by Mary Dickson
1996

It's a story so common, it never even made it into the newspapers. A 49-year-old woman who lives in a middle class neighborhood on one of Salt Lake City's busiest streets let her dog out one warm fall night as she always did. When he began barking furiously in the driveway, she ran outside to see what was wrong. As cars sped by, a masked man grabbed her and put a knife at her throat. Without saying a word, he pulled her by the arm, pushed her into her house and threw her on the bed. The dog ran in the house behind them, barking frantically. The man threw the dog against the wall, then raped the woman. He told her that if she screamed, he would "Nicole" her. Gritting her teeth, she focused on the small can of mace attached to her keychain on the table in the next room.

"I know that I will never, ever be the same person again. In fact, after it happened, I asked both my daughter and my sister if I looked different. Because I felt like I was so changed, it must be on my face," she says. "All women are vulnerable like I am. And if they don't realize it, they should. Because you never know what's going to happen. You never ever know when it's going to happen. And you always need to be checking your back. I have mace on my keychain, but you don't run outside to see what your dog's barking at with your mace in hand. And maybe you should. Maybe you should go everywhere with it in your hand."

While her attacker remains at large, the Salt Lake City woman struggles to get over what happened to her. "I will always feel like I'm not safe," she says. "That's my big issue -- trying to continue to feel safe in my own house. I will always be looking over my shoulder and checking the back seat of my truck and always trying to second guess where somebody could be hiding."

Most women live in fear of incidents like this. We feel at risk because we are. We know the statistics. By some estimates one out of four women will be the victim of sexual assault in her lifetime. Each year women re port almost halfía million rapes and sexual assaults, according to the most recent U.S. Justice Department survey. In family-oriented Utah, a state perceivedías a safe place, more than 4,000 rapes wereíre ported last year. During one weekend alone, the Salt Lake City-based Utah Rape Recovery Center saw 29 victims.

While overall crime has decreased in Utah in recent years, re ports of rape and sexual assault are on the rise, giving the state one of the highest per-capita rates of rape in the country, ahead of New York, Washington D.C. and California. It's difficult to know, however, if rape is increasing, or if the crime is being re ported more. Women who have been brutalized are more likely to re port a rape than women who don't show outward physical signs of the attack. The majority of rapes, particularly acquaintance rapes, still go unre ported. By most re ports, three-fourths of rapes are committed by a man the woman knows -- a fact society is not willing to accept.

"We want to feel safe so we want to believe that rapists have a particularprofile in terms of they're easy to identify -- they wear trench coats, they live under the viaduct or hang out in vacant buildings and have crazed looks in their eyes," says Abby Maestas, executive director of the Rape Recovery Center. "And that's not true. What we have found through the clients that are served at the Rape Recovery Center and through studies, is that a rapist can be anyone -- a father, a grandfather, an uncle, a neighbor, a brother, a son."

C.Y. Roby, executive director of Intermountain Specialized Abuse Treatment Center, agrees. "We have a tendency to look on it and say, well in order to keep safe, what I need to do is stay out of the park at night, stay out of the dark alleys at night and I won't end up being raped. And yet, the vast majority of rapists are known to the victim."

Diana met her boyfriend in college. He was handsome, charming, and funny. He seemed like he had it all together. Then she began to see another side of her boyfriend. He would become angry and then he'd become violent. After two years, Diana told himáshe didn't want to see him anymore. He became obsessive, following her everywhere she went, registering for her classes, and taking a job where she worked. The stalking went on for 10 months, but no one thought much of it.

Then one night as she was writing a letter, she turned around to find himástaring at her. "I screamed because the look on his face scared me so much," she recalls. "He had a knife in his hand, and he cornered me, put his arms around me, put the knife up to my neck -- it was an eight-inch hunting knife -- and he said if I screamed again, he was gonna kill me."

During the attack, Dianna tried to stay detached. "I felt like if I didn't stay calm that he would kill me. That I just was better off going along with whatever he said and did and that way it would be over with. If I would have fought, I think I would have been killed. I always thought of myselfías physically fit, as a strong person. I'm 5'9" and weigh 140 pounds, but he threw me around like I was a paper doll. I felt like the only thing I could do was just try to block blows. I felt very small and insignificant and weak. He had so much rage and anger that I couldn't do anything to match it."

Dianna's rapist escaped through a window when he heard her roommate come home. When police arrived, they warned her she could be killed the next time. Fearing for her life, she dropped out of college and completely broke her routine. She pressed charges, but regrets she didn't push for a harsher sentence. Her rapist was only placed onprobation. "I couldn't go anywhere without worrying about him popping up from behind a building or from behind a bush," she says. Just three months after raping Dianna, he was charged with forcible sexual abuse ofíanother woman.

"I couldn't go anywhere without worrying about him popping up from behind a building or from behind a bush," she says. Not only did the rape make Dianna feel more vulnerable, she was also hurt by the Áreaction of others. "The Áreaction of my landlord was that I who had caused theproblems, that he hadn't hadproblems until I moved to there, and that he had to fix the door and he was kind of mad at me. The Áreaction of my neighbor was pretty non-chalant, like maybe I deserved it. I found out when I told other people that the stigma is still very strong."

We live in a culture where we are taught that we have choices about our lives and that we'reíresponsible for what happens to us. As feminist author Gloria Steinemásays, "If you are beaten, you're said to have incited it, if you'reíraped you're said to have invited it. We all know that these things run very deep in the culture."

"From the time a child is very, very small, we're teaching that they'reíresponsible for the things that happen in their life both positive and negative," says C.Y. Roby. "So when a rape situation occurs, usually what I see going through a victim's mind is what did I do that was wrong."

