An Open Letter on Sexual Safety and Violence in My Community
[CW: sexual assault, verbal abuse]
[Edit, September 2020: I am relisting this story. I made it unlisted in January 2019 because of the violent backlash perpetrated by the family of one of the people mentioned. This was despite my efforts to anonymize everything and assume best intentions. I don’t know if I will end up regretting this decision, but I do know that sunlight is an excellent disinfectant.]
Hello, friends,
I wrote a document that I want to share with you. I want you to understand why I wrote it, why I updated it this week, and why I am sharing it with you now.
This is the document: Sexual Assault Response Basics
Here’s why I wrote it:
About five years ago, I experienced a sexual assault at the hands of a stranger, a friend of some friends whom I’d never met before. It was at Burning Man 2013, the fourth year I attended. It happened on the first night the festival was open for general access, though I’d already been there a few days, setting things up. Over 19 hours that day, I’d worked three physically demanding volunteer shifts, building infrastructure and staffing the information booth. When I finished my work, I went on a bike ride with some friends, then came back to camp to relax in a yurt I’d helped to put together. I drifted off to sleep, in the company of a couple of trusted friends. The assault began not long afterward. At first I didn’t understand what was happening as I came to, and then I understood. Somehow, I couldn’t move or speak. All I could do was wait for it to be over [1]. But he didn’t stop for hours, until after daybreak. I won’t include any details of what he did to me, but it was not casual or accidental: it was sexual, it was extremely intrusive to my body, and he was very deliberate and quiet about it.
I reported the assault to the event’s peace officers. When they asked him, the perpetrator broke down crying and immediately and fully confessed to them and to the Pershing County police. I didn’t want to file a police report; neither of us lived in the state where the assault occurred, and I know how hard it is to prosecute sex offenses without physical evidence. But the peace officers are mandatory reporters, and they told us both we had to give the police a statement.
The assault was the first day of the weeklong event. The rest of the time, I just stayed away from that guy as much as I could and tried to have a normal time. But things were very not okay.
The response in the community we shared was so intensely hostile toward me that it was much more traumatic than the assault by itself. It was not the first assault I’d ever experienced, but it was the first time my peers treated me like I was the problem. They didn’t deny the assault occurred: they accepted my report and his confession. Instead, my campmates made it clear I had no right to complain, and that I was out of line to ask that he not be invited to camp with us again the next year. “That is not the way you handle your friends,” said one. Another told me he couldn’t tolerate the “ocean of ingratitude” that I’d shown. Others simply gave me the silent treatment. I think that was the first time I ever fully understood what shame means.
That experience shut down my sense of agency completely. I had no defenses: no trust in my physical vigilance or social judgement, and no assurance that anyone cared about my welfare. Subsequently, I was assaulted two more times in the next twelve weeks.
The second assault was a guy I’d just started dating. We’d been friends for a couple years, and agreed we wanted to date one another just before I left for the Burn that year. I told him about the assault I’d experienced when I got back, and he seemed sympathetic. We went out maybe one or two more times. In late October, he invited me over to watch the movie Hackers, which I’d seen but he hadn’t. He kept trying to make out with me, while I tried to get him to pay attention to the movie. Then he told me to take off my shirt. I asked, “But what if I don’t want to?” He said, “You don’t really have a choice.” That completely shut me down. He was probably right. I gave up. While I was dissociated, he took off my clothes and had sex with me with my stunned cooperation, and without my consent. I just did as he told me. I knew it was his first time. I felt like I was supposed to make it good for him. It was profoundly disorienting. He told me I seemed embarrassed afterward.
The shirt I wore on that date, the one he told me to take off — I never wore it again. It was one of my favorites: a cashmere/silk blend sweater that I got at a thrift store and treasured. But I stopped wanting to wear it, and I couldn’t put my finger on why for the longest time. I think I get it now. My last clear sensory impression from that night was feeling all my hairs bristling in fear when I asked if no was an option, and the extra-soft sweater amplified the feeling. After that night, I did not want to feel that sweater anymore.
