One
1984
I am sitting in the back of a police car, like someone accused of a crime. It is the first night of summer in Boston. I do not have on handcuffs; I have not been read my rights. I am a victim, not a prisoner, but the difference between the two has completely escaped me tonight and will for the rest of my life.
My wrists and ankles are red and bruised from the phone cord that tied them together behind my back, attaching them to my ankles and pulling my knees up behind me—a position I’ve heard called “hog-tied” when referring to steer in a rodeo. There is a deep bite mark on my neck, and I am torn from my vagina to my anus. In about thirty minutes, a doctor will note that this tear is like one a woman might get while giving birth for the first time. I am headed to an emergency room for a visit that will take several hours and am aware that they may want to admit me. Over my dead body, I think.
I will need stitches, a pregnancy test, and antibiotics to treat any sexually transmitted infections that can still be prevented. In about a year, we will know enough about HIV for me to think I might have contracted it from one of these two men. They were likely IV drug users. I bled. When I finally summon the courage to get an HIV test a couple of years later, the wait for the result seems endless. It is one thing that goes in my favor.
Later, I’ll remember this moment and think of it as the easy part.
“I don’t need one,” I say about the pregnancy test.
“That’s what everyone thinks,” the examiner says. “It’s just a baseline. If someone learns they’re pregnant in a few weeks and didn’t get a test done, it might be harder to know for sure who the father was.”
Father. That couldn’t possibly be what she meant to say, I wonder. It turns out that, legally, it is indeed a relevant term. At the time of my attack, most states gave men who “fathered” through rape the same custody and visitation rights as other male parents. As recently as 2012, thirty-one states still allowed these rights, and in the present day a few have yet to change them.1 The existence of these laws means a woman impregnated through rape may have no choice but to “bargain away her legal rights to a criminal trial in exchange for the rapist dropping the bid to have access to her child.”2 According to those who write our laws, the perpetrator is a father who has rights that must be honored. The victim and her needs and rights, not so much.
* * *
The ride to the hospital lives in shadow. I look around the police car and stay as quiet as possible. It is daybreak, and as the sun rises, the cold steel surrounding me slowly illuminates, softening from black to gray. There is a metal cage and bulletproof glass between the back and front seat of the car, and I wonder how the police officers would know if I needed them for anything. All I can see is the balding head of the driver, stray wisps of hair peeking out from his cap. If only I had some scissors, I think. His partner has a short ponytail and isn’t wearing her hat. Her head keeps whirling around to look at me and she is saying something, but all I can hear is the timbre, not the words. At least her voice is soft; my ears are ringing.
Just moments before, these officers had come into my apartment building with their guns drawn. They found me sitting on the floor in a corner of the apartment across the hall from mine. I tried calling the police from my apartment, but the cord had been sliced with a knife, and the phone was dead. I hadn’t met my neighbors across the hall before this and must have been a disturbing sight when I knocked. “I need to make a call,” I croaked out, walking through the threshold uninvited, barefoot, and disheveled. They asked me no questions, led me to the phone, and disappeared quickly into their rooms.
I tried to make myself as small as possible in the unfamiliar apartment. Perhaps I would be mistaken for a speck of dust and the police would leave me be. I’m not even sure why I called them.
Are you injured? Are you safe? What is your name?
I hear a voice from somewhere inside my body say Michelle, and the word startles me. It sounds vaguely like a curse. The female officer puts her gun away and stands next to where I’m sitting on the floor. I lean on her leg and start to shake. The other person I call is my friend Laura, who lives about five blocks away. She arrives, having run the whole way, and opens her mouth as if to speak, but no words emerge. I reach up for her hand and we trek the distance from the apartment to the police car, a few feet at most; my legs feeling like they’re traveling halfway around the world.
I think about kicking the thick glass in the police car and getting a bit rowdy just to make sure I can elicit a reaction. I am a little worried I am a ghost. Laura is silent; her eyes dart about. Her red flannel nightshirt is buttoned wrong and she keeps pulling it away from her neck, not realizing that she is sitting on it and that a slight tug of the tail would give her the comfort she is seeking.
That I am dead seems completely probable. This thought is more connected to reality than any thought I’ve had since several hours before, when two men came rushing toward my bed in the middle of the night hissing at me.
