I was never raped.

I have had sex I did not want before, during, and after, but this was not rape by my personal definition, not with these women. It was guilt and bad communication with people I loved at the time, or wanted to love enough to have sex. The sins were small and forgivable the next day, or the next hour.

I have been sexually harassed, mostly by women, and abused enough that I had a bruise on my neck from her teeth, but I was never raped. Few people took the harassment seriously - which involved harassing phone calls, rumors, and naked Polaroids of her stuffed under windows and doors at my house (as well as pictures of my underage friends being sexual, which she had people slip in lockers in the girl's school later as punishment for something) - because why would they? As described in Pagan Standard Times, instantly former friends rallied around this woman as she tried to defame me for stopping her from sexually abusing me in public, because an underage, skittish virgin who fought off the advances of a baldly sexually inappropriate woman twice his age and three times his size is clearly not the wronged party.

One older woman groomed me for potential sexual abuse, a fact I realized only as she fired me. If the genders had been reversed, a father and a chipper high school girl he specifically requested to babysit while he stayed home with the kids, I would have understood the ruse on sight. When it happened to me, I was oblivious until she guilty confessed she couldn't have me over anymore and shoved a couple of bills in my hand. In another world, one where her husband had not caught on, she might have attempted to rape me.

I was not raped, but I was mugged once. My friend, girlfriend, and I went down the wrong alley the one time in my entire high school career I dared to skip a class (eighth period gym, a class that calls out to be skipped, even by goodie-two-shoes like I was). Eight guys surrounded us and demanded money. My friend jogged away like he didn't know us. They didn't pursue him. I did not run because I was the only thing standing between this gang and my tiny girlfriend. The runt of the gang, a boy my mother had taught when he was in elementary school, ordered me beaten for not giving them money I did not have. My girlfriend threw three dollars at them and pulled me free after a few blows had landed on my face. I could not fight back without them sexually assaulting my girlfriend and beating me worse.

My friend waited for us a block away. He told me immediately that I was stupid, and he was justified in leaving us, that he had grown up in the city (he had not grown up in the city) and knew better than to stay and help us.

I dashed back to the school and called out for security guards to come help me. If I had run down the hallway during third period, the guards would have been on me in a second. When I wore a spiked bracelet to school once, I barely got through the door before three of them crowded to order me to take it off and keep it in my backpack. If I had sneaked into the theater or hit a vending machine, they would be yelling at me within a minute, but they did not come to my aid then.

I went into the main office and told the secretary I had been mugged and by whom. Finally, the police were called.

Until they got there, I sat in a chair, numb and rocking. I was always one of the best kids in the school, high grades and well behaved. I received a full scholarship to a local college because I was consistently in the top ten percent of my class. I did not smoke, drink, do drugs, or graffiti. When I was mugged, I had not even had sex. I was in drama club, Scholastic Matchup, and debate. I started an improv comedy troupe. No one deserves what happened to me, but I felt I in particular did not deserve it.

When the police came, I told them what had happened and that they could pick the gang up right now without much effort, as they were surely still posturing on Main Street. The police declined. Instead, they searched me, pulling everything out of my pockets and patting me down. I let them because I was dissociating - the first time I ever had - and assumed they would call another car to find the gang. With more force than necessary given that I was willing going with them to give a victim statement, they shoved me into the backseat of a cruiser. Students waiting for the bus pointed and whispered.

At the station, they brought me to a cramped, dark room to give my statement, which I did a few times to different officers before they would write it down. The whole time, they kept asking me if this were a drug deal gone bad. They assured me they would arrest me if they found out I was wasting their time or filing a false report out of revenge. How did they know I didn't ask to be beaten up or start a fight with eight people at once? I wore band t-shirts and baggy pants and had long hair. To the Beacon police, I fit the profile of a criminal.

When I named the ringleader, one of the officers flat out told me I was lying, that my mugger was a good kid and knew his son. When I stuck by my story, his jaw clenched as he insisted I was making a mistake. I asked why he didn't have some officers try to find them on Main Street, which only annoyed him more. I was certain the whole gang was still together. In retrospect, he didn't care if my story was true. He understood it was likely. It was my word (and face) against the reputation of his son's friend.

I told the police my friend's and girlfriend's names and numbers, my witnesses. He didn't bother writing these down. Lying drug dealers don't get to have witnesses.

I don't remember how long I was there before they would let me call my parents, but it was a while, the whole time telling me they would arrest me if it turned out this was about drugs. There was almost no sympathy for me, even as they photographed my growing bruises (which they told me weren't there, despite taking multiple angles and prodding the side of my face to see me wince).

