school, but said later that the fear would not leave her body.

A billboard flown across the horizon line of the beach this past summer; a headless woman in a bikini. Get this body. Now.

She made it safely into school, but said later that the fear would not leave her body.
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I was at a party yesterday, an afternoon gathering, and my two-and-a-half-year-old child wanted to nurse. There were soft couches and chairs in that room, it was un-crowded, I could have (I used to) sat on one of those couches and nursed and kept chatting and nibbling cookies. Instead, I was ashamed, and went with my son to the playroom and sat on the floor surrounded by plastic toys. It was fluorescent lit, low ceilinged, with no windows. I nursed alone with my back against the wall.

Already, I’m hearing it, disguised as inquiry. Has this gone too far? How powerful should an accusation be? How much weight should we give one woman’s word? What if they just mean it as banter? What place does flirting have in the workplace?

It’s the same as asking what she was wearing.

On the radio, a call-in for an intergenerational response to the wave of accusations, which is a disguised opportunity for older men to talk about how much they don’t understand what’s going on; that the standards have changed “so much,” and blah blah blah blah.

It’s happening again, the same again and again — the phenomenon of speaking out is the phenomenon being examined. Not the relentless physical and verbal assaults. Not what it means to live in bodies we call “girl” and “woman.” Not the fear that guides me away from the wooded path in the park, pushing my stroller towards more populated places, the hypothetical protection of more people present.

We are not talking about flirting. We know what flirting is.

It’s happening again, the same again and again—the phenomenon of speaking out is the phenomenon being examined.
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Do you know the story of Cassandra? In an attempt to seduce her, Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy. Foreknowledge of the future. But when she refused him, he spit in her mouth, cursing her; though she would always know and speak the truth of what was to come, no one would ever believe her.

I remember being a kid with my mom in the park on a sleepy city summer day, pushing our bikes up the big hill, too tired to ride them, and these teenagers, these young boys, walking by and slapping my mother on the ass. I remember the strange slow-motion stillness that followed as we all continued to walk the steep hill, the boys laughing, and how there was nothing my mother or I could do about it. It was like the taste of fluoride at the dentist, the way it made my teeth hurt, the doing nothing, the disrespect of my all-powerful mother, the assigning of status.

Have you stood and looked at the array of magazines at a newsstand recently? I mean, really looked? Do that. Notice.

I am on the couch being intimate with my partner, who has a penis, and unbidden into my pleasure flashes a series of images — cinematic, not memories — of rape, assault, violence. I’m not talking here, deliberately, about the give and take of sexual play, of dominance, of submission. This is not about that. I’m talking about images grafted into my brain against my will.

#MeToo Has Made Me See Anyone Is Capable Of Sexual Abuse—Including Me

Forget the Bechdel test, try this one: Refuse to take in any images or scenes of a woman being beaten, arrested, tortured, raped, or killed. See what’s left.

(Hint: not a whole lot.)

Shall we review some numbers yet again?

1 in 6 women will experience an attempted or completed rape.

The majority of sexual assault takes place in or near the home.

The majority of offenders are people the victims know.

I don’t know any woman who has not been assaulted or threatened.

I don’t know any woman who knows a woman who has not been not assaulted or threatened.

To quote Stephen King exactly this time: “And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute.”

1 in 3 men would rape if they could get away with it.

1 in 16 men are rapists.

I know more than 16 men.

These fauxpologies remind us how not to say ‘I’m sorry.’

flickr/Cass Anaya

By Kali Holloway

Few years have been as full of public apologies as 2017.

Wait, let me restate that. Few years have been as full of public apologies, yet rife with non-apologies, as 2017. The #MeToo campaign, along with investigative journalism, forced many well-known people (but mostly men) to attempt sincere shows of public contrition for various longstanding forms of misconduct (but mostly sexual bullying, harassment and abuse). Some did better than others. Many failed miserably, inspiring the satirical Celebrity Perv Apology Generator, which does exactly what its name suggests. (Apology example: “As someone who grew up in a different era, harassment is completely unacceptable — especially when people find out about it.”)

