When you've navigated the treatment and recovery world for awhile, you are inevitably exposed to some very tragic, heartbreaking stories. You hear about the fallout from truly dreadful people doing unspeakably horrific things to innocents, oftentimes children and youth. You acknowledge, and reluctantly accept, your own tragedies.
You see, very few people wake up one morning and think, "Today I'm going to do something really radical to destroy my body." It takes certain events, certain settings, certain genetic predispositions, to cultivate an environment in which eating disorders and self injury (and also alcoholism and drug addiction, though I have no personal experience with those) will develop and thrive. To summarize, it takes a lot of trauma to make a person not only willing but driven to self-destruct.
It is with this knowledge that I approach the recent media firestorm regarding what one ignorant and ill-informed politician called "legitimate rape." Now, I will not be addressing issues of abortion or pregnancy; though I have my own very strong opinions on those subjects, this is not the appropriate forum in which to express them. Rather, I want to go to the heart of the matter and address the act itself: what is rape, how is it defined, to whom does it happen, and what are the long-term ramifications.
Rape is a violent power-act wherein an aggressor sexually violates a victim. This can occur after a victim has clearly said no (is that "legitimate rape?"), when a victim is unable to give consent due to incapacitation i.e. mental/developmental problems or alcohol or drug use (is that "legitimate rape?"), or when the victim is below the age of consent (is that "legitimate rape?"). There are other situations as well, but the previous three are the most oft-cited.
Rape does not just affect young women of college-age, although many popular TV programs would have you believe that. It happens to children and the elderly, men and women, and people who inhabit socioeconomic spheres. Rapists, though they often personally have a "type," collectively do not discriminate.
The long-term consequences are many and dire. Some survivors (and I was very nearly one of them) simply choose to end their lives, too overwhelmed with pain and shame to imagine life will ever be okay again. Some survivors, like myself, develop very dangerous and violent self-destructive compulsions, starving and throwing up and cutting in an effort to numb out the constant onslaught of memories and emotions. Some survivors fall into the void of addiction, doing anything and everything necessary to escape the hurt.
Some survivors fare better than others. They have the support of family and community, professionals and spiritual leaders, and they are better-equipped to face the long and bumpy road to recovery. Even these people have certain inner scars that will always twinge.
My point is this. No person - certainly no politician without understanding of the intense, life-changing trauma of sexual assault - has a right to qualify any kind of rape as "legitimate" or "illegitimate." Unless someone has walked in these shoes (and I pray every night that no one else ever will), he has no business judging the journey of a survivor.
