READ MORE:
In her own words: Survivor shares victim impact statement she wrote
Tips for Talking with Survivors of Sexual Assault
A warning: The following contains stories and details about sexual abuse and rape, and could be upsetting or triggering to some readers. If you or someone you know has been a victim of sexual assault and needs help, the RAINN hotline is available 24/7 at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673), or you can chat live on RAINN’s website, www.rainn.org.
While April is officially Sexual Assault Awareness Month, unfortunately, the crime itself can happen at any time, to anyone.
In fact, according to RAINN, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, a sexual assault occurs every 73 seconds in the United States.
One out of every six women will experience sexual assault in her lifetime. But males are affected, too. One out of every 10 rape victims is male.
To help raise awareness about sexual assault and educate communities and individuals on the continued issue of sexual violence and how it can be prevented, The Dominion Post will present a series of stories on the subject.
For this piece, The Dominion Post reached out to members of the Morgantown community in search of sexual assault survivors who were willing to share their stories with our readers. Several women came forward and agreed to share their experiences. Some of the names are changed to protect the women.
Assault in adolescence
Seren’s story begins when she was younger than 14. She had gotten a “boyfriend.” She said she was way too young to understand what a relationship should have been — let alone what a healthy one should have been.
Seren’s boyfriend would visit her home and play video games with her, as well as accompany her to church. But from day one, he pressured her to engage in sexual activities with him.
“I didn’t want to do anything, even kiss at that point, so I always said no,” Seren said. “He would get mad and cuss at me every time, each time getting more nasty. It went as far as him calling me slurs, claiming I just must be gay since I wouldn’t have sex.”
At that time, Seren was a “very deep-in-the-closet” member of the LGBTQ+ community. She said having been raised in a very strict Christian household; she was later incredibly nervous to come out, even beyond the sexual trauma she experienced as an adolescent.
Her boyfriend’s attempts to coerce Seren into engaging in sexual activity escalated when he and Seren were waiting for her mother after Bible study one evening. That was when Seren’s boyfriend held her down and sexually assaulted her.
“I remember sobbing the entire time and him using his hand to hold my mouth shut and sometimes blocking my nose, somewhat suffocating me at times,” Seren said.
The assault lasted for about 30 minutes, but Seren said she lost all sense of time, and it felt like hours. Her mother finally emerged from the church, having been caught up in discussion with another member of the congregation. Seren said she sat in the car and sobbed. After her boyfriend had been dropped off, Seren’s mother asked why she had been crying.
“I lied and said that he had broken up with me,” Seren said. “But this didn’t end the interaction between us.”
Seren’s attacker was in every one of her classes at school for two more years. Seren said she finally spoke out about the assault during her freshman year of high school. She said her mother wanted to pursue the matter legally, but Seren denied that option.
“I was done,” she said.
But Seren’s best friend, to whom she had also opened up about the assault, spread word of the assault around school. This resulted in Seren’s attacker encouraging others to harass her, she said, including physically accosting her to try to scare her.
“[He] told his buddies about it, who labeled me as a cheap whore,” Seren said. “It got back to the guy I was currently dating. I got targeted by people in the halls. Things were thrown at me. I was called names. I was physically attacked multiple times by his buddies while he was with them.”
It was then Seren decided to proceed legally. She wanted to get a restraining order against her attacker to remove him from her classes, to create a buffer. But the judge didn’t believe Seren was scared. The judge told her that words couldn’t hurt her and denied a restraining order.
Seren then fought with her school’s administration to have her attacker removed from one of her classes and finally got through to them. She said she thought she had finally found peace.
But her then-boyfriend heard the rumors her attacker had perpetrated at school, heard that she was “easy,” Seren said. While the two were watching a movie together, he also sexually assaulted her.
Seren said she felt disgusting afterward and realized she could not be “timid and weak.”
“I learned that this world is a very cruel place. As unfair as it is, we have to be vigilant,” she said. “I want everyone that [reads] this to take something away from it — whether it be strength to come forward, to know that they’re not alone or to watch out for others. Be compassionate, because we never know what others are going through.”
The Thin Blue Line
Corrine prefaced her story with insight regarding her feelings about Morgantown as a whole.
“I’ve found that in Morgantown especially, it is so common to be groped covertly while in a crowded area — whether it’s while wading through foot traffic changing classes, riding the PRT or in a crowded bar — that you get used [or numb] to it,” Corrine said.
Corrine said her sexual assault was traumatic for her, but not for the reasons one might assume. It happened at a barbecue held and attended by several law enforcement officers from multiple local jurisdictions. The person who assaulted Corrine wasn’t a cop, but he was friends with most of them and someone Corrine knew as an acquaintance.
She said there was alcohol served at the party. Her attacker was very drunk. He became overtly inappropriate with Corrine prior to the assault. Corrine had expressed frustration at the man’s behavior. The man’s friends told her to ignore him and stay away from him.
