So it goes

by Ritu Kelotra

"I can't go on any more. My entire body still hurts, and I don't how to make it feel better. The life that was inside of me two weeks ago has escaped. It feels like a large, obtrusive, strong, dirty, hard, painful, disgusting something has taken over my body. Something is inside of me, and it won't go away."

— From the diary of a rape survivor

Rape is a harsh reality. We often might think about the word and know it's bad, but never understand why. As "normal" members of society, rape is something we don't do. As men, we know not to take advantage of women, and as women, we never want men to take advantage of us. But it still happens.

One out of four women is raped every day. We might look at the figure and think that's a lot of women. But realistically, that's one of my roommates. That's one of your roommates or one of your sisters or one of your girlfriends, too. Those one out of four women raped everyday are "normal" members of society. The men who rape those one out of four women are "normal" members of society, too. But rape is not normal and should not be treated as a normal part of society. All too often, it is.

An acquaintance of mine was raped one year ago. She was raped in her Ohio University residence hall, but not by an OU student. At first she didn't say anything about it to anyone. She kept quiet for almost two weeks. One day she finally told her closest friends, and then I eventually found out through the grapevine.

A few nights after people found out, her name came up in discussion. The topic was relatively nonchalant at first, but the knowledge about her rape came up. I was present.

I stressed that I was upset about hearing what had happened to her. I said I wished I could talk to her and give her some kind of support. The thought of this happening to her was awful, I said. I expected everybody to agree with me, but they didn't.

One of the guys made a comment about the "truthfulness" of her allegation. I asked him what exactly he meant by the "truthfulness," because there is no continuum of truth. Either something is true or it isn't. Was he implying that she was lying? He was. He went on to say that rape is a bad thing — a terrible thing he said. A horrid, sad, sick, twisted thing. Being raped must be so horrible; hard to get over; impossible to forget; too much to handle. But it didn't happen to her.

Of course I went into a fit of rage. Screaming, yelling, fighting because he had the audacity to immediately dismiss that a woman was telling the truth about being raped.

But his reasoning makes more sense now. He's still wrong, but I can almost pick apart his asinine reasoning. He sees rape as a word, not an act. He knows that rape is a violation — something about a man forcibly entering a woman. But he doesn't see this violation. He doesn't understand this violation. To him, the violation is something he hears about in an all-encompassing word — rape - that his mind cannot fathom.

In much the same way, I cannot imagine what goes on inside a rapist's head. I doubt that a rapist has premeditated a rape. I doubt he's ever raped before. But he is sick enough to try it for the first time, because something isn't going his way. There is something that he wants, and he can only have it this one way: By viciously attacking his prey. But we've all heard it before. We know it's sick and the image can scare us to death.

How do we get this image out of our minds? Instead of knowing rape as a word, how does it become an act, so that we can better understand the seriousness and the sickness of such a thing?

We make it public. We talk about it and rub in the face of society until it ends. If someone says a woman or a man lied about being raped, we cannot sit quietly and contemplate that "maybe he or she was lying." He or she wasn't.

A woman was just raped. Her body was broken into and the person she is split apart. Safety does not exist in her vocabulary. Imagine that. Are your assumptions going to change how she feels? Thinking that a woman is lying about a rape doesn't solve anything. It turns into a vicious cycle of heresy. The pain of actually being raped far outweighs the point in doubting that someone was raped.

The point I am making is simple: If a woman said she was raped, she was. If we are ever going to make the rapists go away and expunge their twisted ways from our society, we cannot blame the woman. Strange, dark-age dwellers still blame rape on a woman — short skirt, red lips, high heels — but we're too educated to do that. Accusing a woman of lying about rape is blaming the victim, too.

As soon as anyone says a woman is lying about being raped, that's another rapist gone free. Again, here goes one in four.

Kelotra can be reached at ritu_kelotra@hotmail.com. So It Goes runs Tuesdays.