I have street cred on this. In 1990, four months after my marriage, on a gorgeous April morning in New York, I was sexually assaulted at knifepoint in the laundry room of our co-op apartment. The details of the attack are not important for the story.
What is important, at least to me, is that the superintendent’s apartment was next door to the laundry room and I was able to make enough noise so that Dee, the superintendent’s wife, was able to hear the noise and open the door. I yelled, “Dee, he has a knife!” and he fled. The fact that I’d gotten his glasses off and he couldn’t see probably helped. Dee led me into her apartment, had her sister-in-law remove the children and called the police.
The point of all of this, to me, is that Dee saw him. No, it wasn’t enough to be able to identify him. It was enough to validate to anyone and everyone that this really happened. I didn’t know, at the time, how comforting it would be to know that I would be believed beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Sexual-assault victims tend to question themselves and blame themselves, and having a witness meant that I knew it happened. It turns out that doing laundry at 11 a.m. is OK. I didn’t do anything wrong. (And that’s not to imply that any behavior justifies being attacked.) It just was a comfort to me. I know that’s crazy, but it turned out to be really important to my state of mind.
The New York City police were wonderful and very sensitive. They even asked if I wanted my husband in the room. Of course I did, but apparently some husbands and wives don’t have that sort of relationship and they wanted to make sure. While the man was never caught, New York State provided me with a year of free counseling for victims of violent crime. It was really helpful and I am grateful.
Nevertheless, a year later, we left New York for the Pittsburgh suburbs, where some of my family lived and which reminded me of New York in the 1950s, where I grew up and felt safe. Dee and her family moved to upstate New York; her sister-in-law’s family returned to Belfast, Northern Ireland, where they felt safer.
People wonder why victims don’t speak out more. Yes, I had support, wonderful support from my husband and family. Neighbors, however, looked at me differently, or at least I felt that way. Women friends were angry because if I could be assaulted at 11 a.m. while doing laundry, so could they. I destroyed their illusion of safety. Others didn’t know what to say. It was a tremendously difficult time for me and it took years before it was just something that happened a long time ago.
I tell this story now because I really do understand why women are reluctant to come forward with allegations of abuse and assault. If no one saw it, will people believe you? Will it change your life and the way people treat you? Will you feel like you have to uproot yourself and your family to feel safe again? If you’d kept quiet, would it have just gone away?
I know the answer to the last question is no, and that is why I spoke to the police. I didn’t want the man to attack again so I had to report it because maybe they’d find him. Deep inside, I dreaded the thought of having to testify about what happened and having a defense lawyer question anything I’d ever done in my life. That’s another reason women stay silent. Your entire life is put on trial as if, in some morality play, you are being judged by your past behavior to see if you “deserved” what happened to you.
And that gets back to why women don’t report incidents of sexual violence. Somehow, it will come back to them. Somehow, inside too many people, is the idea that you must have done something to deserve it. I was lucky. I knew, all along, that everyone believed me. That carries its own pain, but at least you have that.
Losing the feeling that you will ever feel safe again is terrible. You struggle against fear and feel stupid for being afraid. No one should have to go through it. No one “deserves” it and everyone deserves to be heard.
