Survivors & their stories
Many victims of rape and sexual assault are too afraid to speak out and share their stories. Many times people who are sexually assaulted don't even inform authorities because they are embarrassed and believe it is their fault. However, on this page, you will be able to read and watch victims tell their stories.
Stories
Below are links that will will take you to the story you click on and give you more information on what happened to the vicim
Female Survivors
Female student, Northern Arizona University
She kind of liked kissing the guy, at least at first. The 19-year-old sophomore was visiting friends last fall at Arizona State University in Tempe, a couple of hours from her own campus. She was at a party, outside smoking with the DJ, who had been trying to pick up her friend and was now flirting with her. She didn’t mind the kisses but had no plans to go further. She never had before.
“I’m not sexually active,” she said. “I’m very old-fashioned.”
That didn’t stop the man, another sophomore. She says he led her to the deserted kitchen, pushed her against the counter and began groping her under her clothes as she tried to shove his hands away. He tried to pull her into another room and she went from annoyed to frightened. She was pushing him hard when her friends came in and immediately pulled her out of the house.
“There was no question about consent,” she said. “I said ‘no’ and he didn’t care.”
But as they climbed into a cab, the man ran out and insisted the girl come with him. The cab driver told him to get away from the car. She was shaking and worried that the man knew where they were staying. She called another friend and went to his apartment at 1 a.m. “I was crying in the rain,” she said.
She slept, but she awoke to another scare: Her phone was full of messages from the man. He had found her on Tinder, a dating app that indicated to him that she was nearby.
“I can tell you’re within a mile of me,” he texted. She panicked all over again. Her friend took her phone and realized the man lived in the same building. He and some buddies paid the man a visit, she said.
“They just told me they handled it,” the woman said. “I never heard from him again.”
But the episode exacerbated problems with anxiety and depression that she had already been experiencing. She flunked her classes that semester and has temporarily withdrawn from school.
— Reported by Steve Hendrix
Female student, University of Pittsburgh
A classmate at the University of Pittsburgh took her out to an Italian restaurant one night during her freshman year, then over to a friend’s house. He handed her a drink. It might have been a juiced vodka. A very strong one.
“I woke up the next morning without any pants on, and without any recollection,” she said.
Except for two details: She remembered there had been a baseball game on television the night before, and that there was an inflatable dolphin in the room.
“I was young,” the woman, now 25, said. “I didn’t understand what happened until later, maybe a few weeks later, when this person made a comment about wanting to see me again and do what he did before. It led me to believe we had some sort of sexual contact.”
If so, the woman said, it was without her consent; she was incapacitated.
“I was in no state of mind” to say yes to sex, she said. “The memory is so, so foggy.”
The man, a couple years older, was kind, good-looking, church-going, close to his family. “I put too much faith in him,” the woman said. “His personality didn’t lead me to believe he would do something like that.”
In the years since, she hasn’t dwelled on the incident. “It hasn’t severely impacted me,” she said. “He’s gone about his life, and I’ve gone about mine.”
— Reported by Nick Anderson
Female student, Queens University of Charlotte
The summer before her senior year, an acquaintance invited her to watch a movie in his dorm room on campus. He had a girlfriend, so she didn’t think anything sexual would happen. But as the movie wore on, he started kissing her and she felt uncomfortable.
“It got to the part where he tried to take off my clothes,” she said. “I was like, ‘No, please stop.’ He was like, ‘No, you’ll like it.’ And I was like, ‘No, stop.’ ”
“Some people are able to yell or scream, but when I get really stressed out I kind of shut down, so I just sort of disassociated myself and was trying to figure out how to get him off of me,” she said. As he began to rape her, she said, she asked whether he would get a condom, and he let go of her.
She confronted him immediately.
“He was like, ‘I didn’t rape you,’ ” she said. “I was like, ‘I told you I did not want your penis in my vagina, and that’s what happened, so how is that not rape?’ ”
Less than a year later, they both enrolled in the same small science course. She eventually dropped it, choosing to take it over the summer so she wouldn’t have to be in the same room as him.
“Even after I graduated, he would occasionally message me,” she said. “I think I was hoping that he would realize that what he did was wrong.”
She didn’t report the incident because her mother worried that it would be more stressful to go through that process than to leave it alone.
“I think he thought because we had started, because he had kissed me and I didn’t immediately shove him off and say what the f---, that meant he was entitled to have sex with me or something,” she said. “Which is not true.”
— Reported by Emma Brown
MALE SURVIVORS
Daniel Episcope, University of the Pacific
Daniel Episcope has definitely seen some troubling things in college, like when he visited a big state school and saw a guy slipping something into punch he was mixing for a party. Episcope, shocked, asked, “What IS that?”
The guy shrugged, he said, and answered: “You gotta do what you gotta do to get some.”
So Episcope worried about women getting into bad situations, and thought, “We need to protect the girls.”
But over time, he came to believe, with surprise, that it was more complicated than that: “It happens to both sides.”
When he was a sophomore studying abroad in Shanghai, some other exchange students suddenly started pouring him shots. “These women were like, ‘Drink, drink, drink, drink!’ ” he said, and because it was the first place where he was legally old enough to drink, he got much too drunk too quickly. One woman had told him she wanted to thank him for helping her move in. As he drifted in and out of blackouts, he realized he was having sex with her.
He mostly laughs it off, but it was troubling, too. It wasn’t like he could say no, or walk away.
