Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [121]
One-fourth of all women are raped. Ellie was relatively lucky in that she was not severely injured, didn’t contract an STD or get pregnant. She was also lucky that her parents were so concerned for her and so loyal. She received extended therapy. Even so, Ellie is a different girl than before the rape. She’s more cautious and more dependent on her family. Just when she was beginning to explore the world, her wings were clipped. She’s tiptoeing, not flying, through her adolescence.
Another common experience for girls is some kind of sexual assault by a friend or acquaintance. These are especially damaging because they erode girls’ trust in the world around them and make all relationships potentially dangerous. Because the assailant is someone the victim knows, often the case is more difficult to handle afterward. The victim often feels responsible and is less likely to report it. And if she does report it, there’s more likelihood the assailant will argue that the sexual experience was consensual.
One of my students was walking across the athletic field one night after orchestra practice when a football player she knew from her study hall threw her down on the grass and began to kiss her. She screamed and kicked and managed to escape. She never reported the incident, but she no longer walks alone to her car after school.
A client was raped while on a field trip with her biology class. A student who came into her tent to borrow a butterfly net held her down, choked her and raped her. The next morning she pretended it never happened. She denied the experience until a year later when she went camping with her family. She crawled into their tent and stopped breathing as memories flooded her. She told her mother what had happened and her parents reported the crime. The boy involved claimed consensual sex. After a year it was hard to prove otherwise and my client dropped the case. She came to therapy because she wanted to be able to camp without having breathing attacks. She wanted to be able to trust guys again.
A client doing volunteer work over the summer at a refugee center in Colorado was cornered and assaulted by the minister in charge of the project. She didn’t report it because she was sure that no one would think the minister capable of such an assault.
Another student told of being a Little Sister at a fraternity. She’d been naive and gone to the Saturday night “testosterone party.” One of the guys that she liked pulled her into a bedroom and tried to assault her. Fortunately she had taken a self-defense class at the YWCA and managed to escape. She never returned to the fraternity. She gets nauseous whenever she thinks about that afternoon. When she told me about the incident she asked, “Is that how men treat their little sisters?”
Anna Lisa lived in one of the safest neighborhoods in town. Her mother was a teacher. Her dad was a coach who helped with Anna Lisa’s Little League team. She was a white-haired eleven-year-old who always had a wad of bubble gum in her mouth. Her legs were bruised from sports injuries, and her arms were as thin and hard as rifles. Anna Lisa seemed a little younger than her age. Her favorite topic was horses. Anna Lisa read horse books, attended horseback riding camps and collected model horses. She was obsessed with owning her own horse. She wanted a white horse, which she planned to name Gardenia.
Anna Lisa came in because she had been sexually assaulted twice the previous summer. In July she was home with her older brother and his friend while her parents were out shopping. Her brother biked to the mall to rent a video and left Kyle to baby-sit. Kyle molested her in the twenty minutes her brother was gone. Anna Lisa didn’t tell her parents about Kyle because she was afraid she’d get her brother in trouble.
A month later she went across the street to play with a friend whose father was an insurance executive. He answered the door and invited Anna Lisa in. She smelled beer on his breath, but that didn’t alarm her. She figured her friend was around somewhere. The father locked the