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Illinois Issues: A Personal Story

Carter Staley
/
NPR Illinois | 91.9 UIS

Editor's Note: A version of this story appeared in the February, 2015 edition of Illinois Issues. 

Three different men sexually assaulted me when I was a sophomore in college. That was 30 years ago or so. In that time, I've come to re-evaluate what it means to be to be raped. And I've kept in mind what I can do to help protect my daughter, who, at 22, is a little older than I was in the early 1980s when I was assaulted while a student at Eastern Illinois University.

It is rape when a woman is passed out during an attack, as I was two of the times it happened to me. I was very drunk and high those nights I was attacked. On two occasions, I awoke during rapes, not remembering how I came to be in the situation. In one case, my attacker was a date. In the other, the man assaulting me was a teacher. Naively, I followed him to a hotel. While he was raping me, I awakened, horrified. The same wakeup call came for me on the floor of a darkened apartment where I had gone with a date. We had been kissing, but before I passed out, I had not managed --nor wanted -- to give my consent for sex.

At the time, it did not occur to me in either case that I been victimized, and there was little encouragement from society at the time to do so. As I recall, few of us had heard the term date rape.

I have since come to realize that rape is rape any time there is no consent. It took me years to overcome feeling guilty because I had "let" myself become a victim. I was dead wrong. Whether the woman has been drugged by her assaulter or imbibed at will and forced to have sex, it is
rape. It is a violent, hate-filled act worthy of prosecution.

Not seeing the men in the encounters as rapists, it didn't occur to me all those years ago to report the incidents. As I have said to my daughter, and my son, it is never wise to drink or smoke to the point of extreme inebriation. I was blasted out of my mind, but in no way did it excuse either man from rape, especially not the college instructor who found out that I had been attacked on the street after the incident in his hotel room. As if it had just occurred to him, I remember him saying, "I raped you, didn't I?"

I don't remember whether the other rape by an acquaintance occurred before the night I was sexually assaulted by a stranger while walking home from a party at about 4 a.m.

The man crossed a street to where I was walking and asked for a lighter. As I reached to get it for him, he wrapped his arm around my neck and told me that he had a knife. He pushed me to the ground, pulled my clothes down and assaulted me under a streetlight. This time, I pulled my clothes back on and ran screaming back to my apartment, which was just a block or so
away.

This time there was no disputing whether I was assaulted. But I found several excuses to not report it