Military Sexual Assault Quotes

The hostility and venomous response the topic of sexual trauma and rape in the military brings up, especially with men from my Era, is revealing. This opposition speaks to their guilt and toward the truth that stays hidden. ~ Diane Chamberlain

Five GOP representative candidates this session have shocked me to my soul at how blatant they have trivialized rape. My prayers were answered in their defeat! ~ Diane Chamberlain

Out with stereotypes, feminism proclaims. But stereotypes are the west's stunning sexual personae, the vehicles of art's assault against nature. The moment there is imagination, there is myth. ~ Camille Paglia

[Referring to rape] It already is bigger than everything else. It lives in front of me, behind me, next to me, inside me every single day. My schedule is dictated by it, my habits by it, my music by it. ~ Daisy Whitney

The largest and most rigorous study that is currently available in this area is the third one commissioned by the British Home Office (Kelly, Lovett, & Regan, 2005). The analysis was based on the 2,643 sexual assault cases (where the outcome was known) that were reported to British police over a 15-year period of time. Of these, 8% were classified by the police department as false reports. Yet the researchers noted that some of these classifications were based simply on the personal judgments of the police investigators, based on the victim's mental illness, inconsistent statements, drinking or drug use. These classifications were thus made in violation of the explicit policies of their own police agencies. There searchers therefore supplemented the information contained in the police files by collecting many different types of additional data, including: reports from forensic examiners, questionnaires completed by police investigators, interviews with victims and victim service providers, and content analyses of the statements made by victims and witnesses. They then proceeded to evaluate each case using the official criteria for establishing a false allegation, which was that there must be either "a clear and credible admission by the complainant" or "strong evidential grounds" (Kelly, Lovett, & Regan,2005). On the basis of this analysis, the percentage of false reports dropped to 2.5%."
Lonsway, Kimberly A., Joanne Archambault, and David Lisak. "False reports: ~ David Lisak

The boy I thought was my boyfriend pushed me to the ground. He took my clothes off, and I lay there with no body to speak of, just a flat board of skin and girl bones. ~ Roxane Gay

It's not a matter of Dad sitting down with his preadolescent son and incorporating 'Don't be a criminal!' into the 'birds and the bees' talk. (I mean, that couldn't hurt, probably. But it's not the point.) It's about teaching our boys to actively oppose sexual violence.

It's all well and good to say you're against rape and would never rape anyone, end of story. But somewhere in that crowd of guys laughing about an unconscious girl getting 'a wang in the butthole, dude' - and the one listening to Daniel Tosh say, 'Wouldn't it be funny if she got gang-raped right now?' and the one reading an op-ed in the Washington Post that puts 'sexual assault' in quotation marks, as though it exists only in the eye of the beholder - somewhere in all of those crowds is the guy who would rape someone. The guy who will rape someone. The guy who has raped someone.

And could you blame any of those guys for thinking that rape is not a serious crime, or even something to be particularly ashamed of, when so many 'good' guys around them are laughing at the same jokes? ~ Kate Harding

Some of the morays have held on. When I was in school, I remember asking the question, "Why is it that whenever I walk into a fraternity there's alcohol everywhere and there's no alcohol in a sorority? Why is it that sororities won't allow alcohol, but fraternities do? What is that?" You know, nobody had a really good answer, and that's kind of held on. It's one of the issues that's being examined now - the role of alcohol in sexual assault. ~ Claire McCaskill

Victims are often, automatically, accused of lying. But when a perpetrator is exposed of lying, the stigma doesn't stick. Why is it that we're wary of victims making false accusations, but rarely consider how many men have blatantly lied about, downplayed, or manipulated others to cover their own actons? ~ Chanel Miller

Today there is no law giving rapists the right to rape, but fewer than 3 percent of rapists, the overwhelming majority of whom are men, are ever prosecuted and imprisoned. ~ Soraya Chemaly

