Amber Smith
When I began thinking about my contribution to this anthology, I thought I knew exactly what I would write about: rape culture. This is, after all, an issue I feel so passionately about, and one I have already explored fictionally in my debut novel, The Way I Used to Be. And I’ve had so many incredible, moving, and validating discussions with readers about rape culture and what it means to be a survivor of sexual violence. But the more I wrote the more personal this essay became, until I realized that I couldn’t write about rape culture in the meaningful way I wanted to while continuing to exclude my own life experiences. I felt it increasingly important to openly acknowledge that I am a survivor of sexual assault, although I hadn’t felt comfortable sharing this publicly up until the writing of this essay.
Part of the reason is that I’m a very private person and it felt too personal to share (and on a practical level I wanted to maintain a clear separation between the fictional world of my book and my real life, as they are two very different entities). But if I’m being honest, I know the other part of the reason is silence. Silence is not only an inherent quality of rape culture itself, but in many ways, it has also been a defining force in my life, and it is something that I will probably always wrestle with to some extent.
I grew up in a military family, one that was very much characterized by a stoic, stiff-upper-lip mentality, especially when I was a little kid. There was always love in my family. But there was never a lot of communication. We didn’t talk much about our feelings or our problems. Our struggles—both those of my parents and of me and my siblings—were by and large private battles waged in solitude. (In fact, even as I write these words, my own inner child feels a little anxious that I am breaking some kind of unspoken rule encoded in my DNA.)
My father was in the army for more than twenty-five years and my family moved a lot, which particularly affected my older siblings, as I was not in school when we did most of our relocating. My dad served two tours in Vietnam and it would not be until much later that I realized he had been silently struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder for my entire life. At that time PTSD was not something people understood very well, and certainly nobody was talking about it. Looking back, I can see how PTSD influenced everything that went on in my family, keeping our interactions on the surface, often with a forced sense of calmness. It was almost as if we had all learned to build walls around ourselves, stuck in survival mode by proxy. And so we never ventured into the deep end of the emotional pool, but rather, we stayed in the safety of the shallow end, treading water. In fact, much of the closeness within my family didn’t happen until we were all adults.
In this environment, I learned early on to be quiet and agreeable. I was taught to not make waves, keep my head down, mind my own business, and turn the other cheek. Just ignore the bullies and they will go away was a familiar mantra. My parents were simply giving me the best advice they had in their arsenal, as all parents do. After all, these were the methods that had allowed them to move through their world when they were growing up. But I lived in a different world and I would learn that these methods would not be the ones that were going to work for me. Instead of making me strong and self-sufficient and resilient, as they were intended, they made me feel small and stagnant and uncertain of myself.
From a young age I felt pretty isolated from my peers, which I now know is extremely common, as nearly everyone can relate to the feeling of being alone. But at the time, I thought I was the only one who felt this way. As I entered school I was painfully shy, extremely introverted, and didn’t make friends easily. I had health issues and learning disabilities as a child that made me feel like an outsider. But I was sensitive and creative, and found ways to express myself through art, which has always been my saving grace. I often preferred the world of my imagination to reality, and that is where I felt the most comfortable. Out in the real world, I remember feeling like I just plain didn’t belong.
I was in second grade the first time I was sexually assaulted by one of my closest friends. It was not only an act of physical violence, but emotional violence, as well. We had been friends for years, we went to school together, played together, and from my perspective, were best friends, which was no small thing for me. We were playing at his house like we had many other times, when this assault happened. It came out of nowhere, and I remember distinctly feeling as if someone else had taken over this boy I knew so well—both his actions and his words seemed to be coming from somewhere else entirely. In retrospect, I believe (though I can’t know for sure) the reason it felt as if it was not really him is because he was doing to me what may have been done to him, playing something out that actually didn’t come from him. Regardless of why it happened, it was a devastating violation of trust and a betrayal of the bonds of friendship we shared.
