I’ve spent some of the last posts telling you my own personal advice for what to do after being assaulted. But I think it’s an important asterisk to add that while I believe you can always get help, you can’t always get “justice.”
If you need therapy, or if you need medication for PTSD (or STIs, or anything that might come from being assaulted),, I believe there is some way to get that. (I hope – I hope that’s not just a ridiculous belief from a privileged place in a big city, though I am aware it might be.)
But while I’m hoping to believe you can always, somewhere, find some sort of support group… what you might not get is help from where you expect it, or where you originally feel like you need it.
If your assault happened at work or at school, it is possible you will not have people in your corner there. It is possible that you will want to leave, unfortunately. And that won’t be right that you should have to go, and it won’t be fair. But it might be the best/most possible thing for you at the time (if there is not a system in place to keep you away from your perpetrator).
If your workplace or school is not helpful, you may bring the legal system into things. But that might be daunting for a million reasons. You may not have the time or the money or the energy to go through it. You might just not wanna see your reputation, and every life choice you’ve ever made, dragged out and strangled on the stand. And that’s okay.
You may hope the police could help you, but sometimes they don’t.
Maybe, again, my privilege is showing by being a “non-threatening” white girl who’s, for the most part, only had great (and super few and far between) experiences with police, but I was a little surprised about how things went with the police….
When I told the officer that the man who assaulted me and totally ignored me said, “I knew you didn’t want to, but you needed to” (because he was helping me to “get over” the guy I’d had to leave behind Los Angeles), instead of telling me that was gross or wrong, the officer said, “Was he? Was he helping you? Were you at that point in your life?” As though sexual assault guy was actually being “helpful” in any way by forcing me to have sex in a location I didn’t want to.
And we could argue that my story has maybe too much nuance, and it would be hard to be prosecuted (although, even still, it’d be nice to have a little empathy from the cops, nonetheless).
But I have heard first-hand accounts of people who went to the police who had clearly been raped, with visible bruises, giving specifics soon after it happened, who were asked “But why did you go over to that man’s apartment?” “But you’d done sexual type things with him before, right?” These women were basically grilled and given the 3rd degree, as though they are the criminal.
And I’ll pick up here tomorrow!