The third was the 68-year-old dishwasher from the bowling alley where I worked, after we both finished a shift one night. He cornered me in a bus stop near work. I tried to push him away, but I couldn’t, and I was afraid I’d break him if I hit him. He groped me and forced his tongue into my mouth. One of the cooks from the bowling alley walked towards us as this was happening and I tried to get him to help me, but he just kept walking. A few days after that, I walked into the dish pit and saw him giving a newly-hired girl a “massage” she obviously did not want. I quit the job maybe a week later, and told the day manager about both incidents with the dishwasher. He asked me if I’d want to keep the job if the dishwasher didn’t work there anymore, and I told him no: there were many reasons working there was very bad, and the sexual assault was only the last straw.
That was November 2013. That dishwasher was still working there the only time I went back to that bowling alley, for a friend’s birthday in April 2017, almost four years later.
I never put the timeline of the three assaults together as a set of related events until a couple weeks ago, when recent events prompted me to reflect on that autumn, especially the movie date. Looking back, I guess it must have been like I wasn’t really occupying or even effectively supervising my own body. Nobody was home, and people took advantage of my animated corpse.
I was so afraid of creating a problem, or being identified as the problem, that I didn’t try to stop them. I held everything back. With each assault, I lost the ability to choose or care about more kinds of things. The whole three-month period comes back to me with clear episodic details, but registered emotionally only as a huge blur.
I stopped dating anyone sometime after the second assault, but before the third. I’d felt really bad when I explained to my guy friend that I couldn’t see him anymore, because I was dealing with so much trauma from the assault at Burning Man. I felt like I’d failed to come through for him. And I was sad not to be able to share good times with someone I’d felt attracted to for months. But I had to try to make myself safe.
I focused my efforts on trying to get the Burning Man camp who introduced me to that first perpetrator to examine their processes and attitudes around sexual assault. That’s why in January 2014, I wrote this document: as a guide for a self-organizing community that is grappling with the painful reality of sexual assault by their own, against their own. It’s part field reference, part literature review, part directory listing.
That camp turned out not to actually want to stop the sexual assault that was happening at their events. Many people were supportive, but my efforts to get sexual assault acknowledged and perhaps mitigated met with a degree of resistance and backlash that I did not anticipate. Over several months, I learned of a whole constellation of assaults perpetrated by leading members of that camp and their invited guests. I also observed that the these predators were protected by the same pattern of minimizing and silencing and dismissal in all of these assaults, not just the one against me. Eventually I cut ties from that entire group of people, which included some whom I’d loved as close friends for years. The insularity of the way they socialized made it an all-or-nothing deal. It was a difficult choice to leave them all, but it was necessary.
That series of assaults and the harsh suppression afterward crippled me for years. It left me vulnerable to further exploitation by other abusive people. I was suffering from disabling PTSD, and only partly functional: many important parts of my psyche were completely muffled. Even though I see a psychiatrist regularly for ADHD treatment and I give him thorough, honest reports on my situation and mental health, he utterly failed to help me find a diagnosis. But I started working on treatment in early 2017 when I finally recognized my symptoms for what they were.
Traumatic stress suppresses activity in many regions of the brain and elevates activity in others. Your mind focuses all of its power on surviving the situation, making you highly alert and acutely aware of sensory cues that can help you avoid harm or escape danger. You are learning and acting as if your life depends on it, because it does. This comes at the expense of…well, everything else you might want to think or feel. It makes it so you cannot be certain of virtually anything, while leaving your senses highly tuned to danger signs related to the traumatic stressor. These distortions can become ingrained neurological connections, creating an actual physical scar on your psyche. Psychological trauma is a terrible injury.
I’m doing much better now. But the cost of having my will crushed in such intensely compounded ways has been high. It’s taken a long time and a lot of concentration and work for me to rebuild my confidence and trust in myself since these things happened. In the meanwhile, I took more damage from more predatory and exploitative people. I lost many opportunities.
Eventually, I started dating again. Actually, I resumed dating the same guy who raped me on that movie date in 2013. I couldn’t think of it as rape when it happened: I said I didn’t want to, and I didn’t fight him physically, and I did everything he asked for, and I felt numb for days afterward. But I felt numb a lot that autumn, so I couldn’t parse it appropriately. I didn’t realize how wrong that night with him had been, or how badly it affected me. I still liked him.