It seems worthwhile here to discuss what distinguishes a good apology from a bad one, an actual “sorry” from a “sorry not sorry.” Apologies that get it right explicitly admit failures, take responsibility, acknowledge the hurt inflicted, make no excuses, identify how the harmful behavior will change, and spell out how the perpetrator of the bad behavior will make amends.

It’s a good idea to avoid talking too much about yourself or your feelings while expressing contrition. While it is a good start to acknowledge that the shameful accusation is “true,” you should still ensure the word “sorry” makes more appearances than references to “[your] dick.” Also, maybe don’t try later denying you did a thing you already issued a half-assed apology for, especially when we can hear and see you on the video, Donald. Stop it.

It’s a good idea to avoid talking too much about yourself or your feelings while expressing contrition.

The point is, all this fauxpologizing has made me reflect on terrible apologies from recent years. Here are seven examples of non-apologies that remind us how not to say “I’m sorry.”

1. Megyn Kelly: Recognizing and calling out my unfiltered racism makes you the racist.

If you watch Megyn Kelly’s new-ish morning show (don’t), you might think nothing comes more naturally to the NBC host than stiffly dancing around with audience members in a joyless and contrived attempt at some simulacrum of sisterhood. You would think wrong. What actually comes much more easily to Kelly is racist fear-mongering, which she did a far more convincing job of enjoying during 12 years at Fox News. That includes the time Kelly, without a hint of satire, insisted both Jesus and Santa are white, an absurd dum-dum of a claim that resulted in numerous calls for an apology. Instead, Kelly made herself into a political correctness martyr and blamed people who don’t get how hilarious racism is.

In particular, Kelly moaned about what she called the “knee-jerk instinct by so many to race-bait and to assume the worst in people, especially people employed by the very powerful Fox News Channel,” because conservative media millionaires are the people really suffering in this country. The self-absorbed non-apology continued apace: “For me, the fact that an offhand jest I made during a segment about whether Santa should be replaced by a penguin has now become a national firestorm says two things: race is still an incredibly volatile issue in this country and Fox News and yours truly are big targets for many people.”

2. Brock Turner: I’m not even sure how to spell ‘personal responsibility.’

Caught in the act of raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster, Brock Turner wrote a letter to the court before it handed down the absurdly lenient sentence that reaffirms how wealth and whiteness affect criminal justice. Turner’s “apology” spends most of its length lamenting how hard he’s been on himself (“I shake uncontrollably from the amount I torment myself by thinking about what has happened”) and blaming his tendency toward raping women on alcohol and “party culture.”

“At this point in my life, I never want to have a drop of alcohol again. I never want to attend a social gathering that involves alcohol or any situation where people make decisions based on the substances they have consumed,” Turner wrote, as millions of people who have gotten drunk and not raped anyone scratched their heads. He went on to blame news coverage of the rape, his swimming skills and his acceptance to Stanford — but not, you know, being a rapist — for his problems. “I’ve lost two jobs solely based on the reporting of my case. I wish I never was good at swimming or had the opportunity to attend Stanford, so maybe the newspapers wouldn’t want to write stories about me.”

Why Should You Become An Establishment Member For $5 A Month?

Cue the tiniest violin playing.

“I want to show that people’s lives can be destroyed by drinking and making poor decisions while doing so… I know I can impact and change people’s attitudes towards the culture surrounded by binge drinking and sexual promiscuity that protrudes through what people think is at the core of being a college student… I’ve been shattered by the party culture and risk-taking behavior that I briefly experienced in my four months at school. I’ve lost my chance to swim in the Olympics. I’ve lost my ability to obtain a Stanford degree. I’ve lost employment opportunity, my reputation and most of all, my life. These things force me to never want to put myself in a position where I have to sacrifice everything.”

First of all, maybe try not raping anyone else. That seems like a good place to start.