It's not only the victim who blames herself. Society isíquick to blame her as well. "Even the innocence of children is questioned," says Maestas. "Often times I have sat with a police officer or a client and have heard that a four-year-old girl was responsible for seducing her perpetrator who was an adult. Now what are we saying? What we're saying is that we don't know how to take responsibility as a society. Therefore, we will continue to blame the victim."

Rape is a devastating crime. Some women are badly injured. Some become pregnant. Some contract HIV. But the emotional trauma can be worse than any physical injury. Women who areíraped have nightmares, panic attacks, waves of self-doubt, an overwhelming sense of distrust. The lives of women who areírapedíare forever changed. Some say they will never be the same, that it’s like dying. "I know that I will never really recover from this," says Maggie. "The impact will always be with me and I will never trust the same way and I know I can't even be tested for HIV for six months. So I have to even keep that in mind. I'll never be able to get away from this."

After being rapedíat a party, one Salt Lake woman spent 18 months in intensive therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder. "I managed to continue working for almost a year following the attack, but I was marginally functional," she says. "Finally I quit my job." She says she has only recently found the "hope and courage to face both the world and myself."

Who is most likely to be assaulted or raped? Maestas stresses that rapists choose those who are vulnerable, which is why children and even the elderly are at risk. Her staff has worked with victims ofíall backgrounds and ages, including a 94-year-old woman who was rapedíand a three-and-a-half-week-old baby who wasí sexually abused. Half the victims the staff served in emergency rooms were under 14 years ofíage.

"I think that anyone is capable of rape and I think frankly that anyone is capable of being a victim," says C.Y. Roby. "I don't think that there's anything you can do to ultimately thwart being victimized, possibly with the exception of locking yourself in a room and you're the only one with a key."

Dr. Michael Ghiglieri, an Arizona biologist who has written extensively about male violence, is more specific. He cites a 10-year study looking at more than a million cases of rape in the United States. "It's unfortunately a huge sample of victims," he says. "And it turns out that 88 percent of these women are between the ages of 12 to 28. Three quarters ofíall victims fell between the ages of 18 to 25. So rapists are seeking the women that men everywhere are seeking."

Dr. Ron Sanchez is a supervising psychologist at the Utah State Prison who works with sex offenders. "From my experience, there's a wide variety of Áreasons that sex offenders choose victims. They can range in age from very young to old. There may perhaps be a focus on a particular eye color or hair color or body type. But there is certainly no one femaleprofile they would go after."

Rapists, notes Sanchez, can be calculating and planning, often éstalking their victims. Maggie suspects that the man who raped her had been watching her. "It wasn't unusual for me all summer to run outside and change the water, so I've been very nervous that perhaps it was somebody in the neighborhood that had been éstalking me, and knew that I lived alone."

Sanchez says rapists are often very impulsive. For example, they might see a woman who is alone, such as a motorist stranded on the side of the road, and "seize the opportunity." "As I've worked with rapists, I've asked them how do you go about gaining access to houses and many of themásaid they would look for an open window or unlocked door and just go in the house," he says. "I was amazed to find out how many houses that they encountered had doors unlocked. So I think a simple thing of locking your doors and windowséis a deterrent."

Locking doors and windowséis an easy enough thing. A woman alone instinctively bolts the doors and windows even on a sweltering summer night. For most women, such precautions become secondónature. Ask a woman what she does toprotect herselfíand she'll tick offía list of specifics: never leaving a building without her keys in hand, looking over her shoulder in the parking lot, scanning faces on an elevator, avoiding parking terraces. Yet, despite all the precautions, women can still be at risk. As Maggie reminds, "when you're at home changing your water, how are you to know you should be watching out?" It's a reality that makes her and other women resentful. "First ofíall, it's evenings that I lost," she says. "And now it's like even freedom around my own home. And it seems like we just keep having more and more things that we have to watch out for and more and more freedoms we're losing just because of our gender. I don't know where it's going to end."

In her book, Sex, Art and American Culture, Camille Paglia calls these "somber truths" women must accept. "Feminism keeps saying the sexes are the same," she writes. "It keeps telling women they can do anything, go anywhere, say anything, wear anything. No, they can't. Women will always be in sexual danger." She may be right, but that doesn't necessarily make rape a woman's responsibility.

Gloria Steinem poses the real issueñat the heart of the rape dilemma. "We have to stop talking about who gets rapedíand talk about who rapes. Somebody is doing these things. And we have to identify who they are." Who is that somebody? Why do men rape women? And how do you stop them?

"The fact is testosterone is a real kick-starter for violence," offers biologist Ghiglieri. "It's a kick starter for every male trait, not just violence, it is the responsible hormone for making males. It does affect behavior, it actually forces aggressive behavior. Of course, as humans we do have the choice as individuals whether we are aggressive or not. But the fact is testosterone does affect male attitudes and thepropensities to violence."

Ghiglieri has become convinced that violence is a male tactic. "I think in general if you want to get the simplest perspective on it, male use violence to control females and they do it very often and they control those females for sexual Áreasons. It's done in every species."

From his work with sex offenders, C. Y. Roby has also seen "a lot of desire to dominate or control others. "To a certain degree, I think it's something that we've learned socially," he says. "Males often grow up and realize that the way to get what they want is through aggressive means."

http://www.pbs.org/kued/nosafeplace/articles/rapefeat.html

No Safe Place: Violence Against Women is made possible in part by a grant from the Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation and the Dr. Ezekiel R. and Edna Wattis Dumke Foundation. The documentary is aproduction of public television station KUED in Salt Lake City, Utah.

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