Understanding Silence Is Not Consent

I am posting this on behalf of a friend who asked me to share her story.

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Exposed. Vulnerable. Confused.

Every time I thought about it. Every time I tried to write down or verbalise what happened, a voice in my head told me to be quiet, to laugh it off, or stop typing.

Silence is not consent.

I know that now. I wish I had known it sooner.

When I was 17 I had my first sexual encounter. I defined it as such to put it in a box, minimise the effect it had on me. By clarifying it as the first time I had sex, I could block out what it really was: an assault. Rape.

My memory of the incident is hazy and not because it's been six years, the things I remember today are the same things I remembered so vividly the day after. Trying to push myself off the wall, grabbing at a man in a red shirt, and pulling at his dark hair so he would stop. The only descriptors I can recall of my attacker.

I will say this: I was drunk, irresponsibly so. Not because if you’re drunk you invite this kind of behaviour; NOTHING invites being assaulted, but because I was in a foreign country, and although I was with an older friend I knew I was vulnerable.

No, I do not consider that a justification of what happened, but it's how I convinced myself others would see it. While I was young, on holiday with a friend and drinking, people would say I was lying or just couldn’t remember saying yes.

Honestly, I cannot remember saying "No"; I cannot remember saying anything. I do remember being unable to stand and falling over on my way to the bathroom in a dingy bar and a man catching me. My next recollection is of that man raping me, or as I told myself, of me having sex with a stranger. Every time I tried to tell my friends I chickened out and just said I had a bad sexual experience, like it was a case of not being in sync with my partner or not enjoying it. A couple of my friends have been assaulted by their ex-boyfriends, so it feels like sexual violence is trivialised within our group as just another thing we deal with sometimes. Although none of them have been raped, a scary number of them have been sexually assaulted.

Six years later I must remind myself:

If you are in and out of consciousness you cannot consent.

If you are drunk, you cannot consent.

If you do not consent, IT IS RAPE.

I never told my friend who was there what happened while we were away. I would never want her to feel guilty for not realising I had been gone a long time. Or for not realising how off my behaviour was for the rest of the trip. Some of my friends comment on my unusual reaction to relationships, I have never been able to have a relationship and physical intimacy terrifies me. I hope one day I can move past my fears, but they still control the part of my life that yearns for a healthy, sexual relationship.

I still cannot say it out loud and I don’t know if I ever will. Or if I will ever correct my best friends who joke that I’ve "had sex in a bar" or "had sex with a stranger" because although it makes me feel raw, I can’t be that brave yet. I can’t tell them how much it hurts to hear them say it, I want to be brave. I used to be brave. My attacker took more than my virginity, he took my courage.