After reading a brilliant letter by Eve Ensler on Huff Post, and after reading someone else’s “legitimate rape story”, I decided to post my own rape stories on my other blog. I’m not going to repeat them here, but I have been raped once and dealt with 2 attempted rapes. They were all by people I knew. When the police came after I reported the attempted rape, they intimated that I was asking for it, because I’d been wearing short shorts and a tube top (it was in the 70’s–nothing unusual) and because we’d been talking in my parents’ bedroom (I was changing the sheets). The reason I was dressed as I was? It was a hot day. The reason I was in my parents’ bedroom? I was changing the sheets and he came in and started talking to me. He was my friend until he got carried away.

Listen to me: No one asks to be raped.

No one.

There are some funny bits in the Book of Mormon musical where a certain villager is going to go rape a baby because he’s been told that having sex with virgins will cure his AIDS. The highly imaginative Elder Cunningham did whatever he had to in order to stop that practice. He was “making things up again,” but in his eyes, and in mine, he was doing a good thing.

When I was in training to become an investigator for Child Protective Services, we studied a case where a girl was raped repeatedly as a baby. Eventually she and her brother were removed from that home and adopted. One would think that she wouldn’t remember the trauma she suffered as an infant. But she repeatedly tried to kill her brother and adoptive parents. Eventually they had to let her go–a heart-breaking decision–and she was sent to live on a farm where the foster parents had experience dealing with such cases. That child’s life was ruined because of rape.

I had a case with another child, a 12 year old suffering from hallucinations and with suicidal ideations. She was raped by her grandfather when she was 3. Then one day when she was older and in first or second grade, her father couldn’t pick her up from school one day, so he asked a neighbour to pick her up. The neighbour eagerly assented. He was a registered sex offender. Sure enough, she was raped again, every time that neighbour picked her up. Then she began perping on her younger half-brother. I couldn’t get approval to remove her from her home. I couldn’t persuade her father to place her in a group home for her own safety. That’s one of the cases that haunts me to this day.

Whether the rape victim is a woman or a man, an infant, a child, a teenager, or an adult, it takes away one’s sense of safety. It’s hurting the victim far beyond the physical pain and violation. It is a horrible crime.

Eve Ensler has called for a walkout on V-Day in 2013, and for people to hit the streets and dance. I’ve signed up to participate. Won’t you?