When I was a young teenager, I didn’t know I had a right to report that an older man was trying to touch me when my father wasn’t around.
But who would have believed me? My parents’ friend was a highly respected businessman.
When my parents separated and I moved with my mother to a much larger city, a different man, who lived in our apartment building, tried to touch me often. It made me so uncomfortable that I told my mother, but she didn’t believe me.
Why would a man, with an important job, try to molest a 16-year-old girl. Who would have believed me?
Then when my mother and I moved to a house that summer while I was still 16, my father died. He was buried the day before my 17th birthday.
On my birthday, I asked God to send me someone to love. Just a few weeks later, at church a man asked if he could give me a ride home.
I told him that my mother would pick me up. I don’t know how he got my name and phone number, perhaps from the priest, but the next day or so, he called and asked me to help take the church census.
I told him I didn’t have time, since I was a college freshman and worked part-time. So he asked me out.
I was barely 17 and had never really dated, but I thought God must have sent him, since I met him at church.
I knew really nothing about sex. I was puzzled that a 29-year-old lawyer from a politically powerful family would be interested in me, but my mother was all for it. She wanted me to marry a rich man and he talked about marriage to me.
If I had even known to report that a 29-year-old man took me to nightclubs, provided me with alcoholic drinks, and did things that made me feel very uncomfortable, who would have believed a 17-year-old girl’s word against a 29-year-old prominent lawyer?
A lot of us don’t report. Many of us don’t even know we have the right – we can feel so powerless, so scared.
The next year, after my mother and I moved to another apartment, I was attacked by an older college student that I barely knew, who was in my church group. But I didn’t tell anyone except my boyfriend, who was a virgin like me.
That devious guy didn’t rape me, but he really terrified me. He told me that a mutual friend from college was home on leave from the military. He came to pick me up and take me to his apartment where he said our friend was.
But he lied – our friend wasn’t there. He locked the door and somehow quickly pinned me down. I still don’t know how he did it so fast.
He was babbling about how his aunt “picked me out” for him at church. It was creepy. He could tell me what I had worn to Mass.
I felt he was insane. He told me he was engaged to marry – and still he pinned me down and babbled about all he wanted to do was kiss me. I didn’t know this person, except that he was an officer in the religious club at college that I belonged to.
Thank God, he finally let me up, apologized, and took me home. But incredibly the next night, he called and said he thought I had a good time – and wanted me to go out with him. I told he was crazy and hung up.
Many years later, as a journalist in my 40s, I was covering the OSU Family Resource Center when the director told me, “Patti, that was a sexual assault.”
I was so terrified of that student. I don’t really know all that happened except that after fighting him off for what seemed an eternity, I finally let him kiss me. It was gross.
Why would I report this – even if I knew that he had no right to do that. I just tried to forget it.
Later when I moved into the dorm, another girl told me that he threw her on a bed at a party. I didn’t ask details.
We’d all like to forget these things happened. That’s why we don’t report. We’re scared.
And it turned out that he got an important job at a well-known business.
Who would have believed me?
But it happened.
As a reporter, I covered a seminar at OSU on prevention of child sexual abuse.
A retired sex crimes detective said that one-third of people, male and female, will be sexually abused by the age of 18.
It happened to me.
But I didn’t know to report any of this to law enforcement.
And who would have believed me?