I don’t know why there were not adults there to begin with, but I am thankful that his grandmother suddenly came home during the course of this event, because that stopped the situation from progressing any further. I know that I was visibly upset and shaken by what had happened. Clearly, when his grandmother saw me she must have realized something was not right, but she said nothing. So I ran away as fast as I could. And my friend soon followed behind, chasing me all the way down the street to my house. I’m sure he was trying to prevent me from telling my parents what had happened. I did tell, though.
I think it must have been a difficult thing for my parents to understand, let alone know how to help. I was so used to downplaying everything because that is how my family operated back then. So I’m not even sure I explained the situation fully or gave any real indication of just how severe, distressing, or traumatizing it really was. I’m not sure if they truly comprehended that I had in fact been sexually assaulted by my friend. After all, when we think about children being abused or assaulted, we often assume the perpetrator must be an adult, not another child.
There was no further conversation about it, at least not one that happened with me. Perhaps they felt that there was simply not much to be done. I probably seemed “okay” since I didn’t know there was another way to behave at that time, and so we all just acted normal, went about our lives, and never talked about again. This must have seemed the path of least resistance, and it is a story I have heard from so many survivors. But acting normal and ignoring what had happened began to make me feel like what happened didn’t even matter, like what happened wasn’t important. I felt like it was something I should be able to simply let go of and move on from, only I didn’t know how. Looking back, I realize what was happening under the surface was that I was beginning to feel like I didn’t matter, like I was not important.
It was several months later when I was assaulted again, this time by the same boy who had gotten away with it the first time, along with another friend of his. This time I did not tell anyone.
We moved to a different state shortly afterward, and by that point what happened no longer felt like something we were just not talking about; it felt like a secret—something I was not allowed to talk about. But secrecy breeds shame. And shame is a sneaky, shape-shifting creature that often changes its form and appearance. Sometimes it looks like anger or sadness, even numbness or calmness, and we create many different masks to hide it. My shame morphed into self-blame. For me, this seemed a logical conclusion, as I tried to make sense of my emotions. If I could manage to find a way to blame myself for being assaulted, then at least that meant I had some amount of control over what had happened, which felt a whole lot better than powerlessness. Of course, at the time I couldn’t see this internal and faulty logic. But it was then that I reached the point I was able, for all intents and purposes, to move on from what had happened.
But what I moved on to was silence.
This kind of silence is not simply a state of quietness; it is a disavowal, a denial of both the experience and the emotions attached to it, and with that, a forfeiture of healing. This kind of silence is like a cavity, a void that, for me, was ultimately filled with a profound sense of worthlessness. Sometimes when I think about this process of turning toward the silence, I visualize it as a tiny solar system: imagine you are like the sun, the center of your own universe, the protagonist in your own life story. The planets that surround you are the people and the things that happen in your story. But if you create an intense atmosphere of silence around one of these planets, its density grows and grows, until its gravity is so strong that before you know it, this planet is no longer orbiting you; you are orbiting it—it has become the center of everything in your life and you stand outside of it. Like a black hole, maybe you can’t even see it anymore, but you can feel it sucking in all the energy and all the light that makes up your life and your identity. The only way to stop it from devouring everything is to confront it.
But it would still be a long time before I was able to do that.
As I got older, and particularly in middle school, I was bullied pretty relentlessly, which is one of the things that made middle school one of the worst times of my life. I often look back on those years and realize how much inner strength I had hidden within myself to be able to make it through without being completely crushed. As an adult, when I speak about the experience of being bullied as an adolescent, I’m often asked, “Why were you bullied?” or “Why didn’t you just stand up for yourself?” These are always posed as harmless questions from people who are simply trying to understand, but it implies that many often think that if a child is bullied they must be doing something weird or wrong to incite this behavior, and unfortunately many kids who are bullied feel the same way. For a long time my answer was always a shrug followed by a mumbled “I don’t know.” But what I have come to understand is that my being bullied had to do with silence. Standing up to a bully may seem like common sense, a given, but not everyone (particularly young girls) is provided this simple message: you are worthy of standing up for yourself, you are capable of speaking up, and you don’t deserve to be treated badly. I never learned how to stand up for myself, or rather, I never learned that I should or that I had a right to—I was taught to let it roll off of me. In some instances, maybe that is the right course of action. But in chronic bullying, which is what my experience was, it’s almost like standing in the rain. You can only let the drops of water roll off of you for so long before it absorbs into your skin and begins weighing you down.
