Sexual Assault Survivors Deserve to Be Heard
Read Time: 9 Minutes
Words by Amy Wright
I still remember it all in segments, like I’m on an underground train sitting in the darkness watching blurry scenes race by with flashes of light. His forearm on my neck, blur. His hands pushing my hands, blur. And even in the darkest moments I can hear his laugh. A happy, careless laugh, the pressure still on my neck.
On the day it happened, I was 26. I consider myself a strong woman. I had experienced many different parts of life, chronic illness of a child, brain surgery for said child, I had a college degree, two children of my own, and a happy marriage. I was proudly a woman of faith. I grew up within religion and found that religion had added a beautiful peace to my life. I met my husband Garth within this religion, and we had begun our family on the same path as our childhoods. I had goals, plans, hopes, and dreams. I also had my own struggles, depression, anxiety, and self-worth issues but I didn’t feel like they sat at the forefront of my identity. In other words, I was an average-everyday-woman.
I wish I could say that I screamed when it happened, that I fought back, that I ran outside and yelled for help. But my brain froze. It stopped processing the moment in real time. I moved, I pushed, I ran, I got in my car, and I drove -- all in some sort of reflexive state.
Turn the key, push the pedal, drive.
Just keep driving.
Get your children from school.
Smile at them.
Hug them.
Hold it together for them.
I spent the rest of the day stuck on the kind of auto pilot only a mother can understand. I was back to lunch maker, tear dryer, diaper changer, happy mom mode. Despite the way my body felt frozen inside, I cuddled with my daughter, and we made silly faces in my phone for entertainment. I made everyone a big dinner. I carried on.
It wasn’t until I laid down that night and closed my eyes that I found myself on that horrible train watching the scenes fly by. It involuntarily replayed in rapid fire. He pushed me, moved me, hurt me, and yet, the question that came was what had happened to me? I knew what rape was, and I knew that this wasn’t it. What would this be called? Was it my fault? Why did it happen? What is wrong with me?
Oh that laugh. I typed up every single part I remembered into a text message and sent it to my best friend Kristen. She was bold enough to send back the words I needed to read: “You were sexually assaulted.” Kristen was able to name it for me because she had been sexually assaulted nearly a decade ago and had already done the work of burying and excavating.
Like I said, I was an average, every day, woman. A mother of two children. A college graduate -- and yet I wasn’t positive what sexual assault really is or isn’t. Do you know what it is? Do we talk about it enough? When we hear someone was assaulted, do we know what that actually means?
After texting Kristen I woke my husband Garth and I told him what had happened. I avoided going into entirely specific details so as to not hurt him by making the images worse for him. He held me and he comforted me the best that he could. Eventually, he needed extra support so he decided to tell our religious leader, referred to as a Bishop, what was going on. I stayed home, alone, while he drove around with our Bishop. He told him my story and our Bishop called another leader in our area, the Stake President, and told him my story again. They didn’t feel the need to report it.
Can you imagine how that felt? I was sexually assaulted by a man. Told a man what happened. He told another man, who told another man, and they decided as MEN that it didn’t need to be reported. My one request for them was that I had no desire to meet with them until I had found a therapist of my own and found some solid ground for myself. I made those desires known that night.
I spent the next week trying to continue carrying on. I took long showers trying desperately to scrub my body clean, wishing I could start over with a whole new layer of skin. During one of these showers it hit me that the dirtiness I felt was on the inside and would maybe never leave me. As a religious woman this was a difficult feeling to comprehend, I wanted to believe that I did nothing wrong and that I could someday be whole again, but I also was accustomed to the idea that if I felt dirty, I must have sinned. I sat down on the floor and wished life could simply end. Standing up and drying off felt too big. Carrying on alone felt impossible.
It had taken my brain nearly 12 hours to process being assaulted. Twelve hours before I even told a soul. I felt so much shame for this. I have since learned that this is a common attribute of victims. I grew up hearing comments like, “Why did it take so long for her to come forward, why now?” and, “she just wanted her 15 minutes of fame”. When you have never experienced assault it is easy to make a lot of assumptions about how you would behave if it were you in the situation. The fact that it took me time to process what happened and work around the obstacle of shame doesn’t make my experience any less valid, or real. It simply just means I am a victim of something I couldn't and didn't want to have to understand.
I was afraid to tell anyone I knew. I was terrified of the lack of support I assumed would come from even the women around me. I was utterly consumed by shame. There was too much guilt to open a wound for my husband every day by discussing it so I simply kept quiet and held it inside. There was no other safe choice for me.
The next Sunday while standing amongst friends in the hallway at church, a male leader approached and said that the Bishop would like to meet with me. Mentally, I recoiled. I didn’t want to walk into that office, in fact I had requested not to be called to that office, but I didn’t want to refuse in front of all those people. So I reluctantly agreed and walked to his office alone. I sat in a chair across from the Bishop feeling small and vulnerable.
