Understanding Will Help Heal Wounds of Rape

To the Editors of The Crimson:

I, like many others, am writing in response to the March 8 editorial, "An Orwellian Nightmare," by Jon Morgan.

Many of us don't scream. Our stories lie curled up in our hearts, corroding our trust in other people, warping our capacity to feel love, comfort, safety. Our hearts beat faster when people mention rape, especially date rape, because we know what has happened and we can't scream.

I ask that when you, the reader, think of rape you think about betrayal. When in your life has someone turned against you? Used you? Put you down? When has someone proved to you that your worst nightmares of worthlessness, insignificance, and self-loathing are true? When has someone made you feel like shit? And then blamed you for feeling that way?

When this bad thing happened, was it your fault? Did you leave your window up too far? Did you trust your "friend" too much? It is easy to blame yourself for your pain. The answer to the question "How could it happen to me?" comes back: "I deserved it, I'm really awful."

But beyond self-blame is a necessary understanding that the person who hurt you was wrong to do so. The person who chose to betray your trust, willfully or not, is the one who is to blame. No amount of rewriting the text of the incident will cause the hurt to disappear. No amount of quibbling over the legal definitions of when rape is "real" or not will erase the unambiguous pain in the survivor's heart.

Jon, you can't unrape someone. You can't sew up a slit throat. The survivor knows what has happened to her body. She knows what happened to her mind. She knows what happened to her soul. She knows it HURT. And it is inexcusable that someone, for whatever reason, thought it was okay to hurt her that way. It is also inexcusable and disrespectful to scratch up her tender, healing wounds by attempting to rewrite her life. Whatever you say cannot undo the crime which occurred. An attempt to understand her story would have been a fine and admirable thing. An attempt to obliterate it is a crime in itself.

There is a frightening tendency to separate ourselves from "rape" by boxing it up and throwing it into jail with the rest of "crime." Many people assume that rape is a "street" phenomenon and rapists are rabid monsters who eventually land behind bars. This attitude is not helpful considering most rapists never go to jail and those rapists at Harvard are never even tried. We should spend more time punishing rapists in our community than we do punishing survivors.

In a free marketplace of ideas, shouldn't we be engaged in trying to understand each others' experiences? Discussing rape should not be a question "either she was or she wasn't" but rather an investigation of how we can help each other heal the pain, prevent more rapes from happening and hopefully stumble upon a better way to live with each other in peace. Michelle Tully '91