There are a lot of reasons women (let alone men) don’t report sexual abuse. There are also a lot of articles out there, some scholarly, some not so much, about the why of that – people don’t believe us, people don’t take it seriously, people question our actions, and on and on, ad nauseam. One of the biggest reasons is shame. The idea that somehow if we’d only done X differently, this horrific thing might not have happened to us. Whether we know it or not, we’re victim blaming ourselves and we need to stop right now. “If only” is a story that no one gets told.
Yet, even after reporting abuse, women still face stigma in their lives when deciding to reveal that abuse to the people in their lives. Sometimes hurdles become mountains when faced with a partner who we know may blame rather than comfort. The hope, of course, would be that everyone is understanding and sympathetic to the needs of each particular person in their life. Some may need more support than others. Some women (and most men) don’t want to talk about it after revealing the incident itself. They don’t want to dwell on details or feelings and just want to move on. That is their absolute right. Respect that. No one owes you the details of their trauma, period.
One, lesser know reason for women not telling the details is because there are always a few people who will view this information salaciously. In my life, I’ve had a lot of guy friends and I’ve been very lucky with most of them in that our friendship was a safe space. Back in the early 1980s, when most weekday evenings involved at least one or two phone calls, I was on the phone with my friend “R” and he was asking after my parents, since he’d met one of them. I told him that I was distancing myself from my female parent due to some really difficult memories and that I hadn’t spoken with her in quite awhile. He asked me, innocently enough, what kind of difficult memories I was talking about and probably said something along the lines of ‘Lots of women have issues with their mothers.’
I told him it wasn’t that kind of issue and that while I’d had those also, this was not that. He asked again what I meant. We were really good friends and so I thought that I could trust him. I told him that she had sexually molested me and that I was having a hard time working through all of it. Remember that back in the 80s, discussions about molestation weren’t as publicized as they are now and people didn’t talk about it as openly as they do now. I mention this because when he asked me next, ‘What kind of things did she do?’ it didn’t seem that intrusive to me because people just didn’t talk about it. What was off was when, after I had started to tell him, he made some non-committal responses to show he was listening and then said, “Tell me what your mommy did to you.” and I realized he was jacking off. I was furious and I told him so. I hung up on him and didn’t speak to him for quite a while, even after he apologized. Even now, thirty plus years later, it still rankles me that somehow this betrayal of trust and safety was okay behaviour.
I’d met his mom and his sisters and I knew they treated him like he was a king and that he could be nasty with them if he didn’t get his way. I knew that he cheated on most, if not all of his girlfriends, but it never dawned on me just how far that self-centred behaviour would take him or what it would do to our friendship. In my past, I had had others who used my life events to get sympathy for themselves, but I’d never experienced this before and it really set me back in recovery process. Not only was I learning to live with past sexual abuse, I’d not just experienced a new form of it. Needless to say, I never trusted him fully after that and our friendship was never the same, although we kept in touch now and then.
It was also a long time before I felt safe enough to even begin to tell another man about some of the things that had happened to me. For a while, when first getting to know a man I was dating, I would tell them about being raped by my first husband or being molested on the way to school in first grade before telling them the rest of it. I can’t think of anyone who knows all of it, honestly. It was like I released information about the assaults, molestation, and rape through a valve, in a trickle of conversations so that not all of it was flooding this potential partner at once. Indeed, there were times I’d look back at my own life and wonder how come I didn’t drown when so many others had? Perhaps I’d just learned to swim earlier than some others.
I can’t even begin to stress how important it is to have frank, honest discussions with partners and serious prospective partners about bits of your past that can creep up and ruin a relationship. If you don’t feel safe discussing things like this with a potential partner, maybe don’t swap fluids with them either. And if you’re the type of person who gets off on rape and assault details maybe find out how that effects the people in your life. There are lots of folks who have rape fantasies and there is nothing wrong with that when consent is mutual. What IS a problem is if you use your friends trauma as pornography to their detriment. Don’t be that guy that’s constantly commenting on social media posts asking for police reports of rape victims in order to ‘believe’ the allegations are real so you can have a spank party over the details. Just stop. Be a better human.