Looking Back at Texas: Why I Stayed Silent

I was 19 years old and in a Spanish study abroad program in Madrid through the University of Houston, when a stranger approached me. I was at a restaurant with a large group of friends and acquaintances who were complaining about not being able to call my boyfriend back in Texas, when this young man I hadn’t noticed before leaned towards me.

“I know where you can make a phone call,” he says in Spanish-accented English. His voice was soft and warm. I didn’t hesitate before gratefully accepting his offer and following him outside. Moments later, as he drove us too fast and too far from town, I knew I had made a terrible, terrible mistake.

When he finally stopped the car, he put a knife to my throat. He spat hideous words in my ear, detailing how he planned to kill me and rape me – in that order. What happened next was a blur fueled by my determination not to die. I kicked, slapped, hit, screamed.

Somehow I escaped.

Afterward, I blamed myself for being so stupid, for ignoring my instincts, for putting myself in such a situation. I didn’t know his name. I couldn’t identify his car. I asked myself: what would be the point of calling the police?

It turns out that my seemingly strange reaction is common; In the United States, nearly 80 percent of sexual assaults are never reported.

Why do victims of non-sexual violent crimes typically involve authorities while most rape survivors remain silent?

I’m an adult now, a novelist and mother of a 21-year-old daughter and an 18-year-old son. The fact that my children are almost the age I was when I was attacked has made me hyper-vigilant about their safety. The fact that these were young adults in Texas made me acutely aware of the attacks on their rights, especially after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the decision. Roe v. Wade.

I was completely appalled when I read research in the Journal of the American Medical Association regarding the number of pregnancies linked to rape in the 14 American states where abortion is completely banned. Since these bans took effect, it is estimated that more than half a million rapes have occurred in these states, resulting in nearly 65,000 pregnancies.

In Texas alone, the study estimates that about 212,000 rapes led to 26,000 pregnancies.

According to the aforementioned silence statistics, most of these rapes were never reported. This means that, horribly, an estimated 410,785 rapists nationwide have escaped their crimes and let their lives go unpunished. Their victims, I am sure, did not. And I understand why many don’t speak out.

The only person I told about my attack was a friend I was with earlier that night. After I returned to town several hours later, with a torn shirt, bloody arms, and a broken spirit, she said we needed to go to the authorities.

I knew I would never forget the feeling of that knife at my throat, but I refused to tell anyone else. Not the police, not the school, not my mother. Person. I just wanted to forget about it. Although I escaped with only minor physical injuries, the psychological injuries lasted for more than three decades, in part because I tried to pretend nothing had happened.

According to researcher Sandra Caron, a third of student victims of sexual assault do not tell anyone, not even a friend. For comparison, a 2022 Bureau of Justice Statistics victimization survey estimates that 64% of robberies and 81% of vehicle theft cases were reported to police.

Why do victims of non-sexual violent crimes typically involve authorities while most rape survivors remain silent? Caron says most survivors, like me, blame themselves. Or they feel like society will hold it against them.

Remember swimmer Brock Allen Turner, then 20, who was convicted of rape in 2016 after publicly assaulting a woman on the campus of Stanford University? His father opposed the proposed six-year sentence, calling it “a high price to pay for 20 minutes of action over 20 years of life.”

As a parent, I can perhaps understand – but not excuse – a parent saying something so reprehensible in defense of their child. But what about the judge? Aaron Persky sentenced Turner to just six months, saying, “A prison sentence would have serious consequences. » The judge was more concerned about the future of the attacker than that of the survivor.

Such decisions reinforce survivors’ fears about how they will be treated if they come forward.

In her testimony, Turner’s victim described the harrowing effects of the attack and its aftermath. “If you think I was spared, that I came out unscathed, that today I ride off into the sunset while you suffer the biggest blow, you are wrong,” she wrote . “No one wins.”

Fear of being held responsible for their rape. Fear of losing control of the situation. Fear of not being believed. Fear of getting into trouble. Fear of being labeled. Fear of being mistreated again. Fear of losing someone. (Yet another grim statistic: More than 90 percent of child victims know the abuser.) For many, involving the authorities feels like being molested twice.

The #MeToo movement that began in 2017 changed the public discourse, at least for a time, and in a recall election, Judge Persky was removed from office.

Organizations such as the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network and the Houston Area Women’s Center support survivors. But there is still a long way to go to allow more victims to emerge from the silence.

After Madrid, I thought I had managed to hide the truth from myself, but something this traumatic doesn’t magically disappear. It’s the kind of story that lives deep in your bones.

I turned to athletics to find a sense of power and security, particularly in competitive bodybuilding and martial arts. Eventually, I began teaching self-defense classes to women and girls, sharing an abbreviated version of my assault. For my students, this is a useful scaffold, explaining how violent attacks unfold. For me, it made it easier to talk about that horrible night. Yet, until 2021, I hadn’t told anyone the whole story.

That year, my 19-year-old daughter was preparing to drive across the country from her college campus to spend the summer in Texas. I thought about how strong and capable, yet vulnerable and exposed, she would be on her journey. I couldn’t stop thinking about the vagaries of violence and victimhood, safety and security, guilt and grief. At that point, she knew part of what had happened to me, but I felt like I had to tell her everything.

Subsequently, I decided to process the repressed details of my attack in the most therapeutic way I know how: by fictionalizing it. In writing Cubs of other animalsthe book resulting from this story helped me let go of the feeling of guilt and shame that I carried.

I wonder if this healing would have started 30 years ago, if I had talked about it then. And I wonder if I could have stopped my attacker from hurting anyone else if I had told the police. I will never know.

But I know now that remaining silent doesn’t solve anything.

Half a million rapes in 14 states is too many. More than 212,000 rapes in Texas are too many. Any of them it’s too much. At the very least, we need to try to make it easier and safer for survivors of sexual violence to come forward, seek help, and begin to heal.