We celebrated three years together last month. I fell deeply in love with him. He’s been my friend and my colleague. He was my companion for many wonderful adventures. I learned valuable things from him, something he said he also valued about me. He showed me excitement and utterly sincere romance. He supported my professional development and ambition, with his labor and words and material support. He kept me company when I had to go to the hospital, and showed up with books and my favorite candy. He encouraged me to become a stronger person, and put himself on the line to help me grow. He was handsome and vibrant and fun. He came to mean the world to me.
But something was not right about the way he treated me with regard to sex. It was never right. He’d grab me at inappropriate times. He’d force me into painful positions, even after I specified that those positions caused me pain. He would often ignore me when I asked him to use lube. He told me how boring my body was. He’d praise me for being compliant, and not much else. He referred to my body with language that made more sense for a pasture or other property.
He carelessly injured me, badly, on two occasions. Once, early in our relationship, he left me with pain in my shoulder for weeks afterward. Another time, last winter, he hurt my knee badly enough I was limping for several days. I don’t believe he hurt me on purpose, but he wasn’t putting care or effort into not-injuring me, either. We engaged in activities where he had physical power over me and I could not protect myself, and then he neglected my safety, and I paid the price.
He also didn’t pay any attention to my desires, no matter how I asked or indicated what I wanted. I used my words. I gave him demonstrations. I took him to a class. I handed him zines and emailed him illustrated guides. I annotated a copy of The Loving Dominant to highlight the stuff I would be into, and mailed it to him one Valentine’s Day when he was overseas. I thought it would help him get a grounding in some fundamentals and engage his imagination: safe, sane, consensual, and fun. Last summer, he told me he’d never opened the book.
For a long time, I kept asking myself, “Is this problem a skill deficit, or a character deficit?” And I kept deciding it was a skill issue, since I could see how well he cared for me in many other domains of life. But things didn’t get much better. And I knew how quickly he picked up skills when he wanted to, so I couldn’t understand why things did not improve much for years.
A few weeks ago, we had some really, really bad sex where he denied my verbal requests, pushed me around, and explicitly told me he wasn’t going to do anything I asked for except on his terms. It made me so sad. I was feeling really into him and excited about going to bed with him. But instead of having fun, he made me feel used and lonely and scared. It was awful.
Afterward, I took a shower and composed myself. Then I asked him why it was so bad in so many ways, why he said and did these things. Why did it seem like he did not care about the experience was enjoyable for me at all? He didn’t argue with any of the problems I identified, and then he answered me honestly and carefully. He told me he hadn’t “put [my] pleasure on an equal footing with [his] own,” and hadn’t given consideration to my feelings. He looked like he was having a revelation, like he had never before considered any of the things I referred to or how they might matter. His choice of words validated what I’d seen from him, even though the news was sad. This was the Friday night before Halloween.
The next morning, I asked him about a few more things, like why he physically hurt me so often and verbally put me down during sex. Why did he make it so bad for me? Again, he reflected carefully, then he told me that he’d disregarded my well-being in the pursuit of his own gratification. This also looked like a revelation to him.
And what he said did seem to be supported by the data, but I couldn’t understand why he would do it. I asked him how he ever thought it was okay to treat me like this, and he considered it for a minute. “It’s not,” he said. “It’s not okay.” He stared at me, his eyes wide, his mouth open. A third revelation.
It was such an unexpected response. That’s not how those conversations normally go. I was not pleased by these answers, but they at least sounded coherent and honest. It was a radical difference. Even though I felt like he was admitting a terrible betrayal at the core of our intimacy, I was glad that at least he wasn’t gaslighting me. Instead, his candor finally relieved much of the doubt and confusion that had troubled me for years. I felt anger, but not anguish.
He spent a night at his brother’s house. He did some more reflecting. He opened up in a new way to an old friend, and his attitude changed noticeably. I began to feel relieved that he was finally paying attention, and hopeful that things would improve.
I was even more astonished a few days later, when he told me about his history of assaulting several other women.
I came home on Wednesday, Halloween, and found him sitting on the couch looking stricken. I asked him what was wrong. He told me I wasn’t the only person he’d assaulted sexually. He said he’d tried to coerce two friends of his, classmates of ours in college, and would have gone further if they hadn’t stopped him. One cut off contact with him afterward. The other remained his friend.
He told me about a date he’d had with a woman he met on Tinder: “She said she didn’t want to have sex that night, and then we had sex, and then she said, ‘What I said before about not wanting to have sex tonight — I meant it.’ Then she blocked me and never saw me again.”