3. Lena Dunham: Oops, I did it again.

Since forever — or at least from around when Girls became a thing — Lena Dunham has said and done a lot of stupid crap that reveals her short-sightedness and ignorance on issues of import too myriad to get into here. In several cases, she has followed up with a public apology, followed by another stupid statement, then another apology, rinse, wash, repeat. (She once wrote a piece about her “apology addiction” which missed all the points ever.)

Most recently, Dunham, who once wrote “women don’t lie about: rape” accused a black woman, actress Aurora Perrineau, of lying about rape, because the white accused rapist was a buddy of hers. In addition to its general hypocrisy, Dunham’s horrible history on race made the statement all the more galling. After being taken to task across social media, Dunham issues another statement via Twitter — an apology, of course, as dictated by the pattern — which was equally tone deaf.

“I naively believed it was important to share my perspective on my friend’s situation as it has transpired behind the scenes over the last few months… I now understand that it was absolutely the wrong time to come forward with such a statement and I am so sorry.”

A few things: 1) You can literally just be quiet when you have nothing to add to except the dismissal of a woman’s description of her experience with sexual assault. Seriously; 2) when you add little statements hinting at your “behind the scenes” info about said experience, which is absolutely meant as a callback to your original dismissive statement, you undermine your so-called apology, so why bother issuing it? 3) it’s not just that it was “the wrong time to come forward.” If that’s what you think the central problem with your original statement is here, you really are never going to get it.

So You’ve Sexually Harassed Or Abused Someone: What Now?

In response to Dunham’s consistently garbage stance on race going back years, author and Lenny Letter contributor Zinzi Clemmons encouraged “women of color — black women in particular — to divest from Lena Dunham.”

4. Don Lemon: Just bite your way out of sexual assault.

It was 2014. A steady stream, then a deluge of women came forward to accuse Bill Cosby of rape allegations dating back decades. One of those women, Joan Tarshis, was subjected to a classic version of the Victim Blame Game by CNN’s Don Lemon.

“You know, there are ways not to perform oral sex if you didn’t want to do it,” Lemon suggested to Tarshis, unhelpfully. “Meaning the using of the teeth,” he interjected a second or so later. “As a weapon,” he continued, turning the horribleness up to 11. “Biting,” he added, proving a relentless ability to make it worse. “I had to ask,” Lemon concluded, which he absolutely did not.

Aside from the insane insinuation that the fault of rape lies with anyone but rapists, the idea that you could — and should — have stopped your rape by biting off your assailant’s penis fails on every conceivable front. It is an utterly ridiculous and offensive ask, both logistically and psychologically. Lemon, a sexual assault survivor, issued this tepid apology after 24 hours of outcry: “If my question struck anyone as insensitive, I’m sorry as that was not my intention.”

He’s sorry the question struck you as insensitive. Next!

5. Ryan Lochte: This is a total non-apology I could not possibly have written.

During the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, swimmer Ryan Lochte and three friends from the American team could have gone out and partied all night without international incident. Instead, Lochte et al. chose to wreck shop at a local gas station and make up a story about being held up at gunpoint by brown criminals. Lochte — who also sprinkled in fake details about his bravery — reportedly made up the story so he wouldn’t get in trouble with his mom.

As I noted in a piece about the incident at the time, “if you have ever seen words come out of Ryan Lochte’s mouth, and you read his ‘apology’ on social media, you will instantly know there is no way he wrote, nor was allowed to contribute to, this letter”:

“I want to apologize for my behavior last weekend — for not being more careful and candid in how I described the events of that early morning and for my role in taking the focus away from the many athletes fulfilling their dreams of participating in the Olympics. It’s traumatic to be out late with your friends in a foreign country — with a language barrier — and have a stranger point a gun at you and demand money to let you leave, but regardless of the behavior of anyone else that night, I should have been much more responsible in how I handled myself and for that I am sorry to my teammates, my fans, my fellow competitors, my sponsors, and the hosts of this great event.”