Don’t move. Is anyone else home? Put this over your face. Be quiet!
Maybe they did use the knife I saw before the blindfold went over my face. Maybe they did tie that scarf around my neck and strangle me instead of stuffing it deep into my mouth and tying it tight. It’s what I expected and waited for throughout the night. Perhaps these things really did happen, and my consciousness mercifully moved itself to another place while I died.
I’d love to hand my brain over to the officers so they can find out what happened without my having to say another word. My blindfolded eyes saw only the darkness, but perhaps I have a scrap of memory that can be mined. What secrets, what evidence, do I hold that fear has so elegantly pushed away?
I suddenly feel myself rise out of my body, and I notice from my new vantage point that the siren and blue lights of the police car are on, and the officers are driving as if we are on a high-speed chase. What’s the rush, I think.
Other cars are pulling over so that we can pass, although everything around me is completely silent. Boston is ugly in the first light of morning. There are overflowing trash barrels and a fine layer of soot covering the sidewalks. I float above the traffic and follow an early morning T train going down Commonwealth Avenue, until I am on my street. There is crime-scene tape blocking the front-door entrance of my apartment building, and the neighbors are staring as they go about the business of their day.
“I wonder what happened there?” they ask one another.
My eyes close and the vibrations of the police car hum through me. Everything is a blur. My glasses are gone. The men didn’t need to blindfold me since I’m almost blind without my glasses anyway, but they did. Perhaps knowing I never saw their faces is what saved me in the end, but the absence of my sight already has me feeling like I missed a huge part of this night. How can I fully explain to anyone what happened if I didn’t see it for myself? How can I help the police find these men if all I have to rely on is the description offered by my other senses? I even hesitate to share the details I do have for fear I will sound confused or somehow complicit, so I keep quiet.
The clothes I am wearing feel unfamiliar, but they are soft and warm. After the rapists left and I managed to untie myself, I crawled on the floor trying to find my glasses. Drawers had been emptied, books thrown off shelves. I grabbed something to cover my naked body. It feels like terrycloth and smells of the vegetable curry we had for dinner.
My glasses, I hope, are somewhere. They are no longer on the little spot by the nightstand, where they sit perched every night when I am done reading, next to a glass of water and a tiny desk lamp I recently purchased. Now, the nightstand lies tossed on its side. Someone may have trampled on my wire frames by now or the police collected them as evidence. I have no idea where I will get new ones or how I’ll pay for them.
Rape is not sex, they say, but this was certainly some kind of horrible imitation. I can’t even begin to absorb this part of the evening, so it sits crudely at the front of my mind. What am I supposed to do now? I have only been with women since my freshman year in college, which started out as a complete surprise and then became an identity. I’d never had much experience with men before that: a few kisses, maybe, a little teenage groping. I had intended to get around to men someday. It seemed like an experience in life I shouldn’t miss altogether. Now, I am not so sure. It feels final. The door slams shut, hard. This was the first and last time a penis will enter my body or be in my mouth. Later, this particular loss will make me ache, no matter how happy I am in my marriage and with the choices I’ve made over the years. There remains something unfinished, taken away, forged from brutality and timing rather than my own free will. When people ask me in a moment of curiosity if I’ve ever been with men, I just say no.
I wonder whether I’ll be able to describe what happened to me as torture when my attackers seemed so at ease, so relaxed.
One of them acted like he was on a date and asked if I’d mind if he stayed the night.
“Sure,” I practiced saying in my head.
* * *
I have a thought even before arriving at Beth Israel Hospital that I am going to call my ex-lover and have her come up from Manhattan. Maybe having sex with her might help repair what has just happened, prove to me I’m alive after all. I’m not thinking clearly, and this thought intrudes every time I close my eyes and feel the blindfold being placed.
The police car stops suddenly. We have arrived at the hospital. The emergency room is quiet. I can see empty plastic blue seats in the waiting room beyond the glass. Laura jumps out of the car before I’ve even registered that the engine is off. She runs through the hospital doors at full speed, and I trudge along behind. My arms and legs feel like they have sandbags on them, but I press on, trying to keep track of Laura as she races through the hallway.
“I’ll try to check you in. You go with the police.”