That was before the man attempted to rape her.
Corrine said she immediately disclosed the incident to his friends, but they were nonplussed and dismissive. She recalled one of them saying, “You can’t blame a guy for trying.”
Their reactions made Corrine irate, she said, and she believes the people to whom she had disclosed began to worry she might want to take action. They tried to calm Corrine with a litany of disturbing statements:
“He’s a good guy.”
“He just gets like this when he drinks.”
“He thinks you’re hot.”
“He doesn’t deserve to have his life ruined because he got f****d up and tried to get with you.”
Corrine said her experience has driven her to try to change the way police officers she knows to be “good, caring men” potentially respond to reports of similar incidents. Corrine is married to one such officer and socializes with many others.
While discussing their respective jobs, she said she has heard many officers assert that “many,” “most,” “half” or “a good amount” of sexual assault reports are false — either outright fabrications or misrepresentations of events. She said officers most often say the reports are made by women who are caught cheating and are trying to smooth things over with their partners or by women who were blackout drunk and regretted agreeing to have sex.
She said when she pushes back against these claims with Department of Justice statistics that don’t support them or pertain to the ability to grant consent, she gets the same answer: “You can’t tell me what goes on. I’m the one who deals with this all the time.” She said sometimes officers claim they very recently dealt with a case in which a woman admitted to fabricating her assault.
“They don’t understand that making claims against someone you know can cause all kinds of headaches, that it might be easier to make it go away, even if you say it was all a lie to start with,” Corrine said. “I can’t impart on them how difficult it is for virtually all victims to even come to the police, so much so that many just don’t compound trauma with more scrutiny.”
On college campuses
Samantha Tabor experienced sexual assault her first semester of college. She was trying to acclimate to university life and being away from home. She was trying to make as many friends as possible. She said a senior took advantage of that.
“Immediately after, I grabbed my roommate and ran out of that house faster than I had ever ran before,” Tabor said. “Once we got far enough away, I remember breaking down in tears on the side of the road. My roommate called the police, and I waited to go to the hospital.”
Tabor said she thought that night was going to be the worst one of her life. She recalled having to sit in the back of a police car on the way to the hospital. She said she stared at the bars in the car and felt like she was the one who had done something wrong.
At the hospital, all of Tabor’s clothes were taken. She was left with a hospital gown. She said her friends left her to “have fun,” while she missed the first football game of her college career to sit in an exam room alone. Tabor said looking back, none of those aspects of her assault and its aftermath were the worst part.
“It’s the feeling of pushing through and moving on, only to have him take something else away from me,” Tabor said.
She said it was losing her scholarships, because she was so depressed that she couldn’t go to class. It was having to explain herself in a letter in order to have a second chance at the scholarships she had earned. It was losing those scholarships again the next year because financial aid had expectations of a GPA that was unachievable for her at the time. It was reliving and sharing her story again in front of the entire financial aid board, pleading for assistance. It was applying for internships, jobs and graduate school, and yet again having to explain herself and relive those moments.
“Sexual assault isn’t just one moment to get through — it’s every single day for the rest of your life,” Tabor said. “It’s the feeling that someone that had already taken so much from you gets to keep taking more.”
After her experiences with financial aid, Tabor decided no one else should have to face what she did.
“I felt as though financial aid was setting survivors up for failure by expecting miraculous increases in their GPA,” she said.
Tabor said she worked with a woman in the financial aid office who helped her create an idea for a new system. The process would focus more on taking care of survivors, rather than making sure they achieve certain academic requirements. It would allow survivors to apply once for a scholarship exemption, where a new GPA requirement would be set for them — one that is achievable. The program is contingent on survivors receiving mental health assistance, whatever that may look like for them.
Tabor said she wished there had been someone to fight for her, so she wanted to fight for others. Helping others has allowed her to start healing and move forward, she said.
“I was asked if I wanted to use a pseudonym for my story, and I contemplated maintaining my anonymity, but this is my story. I am not a victim — I’m a survivor. I battle every day, but I’m stronger for it,” Tabor said. “Sexual Assault Awareness Month may just be four weeks, but it is something that is happening every single day. I was strong enough to keep telling my story and keep pushing through, but no one should have to.”
TWEET @DominionPostWV
Today’s articles are two in a series written to raise awareness about sexual assault.
Coming up next:
MAY 9: Morgantown’s Police Chief and Monongalia County’s Prosecuting Attorney talk about investigating, prosecuting sexual assault cases; state discusses status of rape kit backlog.
MAY 16: A look at how WVU Police handle on-campus reports; how Title IX works.
MAY 23: What resources WVU’s Carruth Center offers to students.
MAY 30: A look at the area’s Rape & Domestic Violence Information Center (RDVIC) and Monongalia County Child Advocacy Center: Their missions, resources and more.