With my personal history of living in the shadow of a parent’s PTSD, and my own childhood assaults that I never dealt with or understood, I often picture myself during my middle school years as walking around with a giant invisible scarlet letter on my chest. V for victim. I was not a survivor then. Not yet. I was a victim. I felt like a victim. And that’s how people treated me. I was an easy target. One of the other major factors that played into the bullying and my low self-esteem was that I had never done particularly well in school. I received a lot of the “doesn’t apply herself” or “doesn’t work up to potential” comments on report cards, and that was always so upsetting to me because the thing was, I worked really hard, yet I skated by as a below-average student through much of elementary and middle school. I received some extra help at school in speech, reading, and math, in addition to the regular classroom lessons. But I was so quiet about my difficulties and didn’t test poorly enough to actually be diagnosed with any of the common learning disabilities like dyslexia or dyscalculia, processing disorders I would discover later in life I had been struggling with, so I never fully received all the help I needed. It wasn’t until seventh or eighth grade when, at last, there was a light at the end of the tunnel. I finally found methods of learning and studying that worked for me; I just had to stop trying to do things the way other students did. I began to excel in school, which was one of the first things to boost my confidence and help me to carve out my own path. This was a big moment for me, perhaps the first step to finding my own voice.
By the end of eighth grade I was on the honor roll, and as I started high school I was doing very well, getting As and Bs. With my increased confidence, I found that I was not being bullied anymore and for the first time in my life I was not so afraid of my emotions. At the same time, I also didn’t know how to deal with them, and for several years it seemed that every emotion I experienced came out as extreme forms of panic, anger, or sadness, and rarely anything in between. I was struggling with anxiety and depression (and unbeknownst to me, my own PTSD), not to mention some pretty significant anger-management and self-harm issues that I ultimately had to seek therapy to get under control.
My father had been extremely ill for many years during this time, and in fact nearly died when I was a freshman in high school, due to a long-undiagnosed (and ignored) thyroid condition that was slowly debilitating him from the inside out. I find it telling that the illness that was literally hours away from claiming his life stemmed from the throat area, where our voices are located—the voice that he couldn’t or wouldn’t use to talk about his own trauma. Thankfully he did recover, but soon after, my parents divorced, and my father remarried less than a year later. This breakup of my family and the abrupt blending of another family that included new stepsiblings caused a lot of turmoil. But looking back I feel like it was also the breaking open of so many of the things that had been kept in the shadows for so long.
I would realize in my high school years, amid all of this chaos and upheaval, a big part of what made my emotions and my experiences even more confusing is that I was also discovering that I was a lesbian, which is something I think I knew about myself even before I had the language to describe it. When I was in high school, LGBTQ people were not widely accepted or even visible, at least not in my corner of the world. I don’t remember there being a single out student in my entire school, though we were certainly present. There were also no Gay-Straight Alliances, as are now thankfully prevalent. At the time, I took my cue from earlier experiences to ignore it, to act like it didn’t matter, and to remain silent about it. This became another part of my identity I kept largely to myself until college, hidden from my family in particular, until well into my adulthood.
I share this part of my journey because I feel like so many of my experiences have been related: home life, school life, being assaulted, being bullied, being in the closet, and feeling like an outsider. All of those roads lead back to the same place: silence. And it is this silence that is at the core of rape culture.