I stare back at the police car, frozen. Thinking I may still be naked, I stroke the outlines of my body until convinced that I feel fabric on my skin.
Wait up, I think. Come back. Don’t leave me here with them.
Laura has given my name to a woman who instructs us to wait until she finishes checking someone in. Soon, she gestures us over. “Can I have your name and your insurance card?” the intake person asks, sitting behind a tiny desk with a Formica top in the corner of the emergency room.
I look at Laura, speaking to her and ignoring the stranger in front of me. “I’m going to sit over there.” I wave in the direction of the waiting room. “I don’t have anything with me. Get me when I’m supposed to do something.” Pulling whatever I am wearing around me, I walk to the nearest empty seat.
Laura must do an adequate job providing the requested information, because now a person in scrubs is standing over me. “We would like to take a look at you,” she says, her hands clasped behind her back. She knows touching me would be a most grave error. “As it stands, we seem to only have male physicians in the emergency room right now. That happens sometimes. Do you mind me asking if that would be acceptable to you?” I don’t respond, and she adds, “I’m more than happy to page a female. You might just have to wait awhile.”
“I’ll wait.” My voice does not offer the usual apology.
I’m distracted by the ugliness of the chairs, and daylight coming through the windows. People are waking up, I think. Soon, more of them will know.
When my name is called, Laura springs forward, pulling me up with her.
“You can bring your friend,” the nurse says.
Something nags at me. The sun is up, and I picture my roommates walking into the shambles the night left behind. Since the phone in the apartment is dead, I’m not sure how to reach them to soften the blow. “Laura, maybe you should go and meet them at the apartment,” I say. “You can look for my glasses.”
Laura nods but doesn’t move. “I’m staying here with you.”
The exam will take hours. A rape kit will be taken as a matter of procedure. Unknown to me at the time is that this evidence-collection tool has been available for the last few years: it was first introduced in 1978 in a Chicago emergency room and then adopted by multiple ERs in the surrounding area by 1980.3 Soon, emergency rooms in other larger cities adopted its use.
Over the years, I’ve been asked what a rape kit is and what it looks like. Simply put, a rape kit is the package of materials that contains the evidence gathered from victims of violent sexual felonies. The victim’s body is a crime scene, holding invaluable evidence of the assailant’s identifying biological characteristics. The exam is lengthy and painstaking, often taking four to six hours to complete. When the evidence is retrieved by a trained professional and attended to with respect, the perpetrator may be possible to identify, as well as link to other crimes.
Some kits look like a shoebox labeled with the name of the state in which the test is performed and the words RAPE EVIDENCE written on the outside. Some states prefer a large manila envelope, also properly labeled. Inside, there are clean swabs for retrieving DNA from multiple orifices, a chain-of-custody form, envelopes to hold materials collected from the victim, and a piece of paper that looks like the silhouette of a body, which the examiner uses to document where the victim was cut, scratched, or otherwise injured.
To prevent evidence contamination, clinicians are instructed to change gloves frequently and to wear scrubs, surgical hats, and netting for hair and beards. All the evidence is gathered and placed in the box or envelope, which is then sealed by wide tape to show that the contents have been secured. The kit may be kept in the hospital if the person getting the exam is not yet sure she wants to report the assault. Otherwise, following the chain-of-custody standards, it will be given to and transported by law enforcement should the case ever reach trial. This means that the transfer of the rape kit and documentation of who touched it at every stage of the process should be carefully controlled. These standards are critical to ensuring that evidence of a DNA match cannot be challenged at trial because of shoddy documentation, poor labeling of the samples, or transfer done by someone not qualified to handle the evidence.
As the package leaves the hospital for its new destination, the victim might hope, might expect, that the items gathered are quickly analyzed by a crime lab so that the person or persons whose DNA has been left in and around their body can be identified. That’s how it’s done on the TV crime shows, anyway. Perhaps that rape victim is buoyed imagining a “good guy” like Olivia Benson from Law and Order: SVU rushing the evidence to a crime lab to augment the investigation she has already begun, soon leading to the capture and conviction of the rapist and the resolution that brings to the victim. But real life does not mirror TV shows, which contribute to a false narrative that rape victims’ complaints are investigated routinely and seriously.