I said it was good that he was finally seeing these things. I said he needed help beyond what I was equipped to give him. I gave him the name of a specialized counselor who I’d worked with before. He marveled that I didn’t seem angry at all. I was dumbfounded. He repeated that he wanted to fix his behavior, but I didn’t have any way to respond to that. Then I went to my room until I could decide what to do.
Three days later, on Saturday morning, I asked him to move out. It took me that long to form the necessary words. I was just so stunned. He started packing. I left the house.
While I waited for him to finish, I texted and I asked him when the other assaults had occurred. He told me the Tinder date rape was 4 years ago, and the others were around 6–7 years ago. I took a little comfort in the knowledge that none of the other assaults had occurred since we’d begun dating. And he said that he’d raped two people: “You and her. That’s it.” It took a minute for me to realize he was saying he’d raped me. I had never thought of the time he intimidated me into sex that I didn’t want as rape, until he named it. Only then did I realize that was what had happened.
It explained a lot.
I talked to my counselor and to some friends and family. I emailed Tinder, to notify them of the violation of their terms of service, and sent them screencaps of what he’d texted me. They said they were investigating.
I took some leave from work to rest and care for myself. I’m so grateful to have this time.
We stayed in touch, and he told me about his ongoing efforts to grow. The next Wednesday, he mentioned over text that there was another assault he needed to be accountable for, but I wasn’t ready to hear it about it. That weekend, over the phone, he disclosed to me how he’d assaulted and stalked a student in the tutoring center where we’d both worked in college. He described putting a hand on her shoulder, then groping her. When she left the tutoring center to get away from him, he found out the dorm and room where she lived. He went there and knocked on the door. He told me someone inside said “Who’s there?” and he ran away. Again, I asked him when this was. He told me it was soon after he started working there, which was 7 years ago: his sophomore year.
I know exactly when he started working there because I hired him for that job. I interviewed him. It was one of the easiest hiring decisions I’d ever made. He was one of the best tutors I’d seen in several years of practice.
Somehow, this is the disclosure of his that bothers me the most. Assault against my peers…well, that’s something I identify with all too well. It hurts, but it only goes so deep. But an assault on one of my students feels very different. Hearing about it made me feel physically ill for hours. A couple minutes after he told me, I felt a wave of nausea and then developed a slight but measurable fever. At first I thought I was getting the flu, but later I realized this is what is meant by “making one’s blood boil.” His assault on our student activated a protective fury that I should probably also experience for myself, but apparently do not.
For the first time in our relationship, I felt rage. He was supposed to be aiding her, not preying on her. Peer tutoring is not a license to assault, but that is what he chose to do with the position.
I didn’t think to ask how he found out where she lived. Other students? An online directory? This seems like an important security hole. As far as I can remember, our orientation materials did not specifically address sexual misconduct, unless you count a prohibition against tutors wearing leggings.
It bothers me so much that he has been black hat with regard to sexual exploitation [2]. I’ve been stalked before by someone who meant me harm, and he knows this. He knows the destruction that wrought on my life and my mind. I mistook him as being on the same side as I am: my closest ally.
I entrusted him with power, and he exploited women who trusted him.
His betrayal sickened me.
I kept selecting and elevating this guy, over and over. I promoted him to lead the physics tutoring team when I stepped down. I introduced him to my friends and my family and my professional network. I invited him to live with me. I picked out an engagement gift, for when the time felt right to ask him to marry me. I thought that was the hardest question I’d have to answer about our relationship in the next couple of years: when would our situations be stable and ripe enough for me to propose to him?
Instead I’ve had to answer: Who needs to know that he raped two women and assaulted at least three others?
That he abused his marginal-ass position of power over his student — over my student — who fled from studying physics just to escape him?
Who can use this information constructively?
What do I do…what do I do with him now?
The things he did are inexcusable.
But I’m not convinced he’s beyond redemption.
Not long before his disclosures, I noticed several new signs of maturity, compassion, and social conscience in him. This is a fairly common thing for people who are entering their late 20s. He was wising up to more of the effects of his actions, and had begun asking new kinds of questions about culture and his role in it. He’d even begun expressing appreciation for my design and maintenance work more often. The frontal cortex, which governs sophisticated judgement and foresight, isn’t fully developed in most people until they’re around 25. This is why young people aren’t allowed to rent cars: they really can’t be trusted with other people’s lives or valuables + fast decision making before then.
