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  1. In the fall of 2016 …

In the fall of 2016 …

In the fall of 2016, Netflix came out with a documentary, Audrie and Daisy, about the rape of three teenage girls and the abuse and cyberbullying the young girls and their families faced following the assaults. Audrie Pott, a fifteen-year-old high school student, was sexually assaulted by three or more teenagers, and nine days later died by suicide. Daisy Coleman, a fourteen-yearold high school student, was raped by a teenage boy. Both rapes occurred in 2012, but the girls had no knowledge of each other and their experiences—Audrie lived in California, and Daisy lived in Missouri—but their pain, like the pain of other rape victims, was communal.

After the sexual assault, Daisy had attempted suicide on several occasions. And on August 4, 2020—eight years after her sexual assault—Daisy died by suicide. Ostensibly, both of the girls survived the assault, but Audrie died within days, and Daisy died within years. So what exactly does it mean to survive?

Following Daisy’s death, I read a poignant piece in Jezebel written by Emily Alford about the myth of “surviving”:

Coleman’s recent death by suicide is a grim reminder that stories around sexual assault—even responsibly told ones like Audrie & Daisy—are narratives crafted for audiences, not reflections of the real experience of surviving sexual assault. Grieving sexual assault isn’t a ladder, elevating the survivor until they overcome the horrible thing that’s happened. Grief born of sexual trauma is a ball of knots, the cycle beginning and ending afresh without warning, overlapping and intertwining so that the lines between emotions become difficult to parse and the edges begin to fray. “Why can’t you just get over it,” is a heartless refrain from rape apologists and deniers in the beginning. But over time, the push for a final, permanent move to acceptance comes from all sides, not just the wrong ones. A story has to end 1.

In the years after her rape, Daisy co-founded the non-profit organization SafeBAE, which was a student-led national organization aimed at ending sexual assault among middle and high school students. Even as Daisy committed her life to fight for change; to prevent sexual assault; to combat the harassment associated with an assault; and to educate about rape culture, she couldn’t protect herself from its grip.

According to RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network), ninety-four percent of women who are raped experience symptoms of PTSD during the two weeks following the rape; thirty percent report symptoms of PTSD nine months after the rape; thirtythree percent contemplate suicide; and thirteen percent attempt suicide.2

1 https://jezebel.com/daisy-colemans-death-lays-bare-the-myth-of-surviving1844638046?utm_campaign=Jezebel&utm_content=1596819064&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_source=twitter

2 https://www.rainn.org/statistics/victims-sexual-violence

To quote from Alford’s Jezebel piece again, “the very nature of PTSD means that the body is locked in a prolonged state of fight-or-flight response, playing out the trauma in fits and starts. Even the term survivor is inefficient, indicating that the person who has experienced sexual violence experienced it in the past and survived—not that they are currently surviving, day-to-day, an experience that is still happening irrespective of the actual date of the violence.”

In closing her essay, Alford lambastes rape culture—prevailing social attitudes that have the effect of normalizing and trivializing sexual assault and abuse, and further, norms and institutions that protect rapists, promote impunity, shame victims, and force women to be proactive in preventing their own rape(s)—as a form of gaslighting:

In addition to surviving the assault, survivors must also survive the knowledge that law enforcement, the court system, their neighbors, and lawmakers simply don’t care about their rapes or even believe that they happened. It’s a cultural gaslighting—we applaud victims for coming forward while maintaining a legal system meant to protect rapists. […] Even as we culturally elevate people like Daisy Coleman, applauding her courage while making her rape a highly visible representation of a greater problem, we erase the reality of rape survivors— rendering their long-term suffering invisible, even in a national conversation about their rapes.

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