Intersections: Letter makes rape statistics raw and personal
I spent my Friday night reading a letter with more than 7,000 words, a letter so powerful in its raw, unfiltered form that I’ve since gone back and read parts of it over and over again.
It was not an easy read. The details were graphic, the pain was palpable, but I could not stop reading. Judging from the conversations I’ve seen, it seems that so many people across the world could not stop reading either.
MORE: Read previous columns from Liana Aghajanian >>
It was a statement written and read by the 23-year-old woman who was sexually assaulted by a former Stanford swimmer while they were both at a college party. The statement, which can be read here, was posted on the site Buzzfeed, in its entirety — no editing, no condensing, no different from the statement she read at her attacker’s sentencing last Thursday.
It was shared widely, and went into the details of that night and everything that followed, including the two men who saved her as she lay unconscious behind a dumpster and the grueling trial the man who raped her and his attorneys put her through in an effort to clear him of wrongdoing.
“It stays with me,” she wrote of the night she was raped. “It’s part of my identity, it has forever changed the way I carry myself, the way I live the rest of my life.”
Nearly one in five women in the United States have been raped at some point in their lives, according to the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The survey also notes that most female victims of completed rape experienced their first rape before the age of 25.
Maybe you’ve read these statistics before or others that outline via numbers the ways in which women are assaulted, but rarely will you read a statement as powerful as this one that puts human emotion to these numbers, rarely will you understand what rape does to the lives of the people it touches, rarely will you be as cognizant of what someone who has endured this horror has to go through.
So if you’re a woman, read this letter, but more importantly, make the men in your life read it and read it again. Teach them what rape culture is and how pervasive it is in American society, explain that feminism is not a bad word, that advocating women’s rights does not mean trampling on the rights of men (or hating them), it means coexisting in a world where there’s opportunity and choice for all of us.
Tell them about how fast you’ve walked to your car at night while holding your keys tightly between your fingers to use as a makeshift weapon just in case, how you’ve been catcalled on the street and just kept walking because you feared what confrontation might lead to, how you would never meet a stranger for a date without informing someone close to you about it, how the fact that last month’s story out of Santa Monica about three women witnessing a man drugging his date’s drink made you realize even more that something as simple as getting up to go to the bathroom while leaving your drink at a table is off limits.
They need to know, because men — and the men they raise — are the only ones who can make significant change. They are the ones who can make sure letters like this never have to be written again.
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LIANA AGHAJANIAN is a journalist whose work has appeared in L.A. Weekly, Paste magazine, New America Media, Eurasianet and The Atlantic. She may be reached at liana.agh@gmail.com.