The exam I am about to endure will be performed by a sexual assault nurse examiner (SANE). The SANE program began in the late 1970s, when ER nurses in some cities decided standards for treating rape victims were inadequate.4 While their numbers have grown over the years, there is still a national shortage. In 2017 a writer in The New York Times observed, “The Violence Against Women Act guarantees rape victims the right to a sexual assault examination. But rights mean very little if they are unavailable based on your physical location, or are inaccessible because of your socioeconomic class, or are delayed because of the excessive violence that occurs against your gender.”5 A person who cannot receive an exam because they are unable to travel hours to get to a facility that has a SANE or who forgoes an exam because it will take hours for a SANE to arrive will find prosecution of the crime difficult should they decide to pursue charges.
While some medical schools and residencies include training on appropriate care for sexual assault victims, it is not yet part of physician training nationally.6 In 2017 a group of medical professionals created online modules for medical students and physicians on trauma-informed care because, as they state, “Training to provide appropriate, compassionate care for this population is lacking in most medical school curricula.”7 Knowledge of how to treat a trauma survivor matters enormously in the survivor’s willingness to seek medical care over a lifetime. As one primary care physician who teaches trauma-informed care explains, “A medical office or hospital can be a terrifying experience for someone who has experienced trauma.… The perceived power differential, being asked to remove clothing, and having invasive testing can remind someone of prior episodes of abuse. This can lead to anxiety about medical visits, flashbacks during the visit, or avoidance of medical care.”8 Yet trauma-informed medical care, something that’s been written about and discussed within the mental health field for years, is not yet a uniform standard in medical training.
Laura and I follow the person who beckoned me into a small exam room full of people waiting with gloves and masks on, holding metal trays. I suppose the person examining me introduces herself, tells me her name, explains all that will happen. I suppose she smiles hoping to seem kind, instead of showing the pity she feels. There are bright fluorescent lights on every side of the table on which I lie—to illuminate my bruises and ensure no small trace of evidence is missed.
They scrape under my fingernails and comb my pubic hair. Someone is dictating a description of a bite mark on my neck, and I hear a pencil moving furiously. People are talking about me and being instructed on what to do next to this body part and that. My legs are spread. My eyes are shielded with large wraparound sunglasses to protect them from the light. I am above my body on the ceiling once more, looking down on a person I do not recognize. She is a tiny girl with no control, eyes covered, feeling like nothing more than an object for the second time in less than a few hours.
I think about all the people who don’t know yet and how they might react when they find out. Their faces appear under my eyelids, distressed and silent. The paper gown draped over me is scratchy, and I feel naked and alone with a dozen people in the room. Laura is somewhere. I wonder if she is looking away. I think about how worried my roommates will be, how frantic.
They hand Laura a cylinder of antibiotics for me. “The instructions are on the bottle,” someone says. Someone else asks me again if I could be pregnant, and I’m more specific this time. “No,” I say. “I’ve never had a male partner, only women.” This information seems to sting the person examining me; she says she is sorry, as if what has happened is suddenly so much worse.
What exactly is she so sad about, I wonder? My attackers didn’t target me because of my sexuality, and I was careful to hide it from them, fearing even more brutality. Still, I learn years later that rates of rape and sexual assault are higher in the LGBTQ population because of marginalization, higher rates of poverty, and hate-motivated violence, and I feel a kinship to people I don’t even know.9 Bias must be acknowledged whenever we find there are higher rates of violence targeted at marginalized or disenfranchised groups. There is a marked difference in how law enforcement responds to crimes largely perpetrated against people of a common demographic, such as race, sexuality, or gender. In Identifying and Preventing Gender Bias in Law Enforcement Response to Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence, the Department of Justice acknowledges that “even where law enforcement officers harbor no explicit biases or stereotypes about women or LGBT individuals, an officer’s unconscious bias towards these groups can undermine an effective response to sexual assault and domestic violence incidents.”10
And so I am combed and swabbed and have my bruises documented on the silhouette of a naked woman’s body on one page of the forensic record. I am poked and entered and asked hundreds of questions. And I sign papers that allow the collected evidence to be sent to the police.
Copyright © 2020 by Michelle Bowdler