The Two Flavors of Sexual Assault

TRIGGER WARNING: This post contains graphic descriptions of sexual assault. These descriptions are in bold red font. If you'd like to read my ideas but not specific descriptions of assault, this cue will help you to avoid these areas.

Imagine for a moment that you own a jewelry store. The store is the culmination of your life's work: you put yourself through a master's degree in fine art so you could create uniquely beautiful pieces, you spent years working and saving your money so you could afford to open a shop, and you now have the jewelry store you've always dreamed of.

One day when you arrive to open your shop for the day, you find that your front window has been smashed and your jewelry inventory is gone. What's your next move?

What you do next will depend on WHY your window was smashed and jewelry stolen.

Scenario 1: Your window is smashed. The burglar apparently entered through the window and stole only the most valuable pieces, getting in and out quickly. It looks like the work of an experienced thief who had done their research on your store in advance.

Scenario 2: Your window is smashed. In addition, the perpetrator(s) spray-painted slurs all over the front of your store. Inside the shop, everything is destroyed. Your beautiful displays were smashed with a heavy object, tables were overturned, and a fire was set. You find more slurs spray-painted on the walls and floor. The missing jewelry seems more of an afterthought than the point, with some valuable pieces left behind.

How would you respond in each of these scenarios?

Scenario One: Theft

I've never counted the number of people that have sexually assaulted me. It's probably more than my fingers but less than adding my toes as well. It's enough that I've noticed that the motivation of the perpetrator has been directly related to the impact the act had on me.

Throughout my life, I've read many, many times that power is the point of sexual assault, period. I think that's sort of true: sexual assault is possible because of one person's power over another. But there's more to it than that, and I think that diving slightly more deeply into the topic can help survivors to understand the impact these violations have had on them in a slightly more nuanced way, leading to a better understanding of the problematic stories we started to tell ourselves as a result of what happened to us. Understanding the origin of these stories is a crucial step in healing them.

My working theory at this point is that there are two flavors of sexual assault. The first of the two is theft: you have something valuable that someone else takes from you against your will. The perpetrator's main motivation in this scenario is entitlement, fueled by a lack of empathy. They want something, and don't know or don't care that getting it hurts you in the process.

People tend to want to believe that they have control over their lives, and this belief leads us to do all sorts of excellent things for ourselves, such as working hard, saving money, eating well, and so on. It's helpful to believe that if we do the right things, good things will happen for us. So when bad things happen, we tend to think about the things we did wrong that caused the bad thing to happen to us. This is a highly adaptive strategy, and how humans have survived this long. If our village is washed away in a flood, for example, the best course of action is to think carefully about what we did that caused that outcome, and to rebuild outside of the flood zone.

Let's apply this tendency to our jewelry store scenario. The store owner may blame themselves in various ways: they should have stored the jewelry in a safe, for example, or installed bars on the window that could have prevented the burglar from entering. Implementing some of these measures could help to prevent this kind of theft from happening again in the future.

When we apply this very human tendency to sexual assault, however, we are left with some troubling alternatives. How do we protect our valuables in this scenario?

Perhaps we:

• Carry pepper spray

• Attend self-defense classes

• Get a roommate

• Stop going to ___________

• Start working from home

• Avoid dating

• Get married

• Gain a significant amount of weight so we become less desirable

• Become hyper-focused on our attractiveness so we can use it as a weapon instead of a vulnerability

If this scenario has happened to you, how are YOU protecting your valuables?

Scenario Two: Vandalism

Now, let's take a moment to breathe deeply, and let's revisit our jewelry store. In the second scenario, the perpetrator's primary goal wasn't theft, it was destruction. In vandalism, the motivation is hate, plain and simple.

This flavor of sexual assault doesn't get talked about very much. Maybe it's less common, or maybe we simply don't like to think about it because it makes us feel powerless. It gets talked about so rarely, in fact, that we might need an example or two.

(If you wish to skip these examples, scroll down quickly until you see the picture and return to reading after the picture.)

Here is the one from my own life that's the easiest for me to talk about:

When my child was in elementary school, he had a friend whose mom I really liked. I wanted to be friends with her. I was single, and she was living with her boyfriend. The mom invited my child and I to dinner at their home once, and it was lovely. They invited me to come back for a no-kids birthday party a couple of weeks later. At this party, her boyfriend trapped me in a corner away from the rest of the partygoers. He stuck his tongue down my throat and put his hands where they did not belong. It wasn't because he was attracted to me. It was because he wanted to put me into an impossible position that would inevitably result in my not being around his amazing girlfriend anymore. It was abuse. It was vandalism.

Here is a much more graphic example. This was a real thing that happened, but not to me. Please feel free to skip this one if you feel like you're following the point already.

An abusive father used his oldest son as a punching bag regularly, and sometimes went farther. He believed that he was teaching his son to obey, but underneath of that, he was teaching his son that he was powerless in the face of his father's size and strength. He wanted to break his son's spirit. At times, his abuse of his son had a sexual component. Instead of whipping his son with a belt, he choked his son by shoving his penis into his son's mouth while holding the back of his head so his son could not pull away. It was sexual assault, but it was not about the father's sexual pleasure. It was vandalism of his son's spirit.

So here we are in our jewelry store, window smashed, considering what we should have done differently to prevent this from happening to us. How can we keep ourselves safe from hate?

It's not as simple as installing an alarm system and some bars on the windows. As the owner of the store, there are various things we might consider doing:

• Close up shop and give up on our dream (let that one sink in for a second)

• Move the store to a different place, where maybe there would be less hate, or where we could start over and pretend to be someone different than who we are

• Hire round-the-clock security personnel to watch our store and maybe our selves also

• Try to rally the neighborhood around us

• Stand firm in the face of hate and set aside funds to repair the vandalism when it happens again

Did any of those hit home for you like they did for me? When we've been the victim of vandalistic sexual assault, we often feel the need to hide not our valuables, but our very selves. What this has looked like for me has been things like:

• Thinking of committing suicide

• Isolating myself from others

• Cutting people out of my life that don't feel safe to me

• Trying to be whatever everyone else needs me to be

• Not speaking up, hiding my ideas and feelings, and never asking for what I need

Others have different coping strategies. The son in the above example coped in his adult life by womanizing extensively to validate his self worth and by alcoholism to numb the pain. I've seen people employ narcissism as a coping strategy, or drug abuse, or moving around all the time. The ways we hide ourselves are as unique and different as each of us are.

Our response to sexual vandalism is not the same as our response to sexual theft, and these differences are important in understanding how to best target our efforts to heal. Sometimes our coping strategies may look the same, but underneath of that, the damage is not the same. Therefore, the process of healing is not the same. When we understand the root of the problem, we can address it much more effectively.

If, through reading this, you have realized that you are hiding your valuables due to sexual theft, or hiding yourself due to vandalistic sexual assault, I encourage you to speak with a therapist about it at your earliest opportunity.

Additionally, the National Sexual Assault Hotline is available 24 hours at 800-656-4673. For more information about sexual assault, the National Sexual Violence Resource Center is at https://www.nsvrc.org/.

Much love,

Amaya