To again revisit my previous take on the incident:

Do you see it? The convenient omission of what, precisely, his “behavior” actually entailed? The reliance, even still, on the trope of the frightening foreign “stranger” — in whose country you are a guest — speaking gibberish demands at you? The non-mention of the fact that the group was reportedly asked to pay $50 for the damage they’d done and refused? The use of the phrase “regardless of the behavior of anyone else that night,” which serves to distract from Lochte’s own behavior, which again, he never quite gets around to acknowledging?

Kudos to his PR team for a job of ducking and dodging that proves they earn their cut.

6. Scientist Tim Hunt: Women are too emotional to be in laboratories.

In 2015, Nobel Prize-winner Tim Hunt remarked to an audience of women science reporters, “Let me tell you about my trouble with girls….Three things happen when they are in the lab. You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them, they cry. Perhaps we should make separate labs for boys and girls?”

Given an opportunity to apologize by BBC Radio 4, Hunt declared he was “really sorry that I said what I said” — mostly because it was “a very stupid thing to do in the presence of all those journalists.”

The Disturbing Science Behind Subconscious Gender Bias

“I did mean the part about having trouble with girls,” he continued, figurative shovel digging even deeper. “It is true that people — I have fallen in love with people in the lab and people in the lab have fallen in love with me and it’s very disruptive to the science because it’s terribly important that in a lab people are on a level playing field. I found that these emotional entanglements made life very difficult. I’m really, really sorry I caused any offense, that’s awful. I certainly didn’t mean that. I just meant to be honest, actually.”

For years people have been trying to nail down why there are so few women in STEM fields, but the answer remains elusive.

7. A lot of the men who ‘apologized’ for sexual harassment this year: I hope my PR person at least makes me sound earnest.

Keep in mind, I’m not even including people who continue to deny and deflect, like Roy Moore or Brett Ratner. And please know this item could be a list in and of itself (in fact, that very list has been written a few times in the past few months). I am leaving off many, many examples because otherwise this piece would never end and I assume you have a life to lead between breaking news of emerging harassers and their apology statements. But here are a few apologies from men accused of sexual harassment and abuse who did it wrong.

Harvey Weinstein: His open letter of apology kicked off by absolving him of full responsibility by suggesting he was just too behind the times to know any better, an insinuation belied by the “team of spies” he employed to keep his victims quiet. “I came of age in the ’60s and ’70s, when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different. That was the culture then.” (Did I mention the letter misquotes a Jay-Z lyric? Because it does.)

Everything Wrong With Weinstein’s Sexual Assault Allegations Response

Garrison Keillor: How unsurprising that instead of a letter of apology, the Prairie Home Companion host offered a Keilloresque attempt at humor. After stating his “hand went up… about six inches” under a woman’s shirt — by accident, he suggests — Keillor paints himself as the world’s smuggest victim. “If I had a dollar for every woman who asked to take a selfie with me and who slipped an arm around me and let it drift down below the beltline, I’d have at least a hundred dollars,” he notes, so we know how unfair this whole thing is to him. “So this is poetic irony of a high order. But I’m just fine.” (Not that we asked, Gar.)

Russell Simmons: “While [Jenny Lumet’s] memory of that evening is very different from mine, it is now clear to me that her feelings of fear and intimidation are real,” Russell wrote, as if anyone might have seen the situation Lumet has described as anything but harrowing. “While I have never been violent, I have been thoughtless and insensitive in some of my relationships over many decades and I sincerely and humbly apologize.”

Kevin Spacey: Pulled an intentionally distracting bait-and-switch by interrupting his “apology” to come out as a gay man, as if the issue of his sexuality and propensity for sexual harassment had anything to do with each other. (They do not.) As Billy Eichner noted on Twitter, Spacey “invented something that has never existed before: a bad time to come out.”

R. Kelly: Actually, R. Kelly has never attempted an apology. He hasn’t once come close to saying sorry or facing penalties, because despite dozens of allegations made by girls as young as 14 dating back to the 1990s, along with video evidence and a consistent record of abuse that is ongoing as you read this, his career continues to thrive. To quote Jim DeRogatis, who has written multiple investigative stories about Kelly, “no one, it seems, matters less in our society than young black women.”

