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know what else to say besides ‘Sure.’” He led her away from the party, towards a local park. They walked in an amiable silence under a sky illuminated with stars, a seemingly innocent moment between two new friends as Amy slipped deeper into a drunken haze. When she started walking at a diagonal, he put his hands on her shoulders and steered her toward a dark corner of the park’s field. When his mouth was suddenly on hers, she finally realized how far from innocent this really was. “I should have known what was going on,” she says. “I just didn’t think about it.” Her mind was fuzzy and she was still processing his tongue down her throat when his fingers slipped up her skirt. His hands were everywhere, it seemed, if only to support her as her body started to go limp. He laid her down on the grass, told her he was going to get a condom. “It occurred to me — wait, this is not what I want to do,” she says. Then she passed out. From there, “It got really messy really quick,” she says. Amy was in and out of consciousness. A flash of the senior, back from getting protection, then black. Another flash and her skirt was around her ankles. Her clothes were completely off now, and she was gone again. Halfway unconscious, she could still feel his weight laying on her. He leaned into her, but she couldn’t find the words to make him stop before fading away. As hard as she tried to stop it, the alcohol took charge of her mind, the senior took charge of her body. She stopped fighting, let her head roll back so she could only see the sky, and allowed the darkness to sweep over her. “I just remember focusing on the stars whenever I was conscious,” she says. “And trying not to be.” Def ining r ape Expert Kulstad-Thomas says rape is legally considered any sexual intercourse without consent. “And consent is an active and willing yes,” she says. “Without threat or coercion. So basically that person has to be able to say yes without feeling pressured or manipulated… and that means that the person is not under the influence of alcohol
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and drugs.” For a long time, Amy never considered what occurred in the park to be rape. “Yes, he was older than me, and yes, he was much more conscious than I was,” she says. “But people do that kind of stuff all the time. It happens, it’s not necessarily a big deal.” That date rape is a just repercussion of high school life which must be endured is an idea prevalent in our culture. In the online survey, 57.5 percent of Paly students said they agree that certain women are more likely to be raped due to their promiscuous behavior. Amy experienced the result of this misconception firsthand when she sat her best friend down at Peet’s and revealed everything, expecting support and sympathy. “She [my friend] just said, “You shouldn’t have been drunk, you shouldn’t have been wearing slutty clothes, you shouldn’t have gotten yourself into that situation,” Amy says. “And the thing is… she was right.” Amy avoided telling people what happened, and when the news eventually came out she played it off as simply a drunken escapade, not wanting to be labelled “the poor girl who got raped in a park”. “I didn’t really want to tell people the truth about it, because I didn’t really like the truth,” she says. This thinking skewed how Amy thought about the night she was raped for a long time afterwards, and kept her from going to the authorities or even her parents. “I feel like such a shitty person… and I am embarrassed,” she says to explain why she never told her family. Kulstad-Thomas says that this is common for sexual violence survivors. “We live in a sexist society that tends to blame the victim of sexual assault,” she says. “Survivors tend to experience a lot of guilt and shame.” Amy never thinks of herself as a rape survivor, but then again she never thinks about that night at all if she can help it. Now, telling her story out loud and forced to come face to face with the facts, Amy pauses for a moment of retrospection. “I guess if you get down to it,” she says finally, “It was rape.” v