Another time, back in California, Episcope stopped by a party at his fraternity after work. He chatted with a woman he knew slightly, then said good night to her and his friends, and headed upstairs to go to sleep. About 15 minutes later, he said, the woman came into his room, very drunk and making it very clear that she was interested in him. He was sober, he was tired, he had a girlfriend, he had absolutely no intention of having sex with her, he said.
He asked her to leave, but she wouldn’t go. “I had no intention of sleeping with this woman. I kept telling her. She was really belligerent,” he said. He then led her out of his room.
That’s where it went from annoying to alarming: As he opened the door to the hall, “she fell on the ground, screaming, ‘Stop it, stop it, I don’t want to have sex with you!’ Then she looked around to see if anyone was paying attention. She was trying to stage it.”
If someone had heard her, he has no doubt they would believe her story first.
“She took advantage of that perception that girls are weak, girls are the victims, and totally turned the tables on me.
“That was completely messed up. I have yet to forgive that girl for that incident,” he said. He thought he was just turning down an unwelcome offer, but suddenly he was imagining himself trying to fight a false accusation of attempted assault.
After that, he thought, with shock, “I need to be open and hear both parties before I pass judgment.”
— Reported by Susan Svrluga
Male student, South Carolina school
He was a freshman at a small school in upstate South Carolina when he took a trip to a different school where his high school ex-girlfriend was a student. They were finally going to talk things out after what had been a difficult breakup.
They walked around campus and then went to her room. He expected her roommate would be there, but instead they ended up alone, and he says she forced him into sex.
“I was raped,” he said.
He doesn’t think she would view it that way.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if in her mind, the fact that we had dated before was somewhat of an understood consent,” he said. He tried to resist, he said, but she seemed not to notice. He doesn’t remember what he said out loud.
“It’s hard to speak when you’re in physical pain,” he said.
Afterward, he told his roommate what had happened, but he didn’t speak a word of it to anyone else.
“ ‘I bet he liked it,’ that would kind of be the response,” he said.
“It’s one thing to deal with the aftereffect of being raped, but it also was a secondary hit for me — oh, you’re a guy, how could you be raped by a woman, that makes no sense,” he said. “I was afraid to talk to anybody about it because of the stigma I felt I would receive in talking about it.”
He had nightmares and flashbacks, he said. Weeks after the assault, as he was starting to recover, she texted him to say that she thought she might be pregnant. That triggered another round of panic, he said, as his parents had made it clear that he would be on his own if he ever fathered a child out of wedlock.
“I felt I was going to have to deal with losing my family,” he said.
His ex-girlfriend had not been pregnant, however; he believes she lied to him.
Now he is married to another woman, and he disclosed the rape to her in their premarital counseling. He is a medical student who aims to be a psychiatrist. He has found that his experience helps him help other people who have been assaulted.
He recently did a rotation in the emergency room of a psychiatric hospital, where he said that the experience of helping other rape victims was giving him an important way to deal with his own pain. “What I’m doing now is therapeutic for me,” he said.
— Reported by Emma Brown
Male student, A public university on the West Coast
Guys aren’t supposed to be victims,” this 23-year-old student at a West Coast university said. So he told very few people what happened four years ago between him and a roommate who was a fraternity brother.
“He was really drunk that night, and he started hitting me,” the student recalled. “I wasn’t drunk at all. He kept trying to take off my pants. He tried pinning me down and groping me. It was a really bad struggle. I hit him as hard as I could, and I got out of it.”
After the assault, he said, he left the house and found a place to stay elsewhere. But he was rattled and ashamed and didn’t want to tell the fraternity, the school or the police.
“I didn’t think anybody would believe me,” he said. His schoolwork suffered. “I had nervous panic attacks. I was constantly paranoid about being followed home. I almost dropped out.”
He wonders how he might have handled the situation if he were a woman. “I could have potentially told more people,” he said. “I feel like since I’m a guy, it’s a lot harder. If something happens, guys aren’t supposed to be victims. We’re supposed to be manly.”
— Reported by Nick Anderson
Click this link to read more accounts of sexual assault on campuses and follow this Instagram to hear what these students did about their sexual assault problem on campus.
When you click the pictures below, it will talk you to the victims story.
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More accounts of victims
In this video, you will view men reading accounts of women who have been sexually assaulted and raped in college.
This video shows the account of two women who have been sexually assaulted in college.
In this video, two survivors of sexual assault share their stories. Both of these students attend the same university, Columbia.
“Hannah's Story.” RAINN, www.rainn.org/survivor-stories/hannahs-story.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Al2ne4EATKY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRL3gJv0PCg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9A43LMANbQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kmAGFVN8tQ
“Jeanette's Story.” RAINN, www.rainn.org/survivor-stories/jeanette.
“Maya's Story.” RAINN, www.rainn.org/survivor-stories/mayas-story.
“Monica's Story.” RAINN, www.rainn.org/survivor-stories/monica.
“Sexual Assault Survivors Tell Their Stories.” The Washington Post, WP Company, www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/local/sexual-assault/.
“Stop Gender Violence @ DU (@Wecandubetter) • Instagram Photos and Videos.” Instagram, www.instagram.com/wecandubetter/?hl=en.
“Tasha's Story.” RAINN, www.rainn.org/survivor-stories/tashas-story.
“Wendy's Story.” RAINN, www.rainn.org/survivor-stories/wendy.