This article originally appeared on AlterNet. Republished here with permission.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/emily-dickinsons-legacy-is-incomplete-without-discussing-trauma-e0bfe040239e/ Fri, 08 Sep 2017 21:32:51 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=3271 Read more]]>

To those who think, ‘Who cares?’ I say Emily’s truth matters.

flickr/Gresham College

I picture her writing by oil lamp in the dead of night, dressed in white, seated at a tiny desk. A wisp of red hair falls across her face, but she is lost in a world of words while the rest of the household, in fact all of Amherst, sleeps. Over 150 years later I am burning my own midnight oil with these words — her words — and the secret messages I think they encode won’t let me sleep.

“The Myth,” she was called; a “partially cracked poetess;” “Queen Recluse.” Even today, the adjectives “reclusive” and “eccentric” are frequently found near her name, along with admissions of bafflement. “No one knows why Emily Dickinson…lived reclusively at her family’s Homestead,” states the website for the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst. “No one knows just when or why Dickinson began to wear white,” Jane Wald, the museum’s executive director, writes on the New York Botanical Garden blog. “Emily’s refusal to publish work under her own name is a decision that has never been fully explained,” writes Helen Tope for Artsculture.

Agoraphobia, social phobia, lupus, epilepsy, and a vaguely defined eye ailment are several of the explanations offered today for Emily’s withdrawal from society. Many point to the numerous losses of loved ones she suffered as a possible cause of pain. As a physician, I submit that something besides grief also afflicted her, and that poetry was her way to “Tell all the Truth, but tell it slant.” I believe an explanation accounts for the myriad questions her life and work have generated: trauma.

As a physician I submit that something besides grief afflicted Emily Dickinson.

There has already been some scholarship exploring the idea of Emily as a trauma survivor. A research study published in Military Medicine noted evidence that she, along with other notable historical figures, “developed symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder in the aftermath of repeated potentially traumatizing events.” A paper from the journal PsyArt finds in her poetry “a psychologically acute description of trauma as a distinctive emotional and cognitive state.”

In 1862, Emily herself wrote to mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “I had a terror since September, I could tell to none; and so I sing, as the boy does by the burying ground, because I am afraid.” The Emily Dickinson Museum website avers, “The cause of that terror is unknown”; one biographer suggests it was fear of blindness from her eye ailment.

But the beginning of this poem, written in the same year as this letter and invoking a similar image of singing to ward off fear, makes me doubt this explanation:

The first Day’s Night had come —

And grateful that a thing

So terrible — had been endured —

I told my Soul to sing —

She said her Strings were snapt —

Her Bow — to Atoms blown…

I read this poem with a sense of worry. A secret terror traumatic enough to destroy her “Soul?” I searched for signs of trauma in her writings, reading through a collection of her almost 1,800 poems, examining letters and biographies. I found dozens of trauma poems that appear to encode experiences of being violated, and I felt compelled to consider that she might have endured sexual assault and been silenced not only in her own time but also by generations of scholars afterward who could not or would not recognize such a possibility. I Googled “Emily Dickinson and trauma / sexual assault / PTSD.” I found scholarly works by other doctors with similar suspicions and by authors who saw what many readers seem unwilling to see.

I felt compelled to consider that Dickinson might have endured sexual assault and been silenced.

Emily explicitly describes a menacing situation in “In Winter in my Room,” a poem containing tell-tale phallic worm and snake imagery. She appears to have eluded the leering intruder at first, but in one of her “goblin poems” she relates:

– suddenly — my Riches shrank –

A Goblin — drank my Dew –

My Palaces — dropped tenantless –

Myself — was beggared — too –

Maybe it’s this incident that inspired the lines, “‘Twas here my summer paused… my sentence had begun…Go manacle your icicle / Against your Tropic Bride.”