A white haze fell over my memories as my mind began to repress the trauma. Even now, I know the story of what happened rather than actually remembering it.

For a week after, I would shiver uncontrollably, as though my body no longer made its own heat. I couldn't get warm even in a scalding shower or under all my blankets.

Days after the attack, I went to the orthodontist to get my braces adjusted. My jaw ached from where the blows landed. In another seat reclined a boy who could have been in the gang, in that he was the right age and race. I had a full panic attack -- also the first in my life -- while the orthodontist yanked on my wires. I wanted to cry and escape, but I knew I couldn't.

I did not see the aggressor of the gang at school, but he was not the type to attend when he wasn't suspended. I couldn't tell if his unnamed cohorts were there because their faces blended together by that point.

I began seeing a school counselor during my lunch period to try to process being victimized. It didn't do me much good and his interest in my attack was perfunctory, but it beat keeping it to myself.

For months, his many cousins would try to intimidate me into retracting my statement. One - a boy with whom I had never had any trouble previously and with whom I was as friendly as I was with most of the school - tried to drag me into his house so I could "make a phone call," but really because his friends were waiting inside to beat me without witnesses.

For half a year, the police would call me, telling me I had to show up to court at this time or that, unless I wanted to retract my statement, or that they would just release him of charges if I didn't show up to talk this whole "violently mugging me with a gang" thing with him. The police would threaten me if I didn't skip extracurricular activities to answer them. They would find me in the street - they were keen to devote the manpower to that task they seemed to lack in finding the gang - or when I was at school to ask me again what happened. They had me called down to the office several times to question me in the principal's office. He was, after all, a good kid who hung out with one of the officer's sons. Surely I was lying, since the other option was a boy who bragged about being a gang leader had mugged an honor student.

My girlfriend wanted nothing to do with my reporting the crime and told me to leave her out of it if I wanted to keep dating her. Her father could never know she had skipped a class. My best friend said he had witnessed nothing and would not speak to the police, so I should not mention again that he was there. He would not back up my story. Neither of them were directly victims, so it was not their problem.

He went to trial at some point without my knowing. None of his accomplices saw anything like consequences. My parents may have tried to insulate me from the specifics. His only punishment was a restraining order for six months, but that didn't cover his family, one of whom had a friend grab me when I was at a urinal so he could get off a punch so weak I actually laughed at him (before returning to class and telling my teacher, who sent me to the principal to report this; the puncher got a few days suspension, the grabber got nothing and told me never to mention him again or he would beat me up). The mugger tried to break the order once, screaming threats that he would shoot me from just outside the boundary. A bullet wouldn't respect a few hundred-foot order of protection. I ducked into a store until I calmed down. I may have asked the owner to call the police, but I only knew that they didn't want to be involved in what was going on.

The mugger was gone when I exited.

I did not feel safe for months.

He was arrested in a year or so for kidnapping and raping a young girl, a crime widely reported in the news. It was not his first or last violent felony. The sort of boy who mugs people with apparent police sanction is exactly the one who graduates to rape. Who knows what would have happened if the police had taken his juvenile offenses seriously and didn't just give him a slap on the wrist before putting him back on the street, since he was a good kid who was friends with one of the officer's sons, after all? How many fewer victims would be on his tally? How many crimes did the police brush off because they knew this kid? Could I have been saved that terror if the police didn't consider his crimes "boys will be boys"? I'm certain the girl he raped wished the police would take his crimes seriously long before he dragged her into his car.

In researching this, I see no evidence that he suffered the consequences for this rape and wonder if the police intimidated this girl and her family into dropping the charges against their felonious golden boy. This is the same police department that was in the news a few years ago because an officer used his position to coerce a witness into having sex with him, going so far as to plant evidence in her home and tell her he would arrest her if she didn't comply. It would not be wildly out of character that they exploited their influence in other ways.

Five years later, while working at a library, he came in to rent movies. I couldn't understand why he wasn't in prison after what he had done to that girl. The years had given him muscles and height. He did not recognize me. He had surely hurt too many people to keep them all straight. I started hyperventilating and begged one of my coworkers to please cover the desk until he was gone. Then I went into the break room and paced for fifteen minutes. He was a member of the tax-paying public and the library wasn't going to ask him to leave just because he was a violent felon.

Facebook has recommended him as a friend, because we apparently have mutual friends who do not care what he has done to the world, since he did not do it to them. Every few months, he would have a new account to replace the one I had blocked and Facebook would suggest him again.

After he visited the library, he caught a charge that stuck (aggravated assault) and spent a few years in jail. I can find no other evidence online of charges, but his name is common enough that research is muddy.

