Reviving Ophelia (35 page)

“I wish we’d known,” Ronette said. “Ellie’s not telling hurt us almost as much as the rape. We thought she trusted us more than this. We thought we had a good family.”

I said, “It’s common for girls to keep these things secret. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have a good family.” I asked everyone how they were feeling as we talked.

Ronette said, “I can’t believe this happened to Ellie. I feel guilty that I somehow didn’t prevent this.”

Ellie spoke, “I want to die.”

Dick said, “I’d like to kill those guys.”

“What should we do now?” Ronette asked. “None of us can sleep. We can’t eat. Dick has missed the last four days of work.”

The whole family was in shock and would need treatment. No doubt the younger girls were also in great pain. I planned to do some family work, but first I wanted to see Ellie alone.

I saw her for our next session. She looked a little better—her dark hair was out of her face and her eyes were dry. We visited a few minutes about school and her last swim meet. Then I brought up the rape.

She hugged a couch pillow to her chest and grew silent. Her fingernails and the tips of her fingers were badly bitten. She wasn’t ready to talk, so I read her stories about other kids who had been hurt and how they came to terms with it.

I talked about the nature of trauma. “When you cut your finger, it bleeds; you may not like blood, it’s scary and messy, but fingers that are cut are supposed to bleed. That’s healthy. If they don’t bleed, something is wrong. What happened to you is horrible and you are going to feel a lot of pain. You won’t like it, it’s messy and scary, but it’s part of healing. Burying the feelings will hurt more in the long run.”

Ellie stared at me from behind the pillow; her dark eyes were filled with pain. I explained that certain things happen with trauma. She might have nightmares and trouble with sleep. She might be afraid to go out and afraid to be home alone. She might feel crazy and like she will never recover. She might feel it was her fault and that she should have been smarter and prevented what happened.

Ellie nodded in agreement and said softly, “I keep seeing those guys over and over.”

I sat with her as she cried.

The next four sessions were similar to our second session. I read to Ellie or told her stories about other girls I had known who made it through experiences like hers. Ellie’s fingers stayed red and bitten. She didn’t want to leave the house without one of her parents. She had no interest in doing anything with her friends.

Then in our sixth session Ellie came in and said, “Today I’m going to tell you what happened.” She paused. “You get better if you talk about it, right?”

I nodded. Ellie said, “I want to get better.”

She picked up the couch pillow and told me the story. She had planned at school to slip out and meet her friend for a Coke, but her friend’s dad stayed up late that night and she was afraid to leave or even to call. So when Ellie arrived at the bowling alley, her friend wasn’t there.

She said, “I waited for an hour. I wasn’t feeling all that great; I had a headache and these high school boys kept staring at me. I wasn’t scared of them, but I was embarrassed being there all by myself.”

Her voice grew huskier. “I left the bowling alley about twelve. I noticed those guys were leaving, but I wasn’t that scared. They pulled up beside me and offered me a ride. I didn’t know them so I said no. They circled the lot and returned. Then they stopped the car and two of them got out and pulled me in.”

Her voice was dead now. “There were four of them. I couldn’t see their faces very well in the dark car. Two of them held me down in the backseat and they drove into the alley behind the bowling alley. I started to cry and one of them said, ”Let’s not do this.” But his friends called him a weenie and he shut up. I don’t think he raped me though. Only three guys raped me.”

Ellie stopped and looked out the window. Her eyes were dry but filled with pain. She caught her breath and continued. “The driver raped me first. His buddies pulled down my jeans and he jumped on top of me. He didn’t kiss me or anything.”

Her voice broke, but then she continued. “I never had sex before and I felt like I was being split open. When he finished he encouraged the others to do it too. The two in the backseat took turns. I threw up. Later they used my shirt to clean up the puke.”

Ellie was shaking now as if she were chilled. Her voice was flat and dead. “All the time they did this, they were laughing and joking. The driver said I must have wanted it or I wouldn’t have been out alone. They didn’t threaten to hurt me or anything. They just wouldn’t let me go. They treated me like an animal, like I didn’t have feelings.

“Afterwards, they dumped me out of the car and threw my shirt after me. I put it on so I wouldn’t be topless and walked home. I was crying so hard I thought I might have a stroke or something, but I didn’t go in the house till I stopped sobbing. I slipped in my window and lay in bed till morning. Then I took a bath and rinsed out the shirt.”

Ellie looked at me. “I was amazed that the next morning my parents didn’t notice anything. At breakfast they talked about my little sister’s dental appointment.”

Over the next few months I heard that story many times. At first Ellie told it without much emotion, but gradually she connected her words and her feelings and she sobbed as she told the story.

I asked her to write, but not send, letters to the guys who raped her, letters that allowed her to express all her anger. She scrawled letters beginning, “I hate you for what you’ve done to my life. You’ve ruined everything for me and my family. We’ll never be normal again.”

Dick bought her a punching bag and hung it in the basement. Nightly she went down and punched it. At first she had trouble connecting with her anger as she punched, but I encouraged her to keep trying. I told her to visualize the boys, the car, the rape as she hit. Once she did this, she hit with a frenzy and yelled about the rape. Afterward she collapsed in a puddle on the floor, but she felt calmer. All that anger was out of her and in the bag.

Meanwhile, the court case against the boys worked its way through the system. This re-traumatized Ellie in some ways. The police came by her house with further questions, and she had to tell her story at a deposition. The newspaper carried articles. Her name wasn’t mentioned, but seeing the stories always caused her pain. The trial loomed in her future as a public exposure of her shame.

