You are simultaneously very important and not important at all. Your support in the aftermath of her2 assault may be exactly what pushes her into the realm of okay-ness, and it may just as well be white noise. Then again, white noise could be exactly what she needs to hear. Get used to paradoxes.
You will get angry. You care about this person after all, and the fact that she’s been harmed in one of the most primitive, mean, and irreversible ways will get to you one way or another. You may want to pick up a baseball bat or buy a pair of brass knuckles off Amazon and handle things in a way that’s just as primitive. You might play out elaborate, violent fantasies and have trouble forming words, have to leave the room once she’s told you the parts of the story you both needed to hear and needed not to hear. You will want to hit things if you’re anything like me. But this is not about you, and the more you let yourself be trapped into making it about you, the less you will help.
While at times your anger will provide comfort, will supplement and affirm her own, there will also be moments in which you must replace anger with compassion. The helpfulness of tossing your rage in with hers has its limit; compassion is the antidote that remains potent. If she needs to be away from people for the night, including you, then tell her you understand (even if you don’t). If she has to leave a classroom because her assaulter has just walked in the room, remind her that it makes complete sense that she’s freaked out. If she cries, kiss her tears.
Place sex back into her hands. The way you do this obviously differs depending on whether you are a friend, significant other, or family member of hers. It can be as simple as not taking sex out of her hands. But hold on– what does that mean? Does it mean doing and saying nothing? Waiting motionless while she reclaims ownership of her body? Passivity has its role in helping her to self-medicate, yes, but how passive should you be? It’s important that you give her the space she needs to cope, but it’s just as important that you actively emphasize –to whatever extent is a comfort to her– that her body is hers, that anyone’s getting to have sex with her is always a privilege and never an expectation, that she is no less valuable, or attractive, or strong because of what happened to her.
Any impulse on your behalf, any flicker of suspicion that her being assaulted was in some way her fault –a result of the way she was dressed, of the hot/cold signals she might have been ‘giving off’, of her failure to say no with enough conviction– is straight up wrong. Wrong here meaning counterproductive to her process of healing, detrimental to your relationship with her, and pigheaded in a patriarchal kind of way2 Your job is to flick away such doubts while, at the same time, to ask yourself where these doubts came from, why your instinct was to play devil’s advocate or to write off some parts of her story as exaggeration. Doubts protect you: if you suspect her story is dishonest, or fluffed up, then you don’t have to deal with the cruel reality. But this sort of protective doubting is nothing more than cowardice, egocentricity; your use of it means you refuse your loved one the support of believing her at a time when being believed matters more than ever.
Do not confuse believing her with being her. Bear in mind that you did not experience what she did, even if you experienced something equivalent or close to it. You are a different human being, and for this reason, can never fully understand what she’s been through. There’s no getting around the whole existing-as-distinct-human-beings thing (though science moves faster every day), and any attempts to bridge the unbridgeable gap by extracting painful details will be fruitless and likely harmful. Simply listen to what she is willing to tell you. Listening, like compassion, is one of your greatest tools, along with patience, and communication.
But look– if I spend the end of this essay explaining exactly how the process requires time, patience, and communication, I run the risk of losing you at the moment I need you to pay closest attention– that’s the trouble with concepts that are so important they become clichéd. Instead of some daring, circumlocutionary attempt to rephrase what has been rephrased and rephrased, I will simply conclude with two reminders:
1. The above is what I have learned from my own experiences. If it is helpful to you, good. If not, it’s probably because of what I mentioned a moment ago about humans all being different. And that’s okay too.
2. This is a process that requires time, patience, and communication. This is a process that requires time, patience, and communication. This is a process that requires time, patience, and communication.
Notes:
1 In electing to use she/her pronouns, I mean not to exclude the very real possibilities of sexual assault against those who identify with masculine or non-gendered pronouns. I use the pronouns I do because it is the support of she/her-pronoun using survivors that I have the most experience with, because it’s simpler to use the same pronoun throughout this piece, and because the overwhelming majority of sexual assault victims are women. The following statistic is cited so often that one might call its presence here trite, but I reject the quibble of triteness, dispense with it as nothing more than a squished insect beneath the weight of how fucking important it is that people understand this information: One out of every six American women have been the victims of an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime. A total of 17.7 million women. This as opposed three percent 2.78 million American men, and 0.5 million transgender people. [National Institute of Justice & Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. Prevalence, Incidence and Consequences of Violence Against Women Survey. 1998.]
2I’d say the patriarchy is a whole other can of worms but even that feels like a gross understatement and an insult to worms. [For reference to cute worms, see the cover of “Diary of a Worm” by Doreen Cronin, which features the exact sort of studious invertebrate its title suggests. For reference to the patriarchy, see a man berate a pretty girl for withholding the smile he believes he’s entitled to, on any street, any day.]