He also grew up being a frequent target of narcissistic abuse, and developed some defense and coping mechanisms which he is coming to recognize as maladaptive in other situations. On his own, he’d recognized a need and made a conscious decision to practice compassion more deliberately, just weeks before I asked the questions that led to his disclosures. That had also made a noticeable change. He was listening to me better and actually considering my meanings and feelings, instead of reflexively shutting me down when he didn’t understand things. He’d also begun meditating, which he said improved his sense of inner calm and relieved some anxiety. I’m sure his new observance has a great deal to do with the peacefulness of that pivotal conversation we had.
In addition, he has Asperger’s syndrome. I’m aware of how this affects his theory of mind, social signal processing, emotional regulation, and ability to generalize from specifics in relevant ways. I helped him identify his condition early last spring, and he’d begun working to understand how this condition affects his experiences and interactions. We adopted some coping practices to prevent and relieve overwhelming situations. That had already led to a few positive changes.
And he grew up in our deeply patriarchal society, which taught him to win all the time despite the “external costs” that might arise, to ignore messages of refusal, to ignore his own feelings of vulnerability and doubt, and to treat women like objects, or children, or servants. He has begun recognizing examples of rape culture and toxic masculinity, and making some inferences about their interplay and the nature of liberation work.
I think he was fundamentally missing many important premises about basic respect, and he finally took some time to consider their validity. Premises like “women are fully-qualified humans who deserve personal respect and consideration.”
He has a very long way to go.
For about half a day, he did try to convince me that it was my fault he’d never learned good consent practices because he kept having to support me emotionally, so he never had time for the material on consent that I’d asked him to read. I showed him the collection of a half-dozen articles I’d curated and emailed him two years earlier, after he violated and hurt me a different time. He repeated that he did not employ good consent practices because supporting me during crises kept him from giving the matter priority. “This is the consequence,” he told me, of his providing emotional support. I reminded him that even our first night together had not been consensual. Even then, the emotional labor needed to avoid raping someone who was verbally and physically resisting was too much for me to expect from him.
Then he backed down and admitted that his sexually abusive behavior was not my fault. He told me he was sorry for assaulting me several times. He told me he knew he had to fix his behavior.
Later that day, he had that heart-opening conversation with his old friend. And the next afternoon, he told me about several of the other times he’d hurt women. He took the first step toward being accountable for his actions.
I know this conversation sounds convoluted. But it’s not the worst argument I’ve ever seen, blaming a victim of sexual exploitation for the perpetrator’s actions. It’s not even close to the worst. In fact, it might be the very best, since it’s the only one I can recall that ended with an apology and an admission of responsibility by the perpetrator.
Most people who cross the lines he did never develop the insight or courage to recognize and admit their wrongdoing, but he did both.
He told me he’d never read any of the zines or articles or books I’ve given him to help him learn good sexual consent practices, or conscientious, consensus-driven practices around any kind of negotiation. He saw no value in it. For years, he ignored me when I expressed unwillingness, pain, or desire. And he dismissed the literature I provided to share the ideas and methods behind basic consent and mutuality.
He’s reading it now and taking notes. His insights so far are very promising. He’s seeking help, with support from friends and family and hopefully some appropriate professionals. There may yet be good outcomes for him. But my optimism for him is very cautious.
I am troubled by the ostentatious virtue-signaling I have seen from him in the last few weeks. He blogged about his conversion to a new faith a few days before he admitted his serial assaults. In that post, he credited his practice with “[helping him] resolve a longstanding problem with [his] girlfriend.” I’m not entirely sure what he was referring to, but the miracle-cure tone makes me profoundly uncomfortable. I can’t tell how much of his enthusiasm reflects genuine change, and how much is transitory.
He’s written eagerly in recent weeks about how his new appreciation for patriarchy and truthfulness is informing his respect for women. But he isn’t being fully truthful about the extent of his assaults: not the number of people he hurt, nor the degree of violence, nor the extent over time. I realized this after he spoke to two of our mutual friends, and the advice he said they gave him clearly did not correspond to the disclosures he made to me: they congratulated him on recognizing some mistakes and beginning to recognize implicit sexism. They told him how societal influences partly govern our behavior attitudes, and he seemed very happy with that. I followed up and confirmed that they had counseled him in that way because he had not told them how many people he had hurt, or how badly. Both said they were still happy to support him in his growth, but they would have advised him very differently if he had been forthcoming with a fuller truth.