If you are, or someone you know is a victim of domestic violence, please do not wait any longer, get help today. There are people who will help you. Please call. The National Domestic Abuse Hotline: 1-800-799-7233 The National Sexual Assault Hotline: 1-800-656-4673 The National Teen Dating Abuse Hotline: 1-866-331-9474 ~ Darlene Shortridge

A man of the mouth, formerly the most oral of surgeons, Henry had the habit of giving his lady patients laughing gas, putting them out, then fiercely fucking them, while tugging on their wisdom teeth. His getting caught was a slip of the tongue, so to speak. While he was buried deep in a muff, some sharp thing slipped, and his prize patient, Mrs Mavis Gilette, woke to find a harpoon hole in her cheek and her lost licker languishing on the floor. ~ A.M. Homes

Always know there are friends somewhere rooting for you. There are people you don't know, always praying for you and lifting you before God. - Jenee, from "To the Survivors". ~ Robert Uttaro

I didn't really want to go. Firstly, everyone was just gonna get drunk, which I could do perfectly well by myself in my den while watching YouTube videos instead of having to worry about catching the last train home or avoiding sexual assault. ~ Alice Oseman

I have since talked to some of my girlfriends sexual assault and found out that they had their own experiences that they never shared at the time. It was never talked about it. And I think it's because of that normal response - you feel badly, you feel responsible, you feel guilty, you feel like you did something wrong, you feel ashamed. ~ Kirsten Gillibrand

The little girl who loved her father more than anything in the world is gone. Who survived has survived wolves. ~ Daniel Abbott

It was a catch-22: If you didn't put the trauma behind you, you couldn't move on. But if you did put the trauma behind you, you willingly gave up your claim to the person you were before it happened. ~ Jodi Picoult

the person who did this to you is broken. Not you.
The person who did this to you is out there,
choking on the glass of his chest.
It is a windshield
and his heartbeat is a baseball bat:
regret this, regret this.

Nothing was stolen from you.
Your body is not a hand-me-down.
There is nothing that sits inside you holding your worth,
no locket that can be seen or touched,
fucked from your stomach to be left on concrete. ~ Sierra DeMulder

Since most sexual abuse begins well before puberty, preventive education, if it is to have any effect at all, should begin early in grade school. ~ Judith Lewis Herman

Denial forces victims to retreat in lifeless existence, dieing in the shadows of buried trauma and painful memories. ~ Trudy Metzger

Sexual assault and domestic violence are difficult things to talk about. Talk about them anyway. ~ Mariska Hargitay

Globalization has shipped products at a faster rate than anything else; it's moved English into schools all over the world so that now there is Dutch English and Filipino English and Japanese English. But the ideologies stay in their places. They do not spread like the swine flu, or through sexual contact. They spread through books and films and things of that nature. The dictatorships of Latin America used to ban books, they used to burn them, just like Franco did, like Pope Gregory IX and Emperor Qin Shi Huang. Now they don't have to because the best place to hide ideologies is in books. The dictatorships are mostly gone - Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay. The military juntas. Our ideologies are not secrets. Even the Ku Klux Klan holds open meetings in Alabama like a church. None of the Communists are still in jail. You can buy Mao's red book at the gift shop at the Museum of Communism. I will die soon, in the next five to ten years. I have not seen progress during my lifetime. Our lives are too short and disposable. If we had longer life expectancies, if we lived to 200, would we work harder to preserve life or, do you think that when Borges said, 'Jews, Christians, and Muslims all profess belief in immortality, but the veneration paid to the first century of life is proof that they truly believe in only those hundred years, for they destine all the rest, throughout eternity, to rewarding or punishing what one did when alive,' we would simply alter it to say 'first two centuries ~ John M. Keller

It's like she's floating inside of herself, in the dark, and whatever hasn't already emptied inside her is emptying now... ~ Daniel Abbott

My mom doesn't say anything. I don't say anything. Neither of us knows yet what you should say when rape victims blame themselves: 'It was not your fault.'

