Best selling author, Jessica Knoll, tells what it is like to be assaulted.

[dstark]

There are many sexual assault threads.

I read in many places, including here on CC, how victims should behave and act before, during, and after being assaulted.

It is such bs.

Here in Jessica Knoll’s voice…

http://www.lennyletter.com/life/a316/what-i-know/

                                    To all the TifAni FaNellis of the world,                                                                                                   I know. 

It means I know what it’s like to not belong, I waffle in response to readers, usually women whose albatrosses I can sense, just as they sense mine. What I don’t add: I know what it’s like to shut down and power through, to have no other choice than to pretend to be OK. I am a savant of survivor mode.

[greenwitch]

I read that a few days ago, it is excellent. What a wonderful story about being approached at a book signing and finally deciding to tell the whole truth.

[dstark]

Oregon State apologizes to rape victim 15 years later.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/oregon-state-university-sexual-assault_us_56f426c3e4b02c402f66c3b9?

In June of that year, Tracy, then 24 and living with her parents, reported to police that four men had gang-raped her at a party. Two of the accused assailants, she said, were OSU football players.

What happened next was disappointing, to say the least. The accused men implicated each other in interviews, but prosecutors did not share that information with Tracy — essentially leading her to believe her case was weaker than it really was. Based on that bad information, Tracy ultimately decided to stop cooperating with prosecutors, and the case petered out. The state destroyed her rape kit without telling her, and before the statute of limitations expired. OSU, it would later be revealed, only punished the two accused players with a one-game suspension and community service.

So by the time Tracy told her story to a reporter, in 2014, she didn’t have particularly warm feelings for Oregon State. But then she received something she never expected: an apology.

[HImom]

Wow, a 15 year belated apology to stir up the PTSD from a gang rape. Hmmm, you wish OSU did more, but glad they are leading reform now. Go Beavers (their real mascot)!

[poetsheart]

Jessica Knoll’s story (as well as that of the Oregon State rape victim’s) is heart-rending. It hurts so much to know that gang rape is something that still so frequently occurs, and still has much the same social and psychological fallout for its victims. How can it still be that virtually nothing has changed for rape victims over the past 100+ years?