More than once she refers to her trauma as a kind of “sentence,” and the perpetrator’s possession of her as a “claim.” She repeatedly explores images of entrapment and escape. She compares her home to a prison and an unnamed “kinsman” to a “dungeon.” Emily once welcomed her niece into her bedroom, gestured with an imaginary key to lock the door behind them, and said, paradoxically, “Mattie — Here’s freedom!” Was she thinking of this dreaded kinsman with that gesture?

What fortitude the Soul contains

That it can so endure

The accent of a coming Foot –

The opening of a Door –

Her brother’s paramour, Mabel Loomis Todd, was convinced the poem containing the above verse was meant for her, but might it refer instead to the approach of some menacing presence in Emily’s family? Who was the “the spoiler of our Home” whose footfall Emily dreaded, who committed a “Larceny of time and mind,” and of whom she writes, “He put the Belt around my life?”

Of all the poems that support the possibility that she might have suffered sexual assault, and possibly at home, “Rearrange a ‘Wife’s’ affection” is perhaps the most telling and disturbing, filled with notions of violence and self-harm in the first stanza; devastating shame in the second; “Trust entrenched in narrow pain,” “Anguish — bare of anodyne” in the third; and two recurring tropes in her poetry, the “crown” of wifely duty and an image from Calvary, in the fourth:

Burden — borne so far triumphant –

None suspect me of the crown,

For I wear the “Thorns” till Sunset –

Then — my Diadem put on.

She opens the last verse with, “Big my Secret but it’s bandaged — ”; it is both a wound and something to hide. In “A great Hope fell” she confesses of this wound that “The Ruin was within” and that there was “A not admitting of the wound / Until it grew so wide / That all my Life had entered it.”

Many poems — “She rose to His Requirement,” “Title divine is Mine,” “I live with Him — I see His face,” and “It would never be Common” — suggest ongoing trauma, specifically the trauma of being expected to be someone’s sexual partner against her will; they express despair at having to fulfill the obligations of a bride without the legitimacy and joy of real marriage. “But where my moment of Brocade?” she asks, and exclaims in outrage,

The Wife — without the Sign!

Acute Degree — conferred on me –

Empress of Calvary!

Royal — all but the Crown!

Betrothed — without the swoon..

Born — Bridalled — Shrouded –

In a Day –

The motif of the bridal dress as shroud is a clue to her choice to wear white. “A solemn thing — it was — I said — / A woman — white — to be –.” More than a practical convenience for a life spent at home, the legendary white dress was, I believe, Emily’s silent protest. If she was going to be forced to play the role of bride, she would dress as one, and reclaim symbolically the purity represented in the dress’s whiteness while expressing the sorrow of a death shroud worn forever.

That she had frequent fantasies of death, no reader could deny. Survivors of sexual assault often experience suicidal ideation, unspeakable pain, guilt, shame, self-loathing, grief, depression, feelings of impurity, and ongoing fear. All these permeate Emily’s oeuvre. So many of her poems are imbued with shame, guilt, secrecy, dread, and unbearable memory that one could almost open her complete works to any page to find mention of them. “I’m ashamed — I hide — / What right have I to be a bride.” “I am afraid to own a Body — / I am afraid to own a Soul.” “Savior! I’ve no one else to tell — / And so I trouble thee.” “There is a pain — so utter — / It swallows substance up — / Then covers the Abyss with Trance — / So Memory can step Around — across — upon it.”

The Stories We Tell About Sexual Assault — And The Stories We Don’t

In “Remembrance has a rear and front,” Emily depicts memory as a house with many rooms, including a deep Cellar, then cries out in the chilling last lines, “Leave me not ever there alone / Oh thou Almighty God!” In a manuscript at Harvard’s Houghton Library, she appears to have crossed out these lines and replaced them with ones more vague, changing the character of the verse entirely. I believe the original outcry reflects her state of mind more faithfully.

