If Someone Says Rape Happened Then It Probably Did

An interesting story on NPR about rape in the military is opening old raw wounds for me. The women interviewed claimed they were raped when they served in the military. The interview details, for example, how women in the military often kept quiet about it, and exactly why they did so, which was to remain in the military.

The interview also opened a firestorm of comments on the NPR website where there are usually very few, so it's obviously hit a raw spot in the popular imagination.

One troll in particular, Brim Stone, keeps commenting, saying he's been a victim of rape, but doesn't go into details or offer proof, and yet he insists the NPR story lacks proof, and doesn't believe the interviews. Does his skepticism matter? Probably not, but it's typical, and that sort of disbelief is exactly at the heart of extremely typical reactions to rape.

I know firsthand that even family will side with the rapist and deny it ever happened, ignore it, and shove it under the rug. So it doesn't surprise me when men insist that women fabricate rapes, cry rape all the time, or that they easily lie about it.

Whoever claims women lie about rape is deeply unethical in character. Unjust is another adjective I would use, just to be polite.

It's not at all impolite of a woman to say the truth about an event that actually happened, especially one like rape that's so private, intrusive and potentially embarrassing. Being raped doesn't make a woman more attractive to the opposite sex, after all. A women has zero, even negative, incentive to talk about it and go public.

And by the way, shame on the police for not immediately processing rape kits that they do have. It took guts for each and every woman who used one. There isn't any excuse for that on this planet.

Even if a victim doesn't report a rape and the rapist isn't punished, it doesn't mean it didn't happen. Like the article says, men should learn that it's wrong, wrong, wrong to ever rape. Because girls know in their hearts that men who rape are truly ugly trash.

In my case, during my first two months at university in Canada, I lived with my brother and his wife in another city from my parents. My brother and his wife had just bought a house, had jobs they wanted to keep to pay for the new house, and so I had to keep my kidnap incident quiet (though it was not a rape). (My brother's wife who worked with the kidnapper asked him to drive me home because she couldn't~and this kidnapping coworker forty years older than me drove me around for three long hours with a gun threatening to murder me and then dropped me at their house. And she and my brother did zero. In fact she called me "a slut," and I've never forgiven her. Previously, the same month just a week before the kidnapping, which happened when I was seventeen during my first month at university, I was date-raped by a couple of university students and unconscious for twenty hours, and may have been why she called me a slut before I could say what happened). And after that I moved on campus for the year and then moved away, changed universities and countries.

You don't have to believe I was kidnapped if you don't want to.

More than thirty years have passed, and I don't have any proof, and I don't really care if my readers don't believe me, or blame it on me. I was only seventeen, and I know I did nothing wrong.

But not having proof after all these years doesn't mean rape didn't happen, and I didn't forget it.

In conclusion, rape happens.  The man who kidnapped me is unknown to me, and unpunished to this day to my knowledge. I fled the car he said was bombed and didn't find out his name after he released me. And as for the date-rape, I didn't even call it that for years because the term hadn't been invented for the drugging of drinks, and I underwent therapy with a wonderful Australian psychiatrist to forget it (which was essential as I became depressed and suicidal, and it worked well). That date-rapist is now a father and a successful lawyer in Toronto, Canada, with a second house in the Muskokas, according to Google, and I doubt his wife and family knows what he did, and I don't know what ever happened to his accomplice. Is it just all water under the bridge? I don't think so. Did any of those men, and they were all men, suffer from what they covered up? I don't know but I hope so.

And for those of you who think my story is unusual, or that I did anything wrong, please read this.