Dick and Ronette came in monthly to talk about their reactions to the rape. “For a while,” Dick said, “our lives had no meaning.” Both of them were afraid to let their daughters out of the house. Neither could bear to read news of rape or violence against women. Dick had revenge fantasies that interfered with his work. He woke at night covered with sweat, the way he had during the war in Vietnam. Sometimes Ronette cried when she was working on her customers. She would wrap a towel around the person’s head and run out of the room.

Later the younger sisters joined our group and talked about how Ellie’s experience affected their lives. The middle sister swore she would never go out alone at night or hang out with boys her family didn’t approve of. The younger sister wanted revenge. Since the rape, she’d had trouble in school for acting up. Everyone agreed their family was different now. Other families talked about money, school and ordinary activities. They were obsessed with the rape. They felt a distance, an estrangement that victims often feel. They, like Ellie, needed a place where they could talk and cry.

Gradually Ellie recovered. Her fingers healed and her nails grew longer. She regained her enthusiasm for the swim team and school. She went out with her friends. She and her sisters signed up for a self-defense class. She said, “I want them to know how to defend themselves.”

We talked about the implications of the rape for her future. Ellie said that she felt vulnerable. Now that she’d been raped she knew that it could happen to her. She would always be more cautious and more anxious than her friends. For right now she was not interested in boys. She wanted to stay away from sex for a long time. She said flatly, “I’ve lost all my curiosity.”

One-fourth of all women are raped. Ellie was relatively lucky in that she was not severely injured, didn’t contract an STD or get pregnant. She was also lucky that her parents were so concerned for her and so loyal. She received extended therapy. Even so, Ellie is a different girl than before the rape. She’s more cautious and more dependent on her family. Just when she was beginning to explore the world, her wings were clipped. She’s tiptoeing, not flying, through her adolescence.

Another common experience for girls is some kind of sexual assault by a friend or acquaintance. These are especially damaging because they erode girls’ trust in the world around them and make all relationships potentially dangerous. Because the assailant is someone the victim knows, often the case is more difficult to handle afterward. The victim often feels responsible and is less likely to report it. And if she does report it, there’s more likelihood the assailant will argue that the sexual experience was consensual.

One of my students was walking across the athletic field one night after orchestra practice when a football player she knew from her study hall threw her down on the grass and began to kiss her. She screamed and kicked and managed to escape. She never reported the incident, but she no longer walks alone to her car after school.

A client was raped while on a field trip with her biology class. A student who came into her tent to borrow a butterfly net held her down, choked her and raped her. The next morning she pretended it never happened. She denied the experience until a year later when she went camping with her family. She crawled into their tent and stopped breathing as memories flooded her. She told her mother what had happened and her parents reported the crime. The boy involved claimed consensual sex. After a year it was hard to prove otherwise and my client dropped the case. She came to therapy because she wanted to be able to camp without having breathing attacks. She wanted to be able to trust guys again.

A client doing volunteer work over the summer at a refugee center in Colorado was cornered and assaulted by the minister in charge of the project. She didn’t report it because she was sure that no one would think the minister capable of such an assault.

Another student told of being a Little Sister at a fraternity. She’d been naive and gone to the Saturday night “testosterone party.” One of the guys that she liked pulled her into a bedroom and tried to assault her. Fortunately she had taken a self-defense class at the YWCA and managed to escape. She never returned to the fraternity. She gets nauseous whenever she thinks about that afternoon. When she told me about the incident she asked, “Is that how men treat their little sisters?”

Anna Lisa lived in one of the safest neighborhoods in town. Her mother was a teacher. Her dad was a coach who helped with Anna Lisa’s Little League team. She was a white-haired eleven-year-old who always had a wad of bubble gum in her mouth. Her legs were bruised from sports injuries, and her arms were as thin and hard as rifles. Anna Lisa seemed a little younger than her age. Her favorite topic was horses. Anna Lisa read horse books, attended horseback riding camps and collected model horses. She was obsessed with owning her own horse. She wanted a white horse, which she planned to name Gardenia.

Anna Lisa came in because she had been sexually assaulted twice the previous summer. In July she was home with her older brother and his friend while her parents were out shopping. Her brother biked to the mall to rent a video and left Kyle to baby-sit. Kyle molested her in the twenty minutes her brother was gone. Anna Lisa didn’t tell her parents about Kyle because she was afraid she’d get her brother in trouble.

A month later she went across the street to play with a friend whose father was an insurance executive. He answered the door and invited Anna Lisa in. She smelled beer on his breath, but that didn’t alarm her. She figured her friend was around somewhere. The father locked the door and put his hand down her shirt. She pulled away and ran toward the back door. He chased her around their living room calling her a “pretty little girl” and a “sweetie pie.” Fortunately, at that moment, her friend’s mother drove up.

Red-faced and flustered, he swore as he pushed Anna Lisa into the backyard and told her to go home. He said that he was only teasing and tried to hand her some money. This time, thank goodness, Anna Lisa couldn’t keep a secret. She ran home sobbing and told her mother what had happened and about Kyle as well. Her mother called the police and set up our appointment.

Terra was referred by her school counselor, who had been worried about her for some time. Terra had been failing classes and looking depressed. Then last week she’d come to school with a black eye. The counselor asked her about child abuse, but it turned out that the black eye wasn’t from her mother but from her boyfriend, who had “accidentally hit her.”