It was not your fault, even if you were drunk, even if you were wearing a low-cut minidress, even if you were out walking alone at night, even if you were on a date with the rapist and kind of liked him but didn't want to have sex with him. ~ Joanna Connors

As readers, as people, we might not have the capacity to change the justice system. But as Dylan says in the book, we can change one person's perspective at a time. We can notice. We can speak up. We can teach this generation, my generation, that the way sexual assault is viewed and treated in this country is not okay, so that when it is our turn to step into the shoes of political office and criminal justice, we can continue changing the narrative from a place of power.
And more than anything, we can support. And we can empower. We can love.
We can be better. ~ Cora Carmack

We are not to work on the Sabbath because it takes us out of the play of joy. It is as bizarre as making love to your spouse, but getting out of bed during the process to cut your lawn or wash dishes. Such an offense would do far more than spoil the mood; it would be a direct assault on the integrity of joy, announcing that a mundane chore is more pleasurable than sexual joy with your spouse. ~ Dan B. Allender

A quick turn around a corner
and my planet becomes sand
on the shore of a dying Universe ~ S. Kelley Harrell

Asked to elaborate, Lisak explained, "One of the things that is difficult for most of us, frankly, to understand about a rape, is that there doesn't have to be a gun to the head, there doesn't have to be a knife present, there doesn't have to be a verbalized threat for the act itself to be enormously terrifying and threatening ... .There is a difference between sexual violence and other forms of assault. Sexual violence is so intimate." When your body is penetrated by another person against your will, Lisak said, it often induces a uniquely powerful kind of terror. According to many peer-reviewed studies, a large percentage of the victims of non-stranger rapes "actually feared they were going to be killed," even when "there was no weapon and no overt violence. ~ Jon Krakauer

The town was more than ready to accept the window dressing that hid the ugly truth of Joe's guilt. Some shared the secrets and kept the silence. Others would not have believed if they had been told. They would not have wanted to know. As those who saw and ignored the smoke from the crematoria of Hitler's Germany, they did not want to know that their world was not as it seemed. ~ Judith Spencer

People want this to be an anomaly.... we can handle monsters, we can't handle our neighbors doing these things. we can't believe these are the same people we see at Christmas parties, and basketball games. ~ T. E. Carter

Everyone heals in their own time and in their own way. The path isn't always a straight line, and you don't need to go it alone. ~ Zeke Thomas

The silence was killing me.
And that's all there ever was. Silence. It was all I knew. Keep quiet. Pretend nothing had happened, that nothing was wrong. And look how well that was turning out. ~ J. Lynn

In a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables. ~ Catharine A. MacKinnon

There is probably nothing more menacing or dangerous than an individual who is devoid of compassion or empathy. When this individual is permitted by community apathy and bias to successfully cloak himself in the attire of one who claims allegiance to his or her Creator, it becomes the moral imperative of those who lay witness to the peril to step up before it is too late. Until such a time when domestic violence and sexual assault are eradicated for good, the perpetrators of these deplorable acts will continue to cause unspeakable harm as Evil's welcomed ambassadors and Tyranny's strongest ally. ~ Sahar Abdulaziz

People may not realize the damage that they are doing by placing the blame on the victim ~ but that doesn't lessen the damage that they cause by doing it. ~ Darlene Ouimet

In 2017, after the Hollywood producer, Harvey Weinstein's sexual assault scandal went viral, the #MeToo movement grew like wildfire. It triggered my trauma. Flashbacks of horrific injustice. Old memories resurfaced. ~ Dana Arcuri

My niece was a sexual-assault victim. My sister is a survivor of domestic violence. We have more shelters for animals than for battered women. That's not the message we should be sending. ~ Hilda Solis

While Congress did not, to my knowledge, calculate aggregate dollar values for the nationwide effects of racial discrimination in 1964, in 1994 it did rely on evidence of the harms caused by domestic violence and sexual assault, citing annual costs of $3 billion in 1990 and $5 to $10 billion in 1993. ~ David Souter