One in Three #NoMore

Bear with me, I'm writing this on my phone.

Yesterday the news story started creeping into my Facebook feed.

A college student raped an unconscious woman behind a dumpster, was caught by two eyewitnesses, and got SIX MONTHS in prison. Six months.

The super brave victim wrote her story down for all to see. (You can read her powerful testimony here. ) Thank you Buzzfeed, for giving her a platform. I am in utter and total awe of her strength and conviction.

And also, her story resonated with me. Why? Because I am one in three.

One in three women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. Usually before they even reach their 30s.

Immediately after the fact, I became obsessed with this statistic. Why me? Why did I have to be a statistic? I had made it 18 years without being one. And then, all of a sudden, I was. Was I supposed to feel better about it? "Oh, don't worry, it happens to a third of the female population. No big." I mean, rite of passage, ya?

Shortly after, my life seemed to take off on a series of events that I felt powerless over. My identity felt ripped away, accusations bounced around in my head. "You're making too big a deal out of this." "You're ruining his life." Once the quintessential church-going good girl, I dove head first into college, binge drinking, secularism. I became voiceless. I had no one to talk to. My friends didn't understand (praise GOD), and when they tried I ended up re-traumatizing myself by trying to explain and relive that horrible night. After a particularly botched counseling session in college I tried, and loved, marijuana for the first time. I drank 3, 4, 6 nights a week. I learned the perfect combination of cocktails to make myself forget. Those sweet, sweet, blissful hours of forgetting.

So I became silent. Like the girl in the headlines I too drove around, turned the music up, and screamed until my throat was raw and hoarse. Once a praise and worship, pop and punk listening girl,  I developed a taste for metal, hard rock. I discovered the band Thrice and started to heal while I screamed along to their lyrics.

"Don't be a victim" they say. "Don't let this control your life" they say. But I did. That's a funny thing that happens when you are violated without your consent. You start to lose your grasp on the meaning of the word. My whole life turned into "it just happened to me." I lost my voice. I lost my conviction. I had to slowly retrain myself to give myself "consent" back. I succeeded. It took me several years, many great friends, and guardian angels keeping more violent and ill intentioned people away, but I rediscovered my consent.

And even still, it follows me. It's been 11 years this past May. And it hits me in the gut. It attacks me in my motherhood, the most sacred place. My PTSD from being kidnapped and sexually assaulted keeps the nurses hawk eyed on me after I give birth. Indeed, after my second sons traumatic birth I was in fact hospitalized for post partum depression. Maybe a different woman would have been stronger. Maybe a woman who hadn't been tormented would have been more resilient.

As I write this my gut sinks in that familiar way. Panic rises in the back of my throat. But I'm done being silent. I'm done with the guilt. Because I have children, because I have a daughter.

And the panic crests when I think of sending them out into this world.

1 in 3.

Will my precious, beloved daughter be 1 in 3?

Will we have a society that continues to blame victims?

Will her voice be silenced before she can even speak?

What of my sons? Will they be victimized too? (We must be careful not to limit sexual violence to one gender. Violence does not see gender. We must see the violence.)

And so we must fight NOW. We MUST speak up NOW. We must change our justice system NOW. it's 2016. Maybe my educational experience was flawed but I grew up thinking the world had evolved in some way. Repeatedly I find it is ever much the same, with racism, civil rights violations, human trafficking RAMPANT.

No one likes to talk about this "ugly stuff." But the ugly stuff is there and you don't have to look very hard for it. That's why we have half a million social justice warriors come out swords blazing for a gorilla, but not near as much spotlight for the human trafficking that happens during the Super Bowl.

Fight. Speak up. For yourself, for your children, for the dignity of humanity.

Let the statistic haunt you as it haunted me; as it still haunts me all these years later.

1 in 3.


Edited To Add: Gosh guys, Im loving the encouraging feedback.  But I want to clarify:  I NEVER NEVER would have had the courage or motivation to write and share this if it weren't for this brave woman who came forward, for the benefit of us all.  Most of the time I'm content to sweep my feelings about this under the rug and into the past.  To be sure, I have experienced incredible healing and mercy from this at every turn.  And justice?  Did I get justice?  Who's to say.  I don't know where he is or how his life turned out, all I can do is pray for the best and hope that I was his last victim.

But when I think about my daughter...long before she arrived in my uterus, I was terrified of having a daughter.  Because I KNEW.  I knew I would then be compelled to look into my darkest places.  To confront my deepest scars.  I knew that I would have to be my best self...BE a strong woman so that she would know HOW to be strong.

This is my baby step forward, for me; but mostly, for her.

My justice, her justice, your justice, our justice...will come when six month prison sentences for rape-crimes are unheard of.

We're not there yet.