He decided to let me know that he had spoken to a therapist for me and that they agreed that reporting it would likely not bring about anything positive because it would just be a matter of hearsay and I had no proof. He also mentioned that we had been friends with the man who assaulted me and we had let him stay at our home willingly before, implying it would sound suspicious on my part. Never once did he ask me to share my story. Never once did he ask for my opinion. He never even asked me for his name. The man who assaulted me was a member of our faith, one we met through the church, and there would not be any repercussions for him, even within the church. I started to cry and the man in front of me stood up, opened the door, and said, “Well you’re emotional so you can go.”
I drove home with a heart entirely split open. I needed a voice, and I didn’t have one. Of all the many people who knew my story I had told only two myself, and most of those who knew were men. I remember imagining reporting what had happened to me to law enforcement. I pictured calling and hearing a male voice answer the phone, I pictured talking to more male faces, I envisioned more judgement, more questions, and more shame. Male face after male face went by. I needed to be understood, to feel like I could still be whole some day. I needed a woman, but there wasn’t a single woman around me who held a position of power or authority regarding this.
Because of these early experiences, I was left entirely alone. I didn’t want my husband to have to be damaged and jaded like me, I wanted to protect him. So I closed off from him. It was clear I couldn’t rely on any of the leaders around me within my religious family, they had already all chatted and decided what was and wasn’t going to happen. I had children who needed me, so I buried the experience deep within myself and worked to carry on.
Occasionally when the burying failed, I turned to music. I felt like a part of me was dying inside, and instead of being able to scream and shout about it, I put in headphones and sobbed silently through my workouts. During one particularly difficult day I decided to run out my emotions on the treadmill. I ended the workout covered in tears with purple nail marks in my palms from my clenched fists.
The pain would only deepen at church. My bishop, once a friend who I swapped sarcastic jokes with, would go on to not say even 2 words to me for nearly a year. Our church handbook says a Bishop’s role is to “care for the spiritual well-being of the members of their church units” and that Bishops are blessed with the power of discernment which “enables the bishop to understand the differences between good and evil, and even to know what is in a person’s heart.” Here is the man who supposedly knows my heart and there was not even a single hello. What could that possibly say about what he assumed about my own heart?
Being assaulted was a horrifying experience. It involved mental acrobatics to process that monsters really do exist in the world, and they look just like us. The man who assaulted me was a religious man with his own wife and his own children. Processing this new reality was slow, and painful, but accepting that I was now a woman who had been assaulted in my religious community, was honestly worse. Sitting in the pew on Sundays became nearly unbearable. I would find myself staring up at the Bishop on the stand absolutely sick to my stomach.
Occasionally he would stare back at me and I would feel nothing but hatred boil up inside of me. He left me feeling so dirty, so shameful, so ruined. I felt unsaveable, entirely invisible, and evil. I felt so much anger and so much pain as I watched pieces of my religion forcefully stripped from me. I could no longer watch as only men lead out in the services without a knot in my stomach. Knowing that all these men, like him, had power over me that they couldn’t and wouldn’t share became a source of deep bitterness. I was angry at the assault that began it all, angry at the societal structures that allow horrible men to exist in peace, but mostly angry that I was not given a place to heal and return to being the woman I was before.
I eventually gained the courage to tell the Bishop how I felt in an effort to try to make things better for the next woman in my shoes. We had a meeting with him already scheduled to discuss tithing as a family so I decided it would be a perfect opportunity with Garth there. I was kind, and diplomatic. I told him I wasn’t angry and that I knew that the situation was complicated, but that I wanted to voice some things I needed so he could know for the next woman. I told him that after the assault I had really needed a voice, and I wasn’t given one. I told him that I had learned with time having a voice would have been very healing for me. His response?
“You weren’t my first, and you won’t be my last.”
So today I write my story for the average woman. Maybe you are religious, maybe you hate the idea of there being a God. Maybe you have children, maybe you are living your best single lady life. Statistically speaking it does not matter -- you will meet, or you will be, a woman in my shoes. When you meet her, let her tell you her story--give her a voice. Help her feel like sticking up for herself is powerful, even if it isn’t successful within the male power structures we are forced to work within. Let her know she is no different from the woman she was when she woke up the morning before it happened.
If you are a male reading this, do better. Stop asking the questions about why the woman didn’t react how you think she should have in the moment. In fact, don’t ask questions at all. Step aside and let the woman speak, it will heal a tiny piece of her, and you might just learn something.
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About the Author:
Amy is the proud owner of an ever-thinking, ever-analyzing, ever-questioning brain. She is currently a homeschooling momma of three, who is also chasing her dreams and running two businesses. She is inspired by documenting the magic she's found in what society might consider a mediocre life, and she loves finding ways to live more authentically and purposefully instead of simply spending her days keeping up with the hustle.
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