Tag: rape tw

A friend of mine was recently cornered in her building doorway, late at night, by a total stranger who “just wanted to take her out for a drink”. She said “No” several times, in increasing alarm, and finally he grabbed her arm and asked “Why not?”. She said, “Because you’re obviously not listening when I say no right now, so I can’t expect you to listen to anything else I say no to.”

To her total shock, he looked appalled, let go of her, apologized, and left. As far as she could tell, it had not occurred to him that cornering a stranger, grabbing her arm, and insisting she go get a drink with him might be seen as the sort of thing a rapist would do.

[[trigger warning: rape]]

In response to the Steubenville, Ohio teen rape case, West Virginia U.S. Attorney William J. Ihlenfeld is launching a program to teach high school athletes not to post evidence of rape online.

It’s called “Project Future,” and his goal is to teach teens how to avoid getting in trouble with the law by using cell phones, cameras, and social media “responsibly.” Instead of teaching teens not to rape, the U.S. Attorney wants to teach them not to get caught.

This is rape culture at work: The very people who are in charge of enforcing our laws look at a cruel, brutal attack on a young girl and think, “If only the teens hadn’t posted photographic evidence online.”

The media teaches us that sexual violence is a noisy event. It happens in a dark and empty street to a woman of culturally sanctioned beauty, by an evil man. The woman screams and fights and runs, but the man overpowers her with physical force.

The reality is much quieter. The reality is that very often a person’s body will go into freeze, not fight or flight. The target of the violence will not scream or kick or fight, they will simply shut down, their body too invested in simply surviving an unsurvivable attack – “the most violent crime you can survive,” as Thomas Tremblay describes it – to allocate any resources to calling for help.

And this metaphor of the reality of deadly distress is true for depression, too. It’s quiet. People won’t necessarily sob and despair in any obviously visible way. I would argue that, like drowning, if a person is in a state where they can sob and wail, they’re doing okay – they don’t feel GOOD, but they’re not about to die. When it gets really dangerous, they get quiet. They’re in freeze, all their resources committed to the impossible task keeping their head above water, taking one more gasping breath.