He’s expressed skepticism about many of the steps regarded by subject matter experts as necessary for someone like him to recover from his degree of abusiveness and dysfunction. Many things he has said to me indicate that he is still unaware of both the immediate pain and the long-term damage of his actions. His sense of accountability strikes me as very juvenile. I know he feels guilty, but his insight about the harm of his actions seems shallow, while his skill in rectifying these harms is novice.
He blogged about humility, and his recognition of how much he has to learn and to unlearn. A few days later, he said he wanted “to attract a more diverse audience” to his classes, and “teach classes on subjects non-rich non-white non-male people might disproportionately be interested in [like] the history of women’s rights.”
I think every level of irony about this escaped him, completely.
After I saw how he had been only partly truthful with the first people he sought counsel from, I contacted the next friend he was going to speak with, despite not knowing them well. I told them I knew he had not been fully honest in his accounts to other advisors, and that they deserved to have the whole picture instead of being misled by a fractional account. I outlined the history: that he had assaulted several people over several years, and raped someone he’d met on on a first date after her explicit verbal refusal of intercourse. I sent them the same screenshots I’d sent to Tinder, where he told me how long ago each assault had occurred.
They responded by saying they’d been on both sides of sexual assault questions, that rape can be hard to define, that his actions didn’t mean he was a bad person, and that they’d been dealing with things like this since they were 14 and knew how to handle them. Even though they are almost a decade younger than I am, they seemed to assume their experience and expertise are greater than mine. They made it explicitly clear that they were “his person” and would support him regarding this matter, while I should not expect supportive attention from them. Fortunately, I had the support I needed, but I was surprised that they seemed to regard supporting him as being strictly exclusive to supporting me: I thought I was still one of his people, and he was one of mine.
Much of what they said during our brief exchange chilled me: the minimization, the defensiveness. It echoed many, many conversations with the predators and their enablers from that Burning Man camp. That similarity reminded me that I had already written a manual to handle this kind of situation. All I could think to do was drop the URL to the pamphlet I’d written years earlier, and book the hell out of that conversation. The one thing that gave me hope was their emphasis on honesty, and their assurance that they would help him work towards restitution.
After my former partner met with that friend, he thanked me for breaking the ice for him to disclose the full extent of the abuse he’d perpetrated. He shared with me some ideas about sexual orientation and gender identity that he hadn’t considered before, and I found his new thoughts interesting. But later, I realized he had not mentioned any further reflection on consent practices or accountability for his harmful actions. I couldn’t tell if it had come up at all.
Not all influence is positive. Not all support is healthy.
Over the years, statements like theirs have been directed at me innumerable times: statements in which the apologism, belittlement, condescension, didacticism, dismissal, entitlement, minimization, and overt disrespect have been as clear or clearer than in these examples. People say things like this to me at work, on the street, at parties, and everywhere else I go. Of course, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re bad people, but it does mean they are contributing to a serious problem.
When I happened to mention comments like this to my former partner, he frequently tried to explain to me why I should not have a problem with it, or else asserted that I was upset for no reason and without any predictable pattern. Sometimes, he became angry when I tried to show him how the issues were related. Other times, he accepted my statements about how my day had gone without argument and even sympathized with me, though he regularly mentioned he thought he was shouldering “an outsize burden” of support by doing so.
Earlier this year, he told me I was gaslighting him, and I believed him. For weeks, I feared myself, not understanding when or how I had done something so damaging to him. Eventually he specified that I had done this by saying that he clearly did not understand consent, after he violated an explicit boundary of mine by sending me a graphic photo without asking first. That is how I learned he did not know what the word gaslighting meant before he used it to describe my actions. When he found out its definition, he apologized for mislabeling what I had done so badly. He didn’t make that specific accusation again. He still interpreted my expressions of pain caused by his actions as attacks against him, but less often and less fiercely.