Is it just coincidence that in 1862 she wrote 366 poems compared to only 52 in 1858, or that in the 1860s her seclusion became permanent? It seems quite likely that something terrible happened to Emily Dickinson. In a world where she would have had no recourse to therapy, medication, or even to validation, she wrote incessantly, I believe, in an effort to save her own soul, like a drowning person treading water desperately trying to stay afloat.

It seems quite likely that something terrible happened to Emily Dickinson.

I recently went on a literary pilgrimage to the Dickinson Homestead. I saw Emily’s room and a replica of her white dress, held facsimiles of her poems, visited her grave. Emily was presented by the museum as a romantic figure, the reclusive genius with a strong will and intense passions, writing transcendent, groundbreaking poetry about beautiful things while living an anonymous life, tending plants in her conservatory and baking in the kitchen. I had the sense that visitors and staff alike were content with this summation of her life and disinclined to disturb its surface.

Many readers don’t want the idealized Emily of their imaginations marred by ugly possibilities. They accept the poet who wrote that “hope is the thing with feathers / that perches in the soul” but aren’t comfortable with the woman who feared that hope “might intrude upon… blaspheme the place / Ordained to Suffering.” I agree she was a deep-feeling poet writing in seclusion about flowers and birds, but some of those nature poems, like “A Bee his burnished Carriage,” are less idyllic than they seem.

The Many Faces Of Trauma

I asked one staff member what she thought of Terence Davies’ recent biopic on Dickinson, A Quiet Passion. “It was too dark,” she said. “Our Emily was happy.” I guess the party line at the museum is to focus on the Emily who baked cakes for the neighborhood kids and wrote about sunsets and daisies, but I strongly feel this denial continues the miscarriage of justice her self-imposed reclusiveness forced her to endure during her lifetime.

I shall not murmur if at last

The ones I loved below

Permission have to understand

For what I shunned them so –

Divulging it would rest my Heart

But it would ravage theirs…

She wanted death to bring redemption, justice, and answers. She looked for the crown of forced wifely duty to be transformed into “such a crown / As Gabriel — never capered at — / …Sufficient Royalty!” For all her refusal to partake of any earthly institutions of faith, she had a relationship with Christ that allowed her to believe:

I shall know why — when Time is over –

And I have ceased to wonder why –

Christ will explain each separate anguish

In the fair schoolroom of the sky –

We do have some answers, because she gave them to us, hiding the truth in plain sight. Unlike scholar Robert Weisbuch, who warns against the so-called “biographical fallacy,” I believe what poet Adrienne Rich articulated in her classic essay on Dickinson: “It is always what is under pressure in us, especially under pressure of concealment, that explodes in poetry.” Emily herself wrote, “Split the Lark, and you’ll find the Music.” As I read Emily’s poetry I see circumstantial evidence that explains to my mind why she withdrew, why her white dress was important, why she wrote so much, why she would not publish in her own name during her lifetime, and perhaps even who hurt her so deeply. Unspeakable trauma could explain it all — possibly even her mysterious eye ailment, for which her Harvard specialist documented no physical findings.

Absent the discovery of a secret drawer or floor board stuffed with confessional prose by Emily Dickinson, we will likely never know the exact source of possible trauma. Viewed through the lens of medicine, however, her known writings provide compelling evidence that this trauma arose from sexual assault, and I believe it’s important to consider this possibility not only as a matter of medical and historical honesty, but also for the sake of justice and human connection. Openness to such a tragic consideration potentially allows her poems to function as a salve and source of hope for survivors of such abuse.

We do have some answers, because Dickinson gave them to us, hiding the truth in plain sight.

To those who think, “Who cares?” I say Emily’s truth matters. Today, over 130 years after her death, women and the atrocities they suffer are still dismissed, diminished, disbelieved, denied, silenced, or scoffed at. The lasting power of Emily’s writing is power taken back, albeit in cipher and secrecy, transforming the poet into a prophet — a mouthpiece — for women across time, even if she felt silenced in her own time.

“If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain,” she wrote. That her foreshortened, pained life was not lived in vain, we can be absolutely sure.

Read the first lines of the selected trauma poems of Emily Dickinson here.

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