“Rape culture” is a phrase we hear a lot these days, but I wonder if people really understand what it means. It’s more than just a theory or an abstract term—it’s a lived reality in today’s society, where people are taught how not to be victims rather than how not to victimize others. It’s a culture that promotes silence, fear, and shame, placing blame on victims rather than perpetrators. People who have been assaulted are often questioned about their sexual histories, whether their assailant was a stranger or an acquaintance, what clothes they were wearing, and the amount of alcohol they may have consumed, as if any of these factors changes or lessens the violation. Rape culture is a way of thinking that trivializes trauma and normalizes abuse and sexual assault as something that is an expected, even accepted, part of life.
I’ve spent the last couple of years talking with a lot of people about rape culture, and there are some frequent misconceptions that I’ve encountered. For instance, many people seem to think that rape culture is something that only affects people who have experienced sexual abuse and assault. But that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Rape culture is not simply an issue pertinent to survivors, but an issue that affects all people and one that society as a whole must confront. It is an insidious and often covert product of our culture as a whole, one that strips people of their voices and their power. Everyone is complicit in creating and maintaining it, and if it is to ever come to an end, it will require everyone to do so. While its violence may be implicit, that does not make it any less dangerous. It is the ongoing silence and the stigma of shame that feeds rape culture—ending it involves cultivating an equally strong culture of respect, validation, and compassion.
Another important misconception that I’d like to address about rape culture is that it is not only about physical assault or contact. It is also about unwanted looking, unwanted comments, and the judgment of the actions, decisions, and appearances of (usually) women. This would include occurrences such as “slut shaming” and “body shaming,” both of which serve to reduce a human being’s entire worth down to one criterion: her sexuality. It fosters not only a lack of external support and compassion, but it is so pervasive that it is even internalized as a lack of self-compassion and self-blame on the part of victims, as I felt so strongly in my own experiences, though I didn’t know why at the time.
Rape culture is also not a men-against-women situation. Men and boys are also survivors of sexual abuse and assault. And women often play a huge role in keeping rape culture thriving, as there are so many who are reluctant to engage in dialogue about sexual violence, and are even actively involved in the shaming of other women. What I’ve learned is that women and girls who shame other women and girls often do so because it is the easiest, and sometimes only, way many people can find to distance themselves from the very real fear that they could just as easily be violated, harmed, or judged in the same exact way. It is a painful truth to face, to be sure, but when it comes to silence and rape culture a big part of the issue is disconnection.
The disconnection is not only a lack of verbalization, it is also the lack of reception—even if your story is being shouted for all to hear, it will fall flat if there is no one there to receive the message. It was this disconnection, fueled by fear that prevented any of the adults involved in my assault(s), both my friend’s grandmother and even my own parents, to ask the questions that needed to be asked, or to try to understand what had happened. None of the answers would be easy, and would in fact only breed infinitely more difficult questions, but that is precisely why they need to be asked. Dialogue is the only bridge; it is the remedy to this breakdown that rape culture creates in how we relate to one another and how we show empathy for one another’s experiences.
It is this echo-chamber experience that I hear about over and over again, in countless messages and e-mails and even in-person stories from survivors who often share their struggles with me. I have never done any type of speaking engagement where someone hasn’t come up to me afterward to share their story of being assaulted, shamed, or silenced in one way or another. I think this is because so many people desperately need someone to listen, to care, and to simply believe them. These are women and men, adults and young people, who are not getting that validation anywhere else in their lives, and therefore they are not getting any help to find healing or justice either.
In one of the first public bookstore talks I gave about my book, I referred to my main character as a “victim.” I had barely begun speaking before I was interrupted by a woman in the audience, who stopped me and said something to the effect of “you mean ‘survivor,’ ” as if I’d simply used the wrong, politically incorrect word. And I went on to explain that I did, in fact, think “victim” was the right word, and that the story I was telling was the journey of moving from being a victim to being a survivor. This made her uncomfortable, and as I’ve talked to more and more people about this subject, I’ve found that it makes a whole lot of people uncomfortable. “Victim” has become a bad word, a shameful word. Of course, no one wants to be labeled a victim. And using the word “survivor” to describe oneself can be, and is, a deeply empowering experience. But if you feel that you’re not even allowed to acknowledge that you have indeed been victimized, then all the roads that lead to survivorship are essentially closed off, and you are left stranded and isolated and invisible once again.
