Memories of Rape and Rage

Free use stock photo rape victim

I read a post on Facebook that triggered all the dark places inside me. The dark memories, the dark emotions, the dark cold places where shame and rage live. It all came flooding back as though I have never worked on releasing these things when, in truth, I've worked at letting them go for years and years. Every time I think I have a handle on it, that I've made progress, something happens and I find out that the progress I thought I made was all surface window dressing, a pretty facade to hide the truth. 


Between twenty-five and thirty years ago, I was gang raped. Such a small simple sentence to describe one of the turning points of my life. I was held down and five men took turns violating me to the fullest extent. Being paraplegic, I couldn't kick, or run or struggle. All I had were my arms and my mouth. My arms were quickly and easily subdued as I was laid out upon the hard ground. I could feel the uneven ground beneath my back, the clumps were grasses grew, the small rock that dug into my my lower back. Before they placed a hand over my mouth I begged for my life. I was sure I was about to die since I knew them by sight, fellow students on my university campus. I could point them out easily. I worried that it would hurt, my death. I'd had enough physical pain in my life up to that point and I couldn't bear the idea that I would die in horrendous pain from being strangled or suffocated or being beaten to death. To die that way, after having lived with so much pain nearly every day of my life just didn't seem fair...not fair at all. That thought sped through my mind but I didn't have time to examine it as I was in a struggle to just live second to second...to bear what was happening and whatever would happen next. 

Time ceased to have any meaning whatsoever. Everything was happening so fast but in slows motion at the same time. I had no time to process anything that was happening but simply lived inside the experience as it occurred. It was the strangest sensation, that timelessness. To literally exist outside of time and have only the now and what was happening in it was the only way I describe how it felt. Psychologists may have labeled this as a disassociative state.

Obviously they didn't kill me. They didn't beat me. They had their fun and left me there on the ground with my clothes laying nearby. It took a while, how long I do not know, to even want to move. If I moved, if I looked up, then it all became real somehow. I had this weired idea that if I simply lay there quietly everything would remain unreal. I didn't want to make it real so I laid there. And laid there. And laid there. Nothing changed. It didn't melt away like ice cream in the sun. It was horribly, solidly real. I rose to sit up and scrambled to put on my dirty clothes. Dirt caked onto the sticky skin of my thighs where five men had spent their pleasure all grunting and laughing and cheering each other on. My arms were sore from having been stretched over my head and held down for so long. A few bruises were already making themselves at home on my wrists and upper arms. I managed to climb back into my overturned wheelchair and push it to the campus police station. I needn't have bothered.

When I arrived at the campus police station and announced that I had just been raped they began to take my statement and all that jazz. It looked like the ball was rolling for justice to be done. I was focused on that, on justice. When they found out who the rapists were the whole machine came to a screeching grinding halt. That was the first time I'd ever heard the term "diplomatic immunity". They were the sons of foreign dignitaries. No rape kit, no report, no pressing charges...no justice. I was sent back to the dorms after the campus nurse tended what she called "superficial wounds". The end. Finished. Put it behind me, they said. Every year since then for three more years I saw my rapists. They would grin at me. Put it behind me? I wish it were that easy. 

What was the comment on Facebook that set me off? It was a public post, shared many times by those who read it and it said:

" Ladies if you are going to use your body as bait.. How could you complain if a shark bites?"

I want to be able to let go of this anger, this feeling of being robbed of justice. I can see the good that I can do others because of my experience but I still am pissed as hell anyway.