I Never Called It Rape

Consulting Editor Ellen Sweet Contents Cover Title Page Author’s Note Preface to the 2019 Edition Foreword to the 2019 Edition Foreword to the 1994 Edition Introduction 1: The Reality of Acquaintance Rape 2: Women You Know 3: Why Date Rape and Acquaintance Rape Are So Widespread 4: Why Women Are “Safe” Victims 5: The Aftereffects of Acquaintance Rape 6: Men Who Rape Women They Know 7: Gang or “Party” Rapes 8: Teenagers and Acquaintance Rape 9: Police, Court, and University Responses to Acquaintance Rape 10: For Women: How to Prevent Acquaintance Rape 11: For Men: The Benefits of Change 12: Whose Responsibility Is It? Parents, Schools, Lawmakers, and Acquaintance Rape 13: Helping the Acquaintance-Rape Survivor 14: What to Do if Acquaintance Rape Happens to You Afterword: The Methods Used in the Ms. Project on Campus Sexual Assault, by Mary P. Koss, PhD Epilogue to the 2019 Edition Acknowledgments Selected Bibliography Resources Index About the Authors Copyright About the Publisher Author’s Note If you have been forced to have sex by a date or an acquaintance, please read this before going any further. It’s hard to believe when rape happens to you, especially when the rapist is a man you know. But understand this: You have been raped. It was not your fault. And you are not alone. Even if you have never heard of such a thing before, you’ve just survived the most common type of rape that occurs to women. And “survived” is the right word. Rape is a life-threatening experience. Don’t try to tough it out alone—getting help is not a sign of weakness. In the long run, talking to someone about the rape will give you greater strength and help you recover more quickly and more completely. Tell someone—a trusted friend, a close family member, a teacher. Also call a local rape-crisis hot line, women’s center, or counseling center. You’ll benefit from talking with a professional and such counseling is often free and always confidential. You may want to turn immediately to Chapter 14, What to Do If Acquaintance Rape Happens to You. When you are ready, you may want to read the rest of this book (and some of the material in the Resources section) for a fuller understanding of acquaintance rape and its aftereffects. Later, you may also want to talk with your female friends and other women about your experience and theirs. Many communities have support groups for rape victims, as do some colleges and universities. These groups can help you regain your equilibrium. If you were the victim of date rape or acquaintance rape in an incident that occurred years ago but never talked to anyone about it, do so now. Rape-crisis counselors offer their services no matter when your rape occurred. It’s important for you to understand your rape experience in order to move on to a happier future. All of the rape victims included in this book appear with first names only, and those names are fictitious (as are the names of their attackers). The other details of these women’s experiences have not been changed, although some information that might specifically identify them has been omitted. Preface to the 2019 Edition Gloria Steinem When my mother was in high school, “raped” was not a word fit to write in newspapers, and reporters used such polite euphemisms as “interfered with.” When I was in high school, a classmate was locked up in a garage and gang raped by players on our football team. She was then the subject of a whispering campaign, and her family moved away in disgrace, yet the team continued to be a source of pride for the neighborhood and university scholarships for some of the players. Altogether, it was assumed that a woman who got raped was ruined. She was way more likely to be punished by society than her rapist was to be punished by the criminal justice system. If scenes like these seem less likely to happen today—thanks to many brave survivors who have told their stories to the police and the public, and now thanks to the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements—you will understand why some of us have hope. It’s because we remember when sexualized violence was rarely reported or even named. Now, most countries gather statistics on such violence in all its forms, and the United Nations and other governmental bodies issue global reports on their prevalence. As a result, we know that sexualized violence—from sexual harassment and assault to honor killings and even female infanticide —has created a world in which there are, for what seems to be the first time in human history, fewer females than males. According to the United Nations Population Division, in 2016 there were 66 million more men in the world than there were women. Since these cruel facts of the present are unacceptable, you will also understand why so many women—and men, too—are marching and organizing in countries around the world to change these ugly truths. This is also what we are supporting in this book as writers and organizers. It is what we hope you will do in your homes, workplaces, and streets in whatever way you can. Whatever the time or the reason you are entering this worldwide movement against sexualized violence, you are welcome and you are needed. It will take a big, diverse, multigenerational, and global wave of energy and ideas—including personal truth telling and Internet activism, courage and patience, raising hell and also raising our children in new ways —to diminish this violence. Patriarchy by its very definition is a family or nation state in which authority, descent, naming, and inheritance go through the male line, and on which its women and children are dependent. It means that men or male-dominated political and religious systems must control the bodies of women in order to control reproduction. In most societies, this control is doubly important as a way to keep races, castes, or classes separate in the long run. But the simple truth is that sexes, races, castes, and classes share infinitely more as human beings than we do by any categorization. Yet recognizing our shared humanity would mean that one part of the human race would have to give up controlling another part with violence. Indeed, one part of the human race cannot control another part without violence or the threat of violence. This may take the form of culturally inherited and enforced roles that cast the “masculine” as dominant and the “feminine” as submissive. Or there may be physical violence that ranges from the clitoridectomy of female children in some parts of the world to the beating and murder of women in the United States. In both cases, these crimes are most likely to be committed by the people we live with, not by strangers. Sexualized violence is a way of empowering half the human race against the other half. It’s all about male control of wombs and reproduction. I think it helps to know that there were—and in some places in the world, still are—cultures of balance between women and men. They were not matriarchal—that is, women did not dominate—but they were matrilineal, with clan identity inherited through the mother, and the father and often the mother’s brothers playing an important role in childrearing. Until patriarchal Europeans showed up on what is now called North America, for instance, women knew very well how to use herbs and abortifacients to decide when and whether to give birth. Languages like Cherokee had—and still have—no gendered pronouns, no “he” and “she.” Humans were humans. Women may have ruled over agriculture and men over hunting, but both were equally crucial. However diverse the five hundred or so language groups that were here, in many tribes both female and male coexisted within a balanced universe of individual uniqueness and shared humanity. In the early history of this country, there are many stories of white schoolteachers and entire families who moved to and felt safer in Indian country than in colonies that replicated European and Christian patriarchy, yet there are very few stories of Indians who willingly chose to adopt the supposedly superior European way of life. As Benjamin Franklin himself complained, “When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language, and habituated to our customs, yet he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return. [But] when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, though ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life . and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.” Eventually, Franklin invited four men from the Iroquois Confederacy or Haudenosaunee—the governing body of six native nations that was to become the model for the US Constitution—to advise the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia on creating the governing document for thirteen colonies. He recognized that they in their Great Law of Peace had figured out how to make shared laws by consensus from the bottom up, rather than through the European model of monarchies ruling from the top down. However, he and others seem to have ignored the fact that among the first questions asked by those Iroquois advisors was: Where are the women? If this makes you curious about the history we are never or rarely taught, all to the good.

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