“Victim” shouldn’t be seen as the bad word we’re not allowed to speak, made to carry all of the baggage of violence. This is yet another manifestation of rape culture. Because the terms “victim” and “survivor” are not simply interchangeable. There is a process of healing that has to happen to get from one to the other. And this is an ongoing process, not something you do once and you’re better forever. It is something you have to do every single day. Some days are easy, and other days are more challenging; it is not a linear progression. But I have found that a lot of people don’t want to hear about the dark days or the times of struggle. They only want to see the strong image of a person who has overcome. The danger in this is that victims—and I mean victims—of abuse and assault are made to carry a double burden of shame for feeling like they’re doing something wrong when they don’t yet embody that empowered image of a strong survivor.
It has often been in those times of darkness, when I felt weak or powerless, that I have found my deep reserves of inner strength, but only after years and years of denying there was ever any pain or violation to begin with. This is one of the major roadblocks that prevented me from healing, and it’s an experience I have heard repeatedly, not only from readers, but from some of the people closest to me who are also survivors. This “victim” versus “survivor” terminology is something I’ve always had trouble with, because, in truth, neither word encompasses the reality. They both limit how we think and talk about violation and recovery.
Rape culture is tricky, as it both wittingly and unwittingly keeps people from realizing their own power and is part of a larger, more nebulous system that is used to keep people in their place, contained in their boxes, closets, and individual fortresses of shame. It is even sometimes perpetuated by people who are only trying to help—for example, the woman who probably felt like she was performing a public service by trying to stop me from using the word “victim.” But even that small act in itself is a form of silencing and shaming. Ending rape culture is really about recognizing our humanity and honoring one another’s individual experiences. It is about the right to be safe, to be treated with basic dignity and respect, to be heard and seen without judgment, and to feel important, no more or no less than any other person.
I will be honest. Those dark days I mentioned—there have been a lot of them lately. There is a growing dialogue surrounding rape culture that has been taking place in recent years. For example, we’ve seen public awareness and discussion becoming more active and visible, from the high-profile Steubenville and Vanderbilt cases, to Jon Krakauer’s critically heralded book Missoula, even in the films The Hunting Ground and Audrie & Daisy, and the unbelievably weak sentencing of Brock Turner in 2016’s Stanford rape case. The dialogue itself is encouraging, but what it is revealing is that justice is not being served, survivors are not being taken seriously, and it seems as though many people in power simply do not think that sexual abuse and assault matters.
During the second presidential debate, I watched then-presidential-nominee Donald Trump stalking Hillary Clinton across the stage, repeatedly telling her, “You should be ashamed,” referring to her as a “nasty woman,” when just days earlier the recording in which Trump bragged and laughed about sexually assaulting women and being able to get away with it had been released. Yet there he was telling Clinton she should be ashamed. It chilled me to my core. He attempted, and clearly, to some degree, succeeded, in normalizing his hateful, degrading, and violent comments about women as merely “locker room talk,” the old boys-will-be-boys defense.
In the weeks that followed, nearly two dozen women from all walks of life came out of the shadows to tell the world that they had been sexually assaulted by Donald Trump—accusations that spanned decades. His response was to call them all liars, threaten to sue them, even claim they were not attractive enough for him to want [to assault]—anything to avoid admitting any wrongdoing on his part. This is nothing new, as we’ve seen in recent years, but the elevation and legitimization of the shaming and discrediting tactics that are used to keep survivors silent was brought to new proportions in this election. Politics aside, the simple fact that all of this was overlooked, forgiven (though never apologized for), and that he was still able to become president is the epitome of rape culture.
