The Lasting Effects of Acquaintance Rape

It can happen during any time of day or night. It can happen when you’re drunk or sober. It can happen with a lover, a friend, or someone you barely even know. Sexual assault is a crime against women and men that is difficult to understand.

Katie, 20, was sexually assaulted in on-campus housing by a male Mason student she knew for only a few hours. “It’s scary to think that sexual assaults happen at this school on campus, but they do,” she says.

“I had gone back to his apartment for a little bit, under the assumption that I would just be in the living room and not anywhere else. He led me to his room instead. And that is where the assault occurred,” says Katie. “And after that, I basically went back to my room, and started putting my life back together. But it took a really long time.”

For Katie, every day is a struggle to come to terms with her assault.

“If I tried to tell myself that it didn’t change my life drastically, I would be lying, because it was as if a different person left that room, and came back here.”
She remembers going back to her room after the assault, and getting into the shower. She explains that you should never shower, bathe, or clean yourself if you are sexually assaulted, because it removes the evidence from your body.

“But I did, and I just sat there and cried and cried for hours, maybe three or four hours in the shower because I just felt so disgusted about my body and about myself, and I’ll never forget that . . . little things would trigger me and I would feel complete shock and loss and pain, feeling all by yourself, because you didn’t feel like anyone else could possibly understand what you felt like.”

She credits Connie Kirkland, Director of Sexual Assault Services, as well as the services provided by SAS for giving her the necessary resources to approach the university’s judicial process. She clarifies that SAS never pressures you into reporting an assault to the university or the police, but they have helped her piece her life together one day at a time.

She explains that the process is not usually very long, but her case had been drawn out due to unknown circumstances until recently. There are many differences between a university judicial hearing and a court of law.

She chose the university’s judicial process over the police because “it’s an emotionally easier process. I feel like taking it to the police is very, very stressful, because in a court of law . . . the acquaintance rape cases will be a little bit more difficult to process than other rape cases. And I just didn’t want to have to go through the stress of it, and that would involve my parents, whom I have not had the emotional strength to tell.”

“People need to be aware of that because even if you were a victim yesterday or seven years ago, you still are going to have baggage and you’re going to need help,” she says. “It’s good because without [Sexual Assault Services and Connie], I probably wouldn’t stay in school, to be honest, because it’s the type of thing that destroys your life and it doesn’t go back.”

After attending a baseball game days after her assault, Katie remembers seeing triplet girls sitting in front of her.

“They were so cute and so innocent, and I thought to myself, you know, it wasn’t so long ago that I was that little and young and then I realized that these girls were going to grow up and how bad would it be if somebody hurt them . . . then I realized that I had the power to prevent something like this from happening again. That day was the day I made the decision to report it, it was because of those little girls there.”

Although Katie has yet to be able to tell her parents about her rape, she did tell her roommates. “I had to tell them because for me it is a safety issue,” she explains, “I don’t want him knocking on my door looking for me.” She and her assailant still live in the same building.

After losing all sense of security, she now takes the police escort service almost everywhere.

Being candid about her assault can be hard, she says, because “then people assume that it didn’t happen, you’re telling it for attention, or you’re crazy and you have issues. Sometimes you just have to let people know about the circumstance, and it helps to talk about it.”

Every day is still a struggle for her. “My room is a mess, I have an incomplete [in a course], and I have all of this schoolwork to catch up on…[everything] falls to the wayside when this happens,” she says. “I was supposed to be applying for law school, but I’m not now, I want to make sure I’m really emotionally ready . . . I don’t want to be a big disaster. I want to make sure that I pull it together.”

Katie speaks very highly of the other survivors in her group. “That kind of strength is going to help you get through anything for the rest of your life, because I know if I can get through this then I can get through anything now.”