Because I lacked the vocabulary to name what was happening, I never considered any of his behavior toward me abusive until after I broke up with him. Now that I have educated myself on the tactics of verbal abuse, I’ve been able to identify why so many of our conversations were painful and confusing to me [3]. I don’t believe he employed these tactics out of deliberate malice or with conscious desire to control me with pain or fear, because the frequency and intensity with which he used abusive verbal tactics gradually diminished over time. Slowly, he learned better ways to express himself and to respond to other people. I believe he wanted to behave kindly and respectfully, and wanted to stop being thoughtlessly hurtful. But he did not stop, and it hurt every time.
I’m not seeing him anymore, at all, for the time being. He’s not safe for me. Maybe someday he will be safe enough for me to be around him.
I go through this too often. I’m tired of writing books to convince people to treat me with respect and to stop committing crimes against me. I just want to do science and have a nice time with my friends and build things. Instead I’m fighting a stupid war where victory means being sexually assaulted incrementally less often. I’m tired of being raped and exploited. I’m tired of fighting to prove that I should be treated humanely. I’m tired of cleaning up after sexual assaults. I’m tired of doing make-up homework for rape. I don’t want to live like this. [4]
My purpose in sharing this with you is not to shame anyone, or dox anyone, or hurt anything. My purpose is to inform you, so that you can make the best decisions possible for yourself and for the people you are close to. I want to promote informed consent and realistic awareness of what life is like, so that we can be effective in making things better. That requires honesty, even about uncomfortable subjects. We have to be honest with ourselves, and honest with one another.
Exploitation sucks. Violence sucks. Respect is better.
We need to talk about exploitation, violence, and abuse: to come to terms with them, and to work out how to move forward.
Sex should be a personal choice: a mutual decision, an act of will and consensus. That is exactly why we cannot afford to keep secrets about how it is negotiated.
We have to build better frameworks for addressing these issues.
I cannot do this on my own. This requires your participation.
If you assume sexual assault is somebody else’s problem, it will keep being a problem for everybody around you.
Here is my updated guide on basic social skills and responses for in-group sexual assault. Please use it responsibly.
Sincerely,
Khayah Brookes
***
Correction, 7 December 2018: The original version of this letter stated that my former lover broke a no-contact agreement we’d made, in order to invite me to classes he was teaching. It is possible that I did not receive a notification for this invitation when he first sent it, and that I mistakenly believed that a subsequent reminder notification actually indicated its arrival, after we made the no-contact agreement. It is not my intention to misconstrue any facts for any purpose, so I have removed that sentence.
Update, 19 February 2019: After reviewing the chat conversation, I see now that I paraphrased someone less than accurately. My former partner’s friend actually said that “rape has a broad definition” and “nobody wants to think of themselves as a bad person.” These phrases have a substantially different flavor and tone than I remembered. I tried to consult the chat record when I wrote this article but could not find it; I found it today, and I feel differently about what they said now. I am working on rewriting the relevant paragraphs to reflect this. In the moment of vulnerability when I approached that person for help, I felt more shut down than their actual words warranted. In retrospect, they seemed more distracted than cold. I was shaken, and nervous about contacting them at all, and I interpreted their responses in light of the harsh experiences I’d had before.
Update, 23 February 2019: I won’t be reworking those paragraphs. They’re an honest reflection of my perceptions at the time I wrote this piece. When I approached that acquaintance, I was scared and hurt but determined to do the best I could to promote safety and sad but necessary truth, while also doing my best to make sure that my former partner had accurately-informed supporters. The fear and profound betrayal I was navigating shaded my perception of the interaction, but that doesn’t mean they did anything wrong. They actually handled it very well, especially considering how our exchange occurred over IM without our having seen one another in many months. In fact, most of the people I approached for assistance after all of the events in this letter did pretty well. Only a minority had counterproductive or devastatingly destructive responses. I feel very fortunate to have such wise and sensitive friends and family.
The Black Rock City Ranger who responded to my report at Burning Man also provided an update: in 2018, the Rangers succeeded in a long-term effort to lift the mandatory reporting requirement. This means that victims of assault may now decline to interact with police after reporting an assault to the Rangers. In my case, that requirement meant that I had to wait with my attacker for over two hours for police to arrive at a Ranger station, simply to tell them that I didn’t want to file a formal report. I am very glad to hear of this meaningful step towards restoring survivor autonomy.
I wish my former partner peace in his journey.
I am willing to provide the full revision history of this document on request.