It has baffled and sickened me to witness what has since unfolded, not only as a survivor, but as someone who has watched as so many of my dear friends and loved ones—both men and women—who are also survivors have struggled to cope with recent events. The presidential campaign and election was nothing short of traumatizing. For many of us who felt as though the violence perpetrated against us didn’t matter, or that we couldn’t find any support, or that no one understood or even cared, it was like watching versions of our own traumas and our worst nightmares being played out on the world stage. These are all experiences that, for many, cause damage that can take a lifetime to heal, yet in one moment all those old wounds were reopened when this admitted sexual predator was handed one of the most powerful positions in the world.
The day after the election I tried not to panic. I tried to remain levelheaded and began thinking about the actions I would take to show my resistance, and I even tried to logically remind myself that all progress comes in cycles of ebb and flow. But later that day, I decided to take my dogs out for a walk, and no sooner was I outside—in my very own neighborhood, just one house down from mine—when I was gripped with an overwhelming sense of fear that rivaled what I felt directly after my first assault more than twenty-five years earlier. I don’t even know how I managed to get myself back inside, but I literally did not leave my house again for an entire week. I couldn’t. I felt as though I relived every moment of doubt and pain I ever had, reexperienced the worthlessness and the shame I had worked so hard to manage.
Those first days after the election were some of the darkest. But it was also in that time that I once again found the inner resolve to be my own advocate, once again found my voice and held fast to my principles and my own inner truth. To me this process is the true nature of healing and what it really means to be a survivor (of any adversity). It is not about never being scared or feeling hurt again. It is about allowing yourself to feel that way, but then also taking the next step to transform those emotions and channel that energy into something productive. Emotions are not bad, even the ones like anger or fear that are often labeled as such. These emotions always come up for a reason, and that is to let us know when something doesn’t feel right. Those emotions are what urge us to make a change or do something about the thing that’s not right. It is only when we don’t or can’t do anything that those feelings overtake us and become negative.
It was from this space that I began thinking about you, all of the young people I care about and write for, who are witnessing something devastating and deeply confusing happening in the world. I especially thought a lot about the mixed messages you are receiving about tolerance and violence and self-worth. On the one hand you are taught to love and respect one another, taught to honor your differences, and taught that America was built on the principles of equality, liberty, and free speech. These are the values that we’re all supposed to be upholding in our lives every day, yet these ideals stand in stark contrast to what we see happening right now.
So to the young adults reading this, what I want you to know is this: Do not be confused—you matter. Your experiences matter. Your voices matter. Violence and violation of any kind is never okay. It is never asked for and never warranted. Power that is gained by disempowering someone else is not power at all. Hatred is wrong—it always has been wrong and it always will be. And lastly, you are not alone.
When I was younger I was always seeking external validation—whether this was in academic pursuits, waiting for someone to stand up for me, waiting for someone to ask me for my story, or waiting for someone to assure me that I would still be loved if I came out. But what I found was that no amount of external validation was ever enough. Because I was still standing outside of my experiences, orbiting that old black hole. It was not until I was able to be really honest with myself and own my experiences, to be the support I craved, for myself, that I finally understood what true empowerment was. And the other thing I’ve found is that once I made this internal shift, I did start receiving the external validation I had once coveted, except it didn’t matter so much anymore. What mattered was that I knew I had my own back, my own respect, and my own compassion.
While I don’t claim to have all the answers about the current state of affairs, one thing I have learned beyond all doubt is that silence is the driving force behind not only rape culture but so much of the pain and ugliness and disconnection in our world today. And this is no accident. This happens specifically because our voices are the most powerful things we have, and that is why others will immediately and frantically try to take our voices away by any means possible. But the point is this: they can’t be taken away. We all have voices and they all count. They are formidable vehicles capable of creating change. Change happens when we speak up and when we listen, when we have empathy and compassion, when we stand up and empower ourselves and others. What happens next is up to all of us; it is what we create together.