I was a straight, white, middle class boy at the top of my class and the police didn't believe me or care about protecting this criminal at the expense of another one of his victims. I don't for a second question why rape victims resist reporting what happened to them. I reported getting mugged and was harassed by the perpetrator's friends, family, and the police until I graduated, then my mugger kidnapped and raped a girl with apparently no lasting repercussions. That was exactly how the system wanted it.

I doubt I know a single woman who cannot tell a story about being sexually harassed, if not outright abused and raped. I did not know how to handle this information when I was young, a fact I have regretted since. For many women, this is just a fact of life, the onerous price one pays for living among men.

For the last seven years, I have worked with the spiritual successors of the boy who had victimized me in high school. It wasn't a choice to end up teaching English to this population, but it is the school that hired me when I was poor and I wasn't going to decline; I wasn't trying to restore my power or exact vengeance by proxy a decade later. My greatest takeaway from my time with this population of adjudicated residents - aside from the fact that they are not faceless monsters but deeply flawed boys who have committed sometimes egregious acts - is that they can be stopped before they get this far. They need to be told no, taught boundaries, and face real consequences early on, when their infractions are yanking pigtails and shoplifting candy. They need parents who care enough to not put up with the selfish evil they can unleash upon the world, parents who do not spend their child's early years abusing their kids (physically, sexually, emotionally) and teaching them by example how to be a felon. They need parents who give them limits and stick to them, even when it seems impossible. My students are with rare exception the sufferers of generational poverty and have almost always been conditioned to believe they are entitled to whatever they can take, since their parents aren't going to stop them. I see the same symptoms can be seen in rich dirtbags who think they are owed money (hiking lifesaving medication drastically because profit matter more than lives) or women's bodies ("but he was good at swimming! How can you think to punish him?"). The difference is that my students enter the carceral system before they hit puberty, become institutionalized, and most never find their way out again. The rich instead get slaps on the wrist, promotions, and adulatory think-pieces because they have lawyers and clout.

People don't rape because they want sex. Consensual sex is not that hard to find. They rape because they think no one will stop them and, for the most part, they are right. They rape because they think they are entitled. They rape because our society told them it was not rape or, if it was, who cares? That's how it has always been. Why would anyone report rape when they will only be degraded by the system again and their rapist will almost certainly go free while they are called lying sluts? Why would you report rape when most politicians on both sides have enough skeletons in their closets to better rechristen them catacombs? Why would you report rape when you don't know which officer is a rape apologist, best friends with rapists, or a rapist himself? Why report a rape when "boys will be boys," even though I was raised to think rape was antithetical to being a boy?

Or no, because that's not quite accurate. My parents made clear to me always that rape was a monstrous act committed by the worst of men. My cartoons, however, featured cavemen clubbing women over the head to drag them back home to rape. Some of my favorite movies growing up played rape for laughs or a way of getting revenge, and I laughed along. Until I was too old not to know better, I understood when to drop prison rape jokes, since the penal system supposedly condones or facilitates violent rape as a deterrent for further criminal activity. It was never "Don't go to prison because you will lose your freedom" but "If you go to prison, someone named Bubba will make you his bitch." I personally couldn't understand rape, but I was so enmeshed in a culture saturated with it, a society where it was so commonplace that it was reduced to tropes and clichés. What would it be like to have been sexually violated, then watch people talk about how much they love Sixteen Candles, Revenge of the Nerds, Back to the Future, and the list could go on? (Even my favorite movie, Almost Famous, involves William being coerced by women who want to "deflower" him, then he kisses an overdosing Penny because she won't remember it. That's more than a little problematic, though I can excuse it by hoping it was meant to be.) Even cartoons meant for children made in this century think nothing of making "Don't drop the soap!" jokes. Take a step back and consider about how disturbing that is. Why are we teaching our kids this?

I know rape victims, but I don't know one who saw her rapist suffer any punishment. The closest thing I have witnessed is a man going to prison for soliciting sex from a fake teenager, but I don't know that he managed to rape anyone prior to this. (I would not be surprised if he had given his behavior.) There is not much faith in the system and much public chatter of people who will go to bat for a famous rapist by denigrating his accusers, no matter how plain the evidence.

If I were a girl who had been raped, I would be terrified what would happen to me if I told anyone. Most people of both genders are more concerned about the rapist's welfare than those he has raped and do not see this as a problem. We will raise another generation of rapists and victims until we decide that this culture is abhorrent and teach them better through our words and actions.

Given what I have seen recently in the public discourse, I am not optimistic.

Soon in Xenology: 11/9. Zoo.

last watched: iZombie
reading: The Sleep Revolution
listening: fun.