Keeping Silent is Not an Option!

Sexual assault and alleged sexual assault have been much in the news of late. There has also been a debate about when you should report this abhorrent kind of behavior and why anyone would wait to do so, in some instances, for decades.

Only someone who has actually experienced an assault can truly understand the question and answer it. Each case, however, is different in circumstance and with the support available to deal with an experience that stays with you forever. No amount of talking about it, therapy or understanding will eradicate the lifelong trauma that will forever be a part of the victim’s life.

I can say this from personal experience. More than forty-five years after being raped at knifepoint, there are still moments in which a smell or song or other trigger will take me back to one of the most terrifying moments in my life. Anyone who feels that time heals, lacks the insight to fully comprehend the enormity of assault and its lasting damage.

I started as a freshman at Plymouth State College during a bitterly cold January. I was late starting because the previous September I had enrolled at a college in Mobile, Alabama. Fortunately, I realized my mistake within two weeks and returned to Concord. Plymouth had already started the fall semester and I could not begin classes until January. That suited me fine since I had a job at the Concord Theatre that I relished. When I enrolled at Plymouth, I arranged to return to Concord each Friday after my last class and work over the weekend at the theater.

Grafton Dorm was the housing unit arranged for me. As a freshman you had no say in a roommate. My roommate was a student from Massachusetts named Brad. We barely spoke and seemed to have little in common. Since I was determined to focus on my studies, that arrangement suited me just fine.

Some weeks later, Brad returned to the room highly inebriated. Although I’d heard him speak of a girlfriend in Massachusetts, I was not prepared for what happened next. To this day the smell of beer instantly takes me back to our room that winter night, the feel of a knife at my throat as he brutally raped me. It would happen several more times.

I never attended another class at Plymouth. I spent days and evenings hiding out at the library or going to the movies in downtown Plymouth. I began returning to Concord earlier and earlier each week, finally settling on Tuesday morning and by April, not leaving Concord.

Why didn’t I report it? First of all in the decades before the new millennium, rape was something not freely discussed. It was not unusual for a man to say about a woman who had been raped that “she asked for it by the way she dressed…” or “she deserved it!”. You rarely if ever heard about a man being raped. However, in my case, I tortured myself with wondering if I’d inadvertently given off some signal of wanting it? Was I to blame? Was it my fault?”

The people around me seemed to subscribe to the notion that you dealt with misfortune by pulling yourself up by the bootstraps and going on. “Buck-up” was another frequently used phrase as was “If you don’t talk about it, it doesn’t exist.”

None of that works for a person who has been assaulted. Sure you can try to push it to the recesses of your mind and seem to function normally. It doesn’t go away however, and its like a cancer eating away at your insides, leaving you haunted and feeling at times as though you aren’t sure where you belong.

I worked for the State for 3 years, spent 7 ½ at Blue Cross and Blue Shield, and projected an exterior that seemed capable and content. I hid the darkness inside as well as I could, calling in sick on those days when it became too much.

It became very difficult in the late 70’s when my former roommate was convicted of murder and the trial was front page news. A torrent of emotions crashed down on me and was almost my undoing.

The dam finally burst in the office of psychotherapist Jim MacKay in Concord in the mid-80’s. Finally confronting and talking about it unleashed demons that had been formant during all of those years in which I’d remained quiet. The next decade was, for the most part, hellacious.

Although I spoke about it publicly in the Concord Monitor in the 80’s, it wasn’t until I wrote about it in detail in 2010 for my book, “Was That a Name I Dropped?” that I was finally able to come to terms with the damage the assault had wrought. The thousands of letters and e-mails I received, many from victims of similar assaults, helped me to finally begin to understand the importance of speaking out. I was even able to return to Plymouth State for the first time in nearly 40 years to talk about my story.

In a perfect world under perfect circumstances, reporting or talking about a rape or assault would be handled at the time of the event with a conclusion that would enable the victim to move ahead with their life. The world isn’t perfect and the way each individual is able to handle what happened requires compassion, love, patience, courage, understanding and the right tools. It never goes away and won’t. Questioning why it takes someone years to speak up is wrong and only exacerbates the tragedy they have endured. We are better than that.