Best laid plans...
I don’t know statistically how many of you are like me. How many people were involved in intimate partner violence/assault that you did not report to anyone of consequence. That is not a question, I know the answer isn’t a quantitative possibility. I have guilt about not reporting. I sometimes feel shame because I took the easy way out. You see, I saw what happened when someone reported an assault. There were rapes that got reported and the victim was immediately put on trial. This one girl Kari, she was too drunk to consent and this guy, a really nice guy, a nice dork-wad of a guy who probably lost his virginity on this night, had sex with Kari when she was too drunk to consent. So, what happens when she realized what happened? She wanted some sort of justice, of understanding and acknowledgement that what the dork-wad did was wrong, that it should have been stopped, that he wouldn’t keep doing it, that that wasn’t the way you had sex with people. Kari got in trouble for being alone and drunk with him. And for being under 21 and drunk. And the rest of the fuzzy details of that night were left unaddressed. Dork-wad was pretty much back to being ignored. There was Jen. To this day she probably hates me. I was her roommate and I reported her assault. And she was one of 13 women who were victims of one man plucking his way through a dorm building of young, vulnerable women who were afraid of what would happen if they said no. Jen hated me. Steph hated me with her. I was a whistle blower. And then there was Andrea who lied. Because she didn’t want to get her baby-daddy in trouble and he would have been in big trouble for being her baby daddy. So she said she was raped. For some reason her “rapist” was pulled out of the barracks in handcuffs in front of five hundred of us. His career was ruined before Andrea went AWOL. By the time I became a victim and my Drill Sergeant asked if I wanted to know what he would do, I’d already been told that most of us were liars, and seen what happened when you told the truth. When my Drill Sergeant told me I’d be better off forgetting, I didn’t for a second think he was wrong. I just didn’t know that by taking the easy way out, I was sentencing myself, rather than asking Andy to take the blame.
