This is what rape looks like
Tonight I rang a friend of mine to check she was ok after a split with her boyfriend of one year. She’s 15, and was smitten with the guy. Yesterday night he raped her.
The story plays like too many I’ve heard before; boy meets girl, girl splits with boy, boy takes revenge for being humiliated. She argued with him in the street, whilst out in the evening with a female friend. The boy and his group of friends, all 15, appeared to leave, but showed up again as the girls walked home in the semi-light, following them and shouting taunts. Eventually they caught up, dragging my friend into the bushes surrounding the local cemetery. She was told she wanted it really, and that she’d “better give it up”. She was frightened, humiliated, as a group of boys watched while her ex took off some of her clothes, and proceeded to rape her.
The telling of it was also like too many retellings I’ve heard before. She didn’t call it rape. She said he was “mean” to her because she “pissed him off”. She said she “had to let him do it”. I didn’t push her, but tried to suggest he had done something abhorrent, illegal, greatly wrong. She was adamant it was “just one of those things”.
And the worst of it is, he’ll get away with it. Less than 5% of women who report rape see their attacker convicted. Odds are this young woman won’t report it at all - and why would you, if that means sitting in a striplit room talking to at best a well-meaning police constable who can’t promise anything because it’s your word against his and he’s such a nice young man, and at worst a sceptical police officer who wants to know what you were doing out on your own at that time and raises his eyebrows just so when you say that you’d had a drink / slept with the guy in the past…
this is unspeakably awful.
what can be done, with your YWCA policy & campaigns hat on, to make it less unpleasant for young women to report these atrocities, to provide a more supportive environment for those who have been violated like this, and to make it more likely that baatards like these will be caught?
Started to reply here, but it got too long, so have written a new post above.
sigh… typical old unattractive woman attitude. she probably wasn’t raped at all but had one of those next day regret feelings. she told you it wasn’t rape so stop trying to ruin some kids life because you have no other way to focus your frustration with your own barren sex life