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For 14 years, Holly kept the fact that she had been raped completely to herself. Like many people, she had thought of rape as “being attacked outside of the home with the threat of a knife or gun.” So when it happened to her, and the perpetrator was someone she invited to her home, Holly says simply, “I didn’t even understand I had been raped.”
At the time of her rape, Holly was, in her own words, “a naďve 15 year-old girl whose family did their best to protect me from the harsh realities of the world.” One afternoon, when her parents were out for the day, she had a girlfriend over to play pool. Her friend brought a group of friends. When Holly noticed one of the young men at the party -- he was about 20 years old -- had left the room, she went to see where he had gone.
She found him upstairs, where he raped her.
In the following year, Holly felt guilty, ashamed, and confused. “I had no words for what had happened to me. I just knew that I had never felt so lost or had such pain. My whole life had changed that afternoon.” An honors student with good grades, Holly was afraid if anyone found out she’d been raped, she would be shunned. She threw herself into school and extracurricular activities and began dating her high school boyfriend. But in that relationship and others over the years, intimacy was “something my body responded to, but emotionally it was too much to handle. I had so much guilt that it just felt like that part of me was lost.”
In her 20s, Holly says, she had more relationships and sexual encounters than the other women she knew. “I didn’t make the best choices because I did not value myself the way I should have.” Knowing she needed help, Holly finally went to a therapist. “It was so hard to admit I was raped, but once I said it I finally learned to accept it. I finally said the word out loud.” Her next step was to tell her parents: “They couldn’t believe I’d kept such a terrible secret. They wept for the child that was taken that day, and in the end telling my mom and dad brought us together.”
Holly’s story is a reminder that we need to talk about rape -- and we need to use the word rape when we do. Too often we hear people refer to sexual violence, particularly when the victim knows the perpetrator, as “the time things got out of hand” or “the party where they both had too much to drink.” These phrases -- excuses, really -- silence victims. When someone is sexually violated, however they are sexually violated, it is not a misunderstanding. It is not a date gone awry. It is a crime. This is a message that our young daughters, especially, need to hear from us.
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