This post is not about my normal subjects, to which I’ll return another day.
And in the news certain other people have been talking about victims being or not being “brave enough” to report – mostly people who seem to have never experienced let alone tried to report a sexual assault. So. Okay, I’m going to do this: here are my stories about reporting a burglary and reporting a sexual assault.
A couple of years ago someone tried to rob my house and was scared off by the alarm. When I came home I called the police who were nice and professional and unmemorable, as were the afterhours alarm repair company (the would-be burglar had tried to stop the alarm by ripping it off the wall), the carpenter who fixed my back door (no dead-bolt, they just kicked it in and splintered the frame), and my insurance company (who didn’t even ask if I had a dead-bolt). The police dusted for fingerprints but the burglar had worn gloves so that was that and life went on. It’s an easy story to tell, no-one ever questions it, everything’s cool.
On the 6th of September 1997, someone stopped across the street from my busstop, exposed himself and masturbated in a way designed to get my attention. (What do you even call this? All the terms I can think of carry a connotation of victimless crimes. He didn’t touch me, approach me, or speak to me, but I was nevertheless very much his target. So for the purposes of this post I’m going with ‘telepathic sexual assault’.)
I followed all society’s rules for how a woman should behave in order to not be a victim, and how a victim should behave in order to be taken seriously. To start with I was white, cis, and middle-class. I’d been working, not drinking. I was wearing ‘modest’ clothes. My assailant fit the conventional narrative of a stranger lurking in the bushes, not the uncomfortable truth that over 90% of rapes are committed by victims’ acquaintances, friends and family. I watched him leave so I could try and get a description. As soon as possible I went to the police kiosk in town and reported it. I was visibly and audibly shaken but forthright and articulate. I knew I wasn’t giving them much to go on, but I wanted it on the record in case he did it to someone else.
The police were nice and professional and told me that guys like this were cowards, so if anything like it ever happened again I should shout at or walk towards him.
When was the last time you heard the police say that if you come home to a burglary in progress you should confront the cowardly burglar?
The first time I told this story was three years later, on a mailing list, and doing it gave me an adrenaline reaction as if it’d just happened. Fortunately I was among friends (one of whom told me with authority that the police’s advice was balderdash) and it was cathartic and ever since then it’s just been a thing that happened one time.
So I thought. At lunch yesterday, thinking about Roast Busters and the perennial burglary comparison, I suddenly thought: after the burglary, the police dusted for fingerprints. Did they look for evidence after the telepathic sexual assault? I remember the mood at the time was very matter-of-factly that nothing could be done. Maybe I’m now forgetting a perfectly good reason for this. But. But. Suddenly there’s this question in my mind – Did they even think about looking? – and boom, adrenaline reaction. What had been a fantastic day was suddenly crap because of psychic residue from something that happened sixteen years ago.
I ended up writing to the police to ask what information I’d be able to access relating to that report. I expected there’d be some bureaucratic hoops to jump through. Instead, within a few hours I got an email saying:
I have checked and the only file I can see is a Burglary report you made on [date redacted].
So. I guess that answers my question. And honestly, having heard the far worse stories I’ve heard sixteen years on, I wasn’t surprised. It’s just one on the long, long list of reasons different people have for not reporting sexual assault: sometimes we do report it, but the police simply don’t keep any records of that report.
Administrivia:
- I’m happy for this post to be linked to or, per my CC-BY license, to be quoted or reposted with attribution back to this url.
- I welcome comments. That said, I won’t tolerate any kind of victim-blaming or rape apologia. Wishes for, or jokes about, rapists being raped in prison count as both of these things.
- If you want to do something.