By Angelica Melara
It was my 18th birthday, about two months before my high school graduation. I went to my friend’s house to go celebrate because I wanted to have a good time.
I wasn’t drinking, and unless a “Guns n’ Roses” T-shirt paired with light-wash jeans and black high-top Converse is a provocative outfit, I wouldn’t say that my clothes were doing any type of talking.
No alcohol touched my mouth, but there was alcohol around and I was drinking Sprite out of a red Solo cup. Out of nowhere I started stumbling, couldn’t see straight, and started slurring my words a bit.
The last thing I can vividly remember is the boy I was talking to at the time looking at me and saying: “Oh god, I think you’ve had a little too much. Let’s go lay down.”
I couldn’t move my arms or my legs no matter how hard I tried. It felt like I was a ragdoll. I could feel what was happening, and still have nightmares about it.
It wasn’t my choice. I didn’t want it. I wasn’t drunk. I never gave consent.
My story is like many other stories from other sexual assault survivors.
April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month and throughout March on social media platforms like Tik Tok and Twitter, survivors have been posting their stories.
There have been people from the military who have been talking about their superiors sexually harassing or assaulting them with no justice being served. There have been teenagers who have been talking about being young and remembering their parents sexually harassing or assaulting them. There have been multitudes of warnings over videos that talk about sexual assault and sexual harassment.
People feel the sense of community that comes along with hearing other people’s stories, which makes others feel comfortable to share their own stories. The entire “#MeToo” movement has created a space for people to feel connected with one another knowing that they are not alone in their traumatic experiences.
Butterfly Blaise Boire is the Title IX Coordinator at SUNY Plattsburgh. She is someone who has been known to fight for those who feel as though they do not have a voice when coming out to talk about their experiences.
“Even if we have to meet 10 times before we get to the point of that person sharing their story, we are there for people and we are open to serving them in a way that’s flexible and that meets their needs in terms of their experience and their identities,” Boire said.
Resources like Title IX have created different policies like the Policy for Amnesty of Drug and Alcohol and the Social Distancing Amnesty Policy to ensure that people feel as though they can go to places like Title IX without fearing they will get in trouble for doing something illegal.
The narrative of someone being drunk or wearing clothing that shows too much skin or anything along those lines plays into victim blaming.
Victim blaming is another issue that comes up when talking about sexual assault because it focuses on everything victims are doing wrong that prompted them to get sexually assaulted.
With people's stories now online, there has been an increase of people retaliating and showing women specifically how to defend themselves. People have also been retaliating by saying “not all men,” which means that not all men rape.
This is a true statement. Not all men do rape, but as a woman who has been sexually assaulted, it makes sense to group all men together because we do not know if the person walking down the street from us at night is going to get a sudden urge. There is no time to nitpick at who will and who won’t sexually assault another human being.
People that have made comments about how not all men have sexually assaulted people have come back with analogies like “not all sharks kill people but we still think sharks are dangerous,” and have said “don’t teach me how not to die, teach people not to rape.”
RAINN stands for Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network. It is a source that people can go to when they are seeking help for suffering any form of abuse. On the rain website it shows one out of every six American women being the victim of an attempted or completed rape within their lifetime. It also shows that one out of every nine American men are sexually abused in their lifetime.
Boire explained that it is important to talk to experts when trying to understand things like consent because the portrayal of giving consent in movies is far different than it is in real life.
“I used to go into schools and teach kindergarten through senior, where a lot of people are then going into college or getting their information from movies which is not how it works,” Boire said. “You don’t have this long, magical gaze that tells you that someone’s giving you consent. It’s a little more complicated than that.”
My younger sister, Gina Martinez, is now a freshman at Stony Brook University. I told her my story to make it clear to her that she has to know what can happen to her and her friends. I hope and pray that it never does, and she doesn’t have to suffer through what I did but it was important for me to know that she understands that something like this can happen to anyone.
“Ever since I found out what happened, it’s made me so aware of what I can do, and who I can talk to if it ever happens to me or someone else I care about,” Martinez said. “It already happened to someone I care about, and I never want it to happen again.”
Martinez took initiative and went to her school’s Title IX program and learned more about sexual assault.
“You can find sources through social media platforms, or through national organizations such as RAINN or Planned Parenthood or things of that nature,” Boire said.
It is important to understand that sexual assault can happen to anyone, and the education system has to do a better job at teaching impressionable kids about sexual assault. The solution to the problem is not victim blaming, or teaching people how to not get murdered. The solution to the problem is education, and making sure that survivors are met with open arms instead of being terrorized for sharing their stories.
Comentarios