This post is not about my normal subjects, to which I’ll return another day.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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’.)<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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?<\/em> – and boom, adrenaline reaction. What had been a fantastic day was suddenly crap because of psychic residue from something that happened sixteen years ago.<\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n I have checked and the only file I can see is a Burglary report you made on [date redacted].<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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.<\/p>\n Administrivia:<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div> This post is not about my normal subjects, to which I’ll return another day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[230],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307\/revisions\/311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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