Tag Archives: Sexual Assault

The Silent Victim

“Patrice” (Photo/sketch by John P. Flannery)

“Patrice” (Photo/sketch by John P. Flannery)

Some ask, “Why does an alleged victim of a sex predator wait so long to come forward?””

Patrice agreed to discuss the sexual attack she suffered 45 years ago because she thought it might be a catharsis for herself, but, more importantly, to help other victims to find their voice and come forward to help others understand why we often wait to disclose.

Patrice said, “these public attacks on victims, charging, that they’ve been ‘waiting too long’ to come forward upset me.  These victims deserve to be heard loud and clear, and not to be ostracized.  It’s not so easy to come forward.  Maybe only the victims know this.”

“I think of my own sexual assault,” said Patrice, “and my efforts to process what happened to me so long ago.”

With some difficulty, Patrice described what happened to her.

“I was a freshman in college living at home in a suburb of New York City and commuting to school each day,” said Patrice, “and, of all places, the sexual assault, holding me, not letting me escape, preventing me from getting away, occurred on a public bus, in January 1973.  I wasn’t raped but I was grabbed and restrained by this offending stranger.”

“I did come forward in my case,” said Patrice, “and the police were called when I arrived back home.  The process became progressively more hurtful.  They interviewed me, took my statement and had me look through mug shot books.  It was like you saw on tv but I couldn’t find any mug shot.”

“I never thought that something like this could happen to me in my hometown,” said Patrice.

“Amazingly, that wasn’t the end of it,” Patrice said, “later that day I went to a local pizzeria with my sister to eat and calm down. While eating, I looked up, and across the street I saw my attacker  and he was waiting for the bus.  I lost it and freaked out.”

“My sister called the police.  They caught him on the bus where he’d just attacked three other women.”

“I did what some have not,” said Patrice, “I pressed charges against this man. I was required to attend a hearing the next day.  Before the hearing I met with the Asst. DA and was questioned over and over again about what happened, including what I was wearing, like I invited the attack with my student blue jeans and long winter coat.  I was asked if I had provoked my assailant, and worse.  It was humiliating and degrading.”

“At the hearing,” said Patrice, “it was disclosed that my attacker had a history of attacking women going back to the 1950’s, including the 3 women he attacked that day.  Unfortunately, the other victims declined to appear at the hearing that day.  My attacker was not sentenced to any punishment for his crime.  Instead, he was remanded to a psychiatric facility for 3-6 months.”

“It was as if I’d been a victim twice,” Patrice said.

“Following the assault, I had and continue to have panic attacks,” said Patrice, “I get claustrophobic in crowds and tight spaces.  I had been trusting.  But no longer.  I was leery of strangers, anyone outside our immediate family.”

“I was only able to tell my story to acquaintences around 2012,” said Patrice.

“As compared to others,” said Patrice, “my attack was not a rape or a kidnapping.  Still, it was terrifying.”

“I’ve learned that men get away with this gross misbehavior,” said Patrice, “and we have had an array of powerful and public men, treating women as objects, uncovered of late, who forced themselves on women, like they may do whatever they want.”

“It is clear,” said Patrice, “that some women are coming forward to call out men in the public eye or who are in transition, in or about to assume significant positions of trust.  More women sense that they have an obligation to endure the scrutiny lest unworthy men are assumed to be otherwise.  But victims are wary.  They see how they are treated.”

“It is tempting to many,” said Patrice, “to disbelieve the charges of sexual misconduct when we see what these men have accomplished in their professional lives, or how they appear in the family Christmas photo, but that’s a mistake. Women need to find their voices. Our society must learn to listen to these charges of sexual misconduct from these victims, no matter how long it takes, and foster laws and practices that make it more dignified for the silent victims to come forward.”

Patrick Henry College to sexual assault survivors: “If you were telling the truth, God would have kept you conscious”

The administrators at Patrick Henry College have had a tough week.

Beginning on Sunday, PHC founder and chancellor Michael Farris posted a public statement about the recent disgrace of two important leaders within the religious homeschooling and “parental rights” movement, both of them because young women have come forward with testimony of sexual misconduct and abuse of power. Former Home School Legal Defense Association attorney Doug Phillips resigned last fall from the separatist group he had founded after it was revealed that he pursued a sexual relationship with a young woman, under 18, who was under his “authority.” Bill Gothard, leader of an influential Christian Patriarchy instruction program, is slowly being exposed as a predator who has for decades sexually molested young women sent to him, often at his personal invitation, to be his interns.

Farris did not dispute the misconduct of these men, seeming to accept evidence of their “protracted patterns of sin.” Instead, he tried to distance his own kind of “leadership” from theirs. But his statement is very strange. Attempting to avoid criticism of the authoritarianism that undergirds his own position, it ends up reading as if he thinks these “leaders,” these powerful men, should rightly have such control over the women and children under their authority, and that maintaining this position of male authority is a “basic strength.” The only problem with these men is that their strength was allowed to “get out of control.” The statement then ends with a lighthearted punchline normalizing the idea that men naturally want to pursue young women, but are inhibited by the fear that their wives will shoot them.

What came the next day must have been a surprise, although one is at pains to imagine why.

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Dick Black tries to explain his “marital rape” remarks

Dick Black explains his view of a spousal rape bill

Dick Black explains his view of a spousal rape bill

In a defensive-sounding email sent Friday, the Dick Black campaign reacted to a Weekly Standard piece that doesn’t consist of much more than the video of Black’s remarks about a 2002 bill to amend Virginia’s spousal rape law: Spousal Rape Defending Republican Considering Running for House.

The email claims that “Black was not taking a position for or against marital rape.” While he may not have been literally “taking a position for or against marital rape” during the floor speech captured in the video, it’s difficult to believe that he doesn’t have opinions on the topic. His closest allies on the fringe of “social conservatism” typically take the position that marital rape, by definition, can’t exist. For example, Phyllis Schlafly of Concerned Women for America – the organization for which Mrs. Black is a national lobbyist, and to which Dick Black gave this appalling interview during which he joked that “Concerned Women for America is the women’s organization that likes men” – had this to say in a 2007 campus speech:

By getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don’t think you can call it rape.

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The trouble with Baskerville

Trigger warning: Rape, domestic violence and child abuse denialism, victim-blaming.

Critics of Stephen Baskerville’s astonishing Faith and Reason lecture at Patrick Henry College last Friday have no shortage of material to cite. The lecture was such a departure from even the pretense of academic standards that it’s easy for critics to frame it as a mistake that no one should take seriously; surely the cause of this catastrophe is that the administration failed to vet it properly, and surely the students have the necessary skills to reject it. PHC alum David Sessions reaches out to those students in an open letter:

To say it was beneath the standards of charity, evidence, and logical rigor students at PHC should expect from their professors would be an understatement. But beyond its weaknesses as a piece of argumentation, it had darker moral undertones that should be emphasized and rebutted. Anyone committed to the Christian virtues of love, charity, forgiveness, and justice should be deeply suspicious of such a hostile condemnation of the voices of people who have been subjected to violence and discrimination in our society, and of those who have worked courageously and democratically to protect them.

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What I’ve been reading, links worth following

These are links from my Twitter Feed from today*.

*I may spend a smidge too much time on Twitter.