“The mediator wasn’t there to discover what was true but to figure out what they could use to dismiss this because rapes on campus made the school look bad,” she says. “They found out I’d been smoking marijuana that night and they said, ‘That’s a hallucinogen.’ The tacit implication was that I had just hallucinated the whole rape.” Eventually, the campus mediator moved to dismiss the charges Aspen had leveled against her rapist.
Not only did Aspen’s rapist face no punishment, but he was also moved into her dorm building shortly afterward. By the time the ruling had been made, it was too late for her to get a rape kit exam.
The Ever-Changing Dialogue About Victims of Sexual Assault
Over the course of the last several years, we’ve finally started having a long-overdue national dialogue about sexual assault. Examinations of “rape culture” and “victim blaming,” terms once relegated to feminist media outlets and women’s studies classes, are now showing up in the mainstream media on a regular basis. Yet, we continue to hear about just as many stories that make it feel like we’re moving backwards. Case in point: Earlier this month, CNN reported that a judge in Canada sparked outrage by asking a rape victim, “Why couldn’t you just keep your knees together?”
In that respect, not much has changed since Joanna Connors was raped at knifepoint by a stranger in an empty theater on a college campus in Cleveland nearly 30 years ago.
A self-described feminist, Joanna (now 63), who has detailed her healing process in her memoir, I Will Find You: A Reporter Investigates the Life of the Man Who Raped Her, says she knew the assault wasn’t her fault—but the prosecutor in her case said something that sent her into a spiral of self-blame.
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“The prosecutor in my case was talking to me and my now ex-husband preparing me for the trial,” she explains, “and at a certain point he asked my husband to leave so he could ask me a question. I thought it would be an intimate sexual question about one of the acts, but instead he looked across the desk at me and said, ‘Why the hell did you go into that theater?’ That was the pinnacle of more subtle examples of the same kind of thinking that I heard from people at the time. I don’t remember what I actually said to him, but what I wish I had said was, ‘F*ck you.’”
Joanna adds that although her sexual assault happened in 1984, she doesn’t feel that our culture has shifted much since then when it comes to helping the victims of rape. “Rape culture is absolutely still alive and well, and victim blaming is definitely still prevalent,” she says.
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How the Blame Shifts
But why do these harmful attitudes remain so pervasive? While sexual assault does affect men, it affects women to a much greater extent: One in five women and one in 71 men are sexually assaulted at some point in their lives, according to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center.
Silvia M. Dutchevici, L.C.S.W., founder of the Critical Therapy Center in New York, who specializes in working with survivors of abuse and sexual assault, says the way our culture values men and masculinity over women and femininity often leads to victim-blaming.
“For men, victim-blaming is a way to deny responsibility and not have to think critically about how the way one acts around friends, co-workers, etc., might play into a culture that promotes rape by objectifying women and seeing them as commodities, and also to deny vulnerability in themselves,” she says. “Sexual assault is about power, and when women are seen as less than men, it is difficult to discern what consent is supposed to look like.”
Pointing the finger at the victim also allows people to deny the culture that’s made sexual assault seem “acceptable” in some cases. “Psychologically, when we blame the victim, we subconsciously ward off or deny any vulnerability in ourselves and we also deny any responsibility for the ways we as a society we allowed this crime to happen,” says Dutchevici.
What’s more, only nine out of every 100 sexual assaults are ever even prosecuted, according to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN)—a far lower percentage than other violent crimes, such as armed robbery, reports the organization. “For survivors, it’s easy to think, ‘Maybe it’s not really a big deal—why should I be so affected by this thing that all of society doesn’t seem to think is even worth pursuing legally?’” says Aspen.
“Sexual assault is about power, and when women are seen as less than men, it is difficult to discern what consent is supposed to look like.”
Aspen says the mediator in her own case reinforced this belief for her. “After the ruling came out, the sexual assault coordinator, who was supposed to be my representative, said, ‘If he is ever accused of rape again, I want you to know it will be taken very seriously,’” says Aspen. “It was like she was saying, ‘The rape of your body isn’t quite serious enough, but assuming he commits another violent felony and ruins another student’s life, we’ll consider doing something about this.’ I was absolutely horrified.”
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The Path to Change
When it comes to reducing the staggering number of sexual assaults that occur every year in the U.S., it’s clear that talking openly about the issue and educating people about consent, starting at an early age, are the most important things we can do.
“The thing I most want everyone to know,” says Aspen, “is that short-shorts don’t cause rape, weed doesn’t cause rape, and alcohol doesn’t cause rape. No one and nothing causes rape except for rapists. People try and twist it a thousand different ways, but it really is just that clear, and clean, and true, and simple.”
Education is the key, says Dutchevici. She and Joanna both note that bystander intervention education, which involves teaching both men and women how to intervene proactively to stop a potential sexual assault from occurring, are being proven successful, too.
Joanna also says one of the most important things we can do is talk more openly about sexual assault. “In our culture it takes a long time for attitudes to change,” she says, “and I think we’re right at the beginning of this whole thing changing, because women are no longer ashamed to say they were raped.”
That doesn’t mean that every survivor has to come out, adds Joanna. “But the more people talk about it, the less the notion that victims or survivors should be ashamed will be in the air in our culture,” she says. “Talking about sexual assault can make people uncomfortable, but the only way to create change is to talk about it anyway—to be willing to be uncomfortable.”
Creating spaces where victims can feel comfortable telling their stories may also help, says Dutchevici. “By not silencing the victims and overcoming our own avoidance to hearing these stories, we lay the necessary groundwork for victims to reposition themselves regarding the assault, to process and to understand that they were the victims, not the instigators,” she says.
Aspen says speaking out about her rape—and the fact that she asked her attacker to sleep over afterward—helped her cope with what happened. “It’s a tremendously common reaction, trying to retroactively correct the thing that happened,” she says. “Like, ‘Maybe it wasn’t rape if he sleeps over and I can pretend this was my choice or my will.’” After writing about the incident for the New York Times in 2012, says Aspen, “I actually had hundreds of women reach out and say they’d done the exact same thing.”
Vice President Joe Biden on Helping Victims of Sexual Assault
Women’s Health, in collaboration with It’s On Us, an organization launched by the White House in 2014 that’s dedicated to shifting the culture around sexual assault, reached out to Vice President Joe Biden for his advice on what we can all do to stop the sad cycle of sexual violence in the U.S. Here’s what he said:
“One of the most important things we can do in combating sexual violence is continue to fight for more funding and more services for women and men who have experienced the trauma of sexual assault. These devastating crimes can have lasting effects. A recent study by the Centers for Disease Control affirmed for the first time what we’ve always suspected—that women and men who have been abused or raped have increased rates of PTSD, and a higher chance of developing health issues like asthma, diabetes, and chronic pain. There are things that we can do to help that won’t put these survivors through additional trauma. First, all survivors need to have readily available access to the health care and treatment that they need. And second, we need to ensure that rape kits are made available to all survivors of rape—along with the assurance that those kits will get tested—so that survivors of sexual assault can finally have closure. By giving these strong women and men the vital healthcare and support that they need, we can ensure that they do not feel re-victimized by the system all over again.”
For information on therapies that are especially effective in helping victims of sexual assault, tips on what to say to a friend who’s been sexually assaulted, and more, pick up the October issue of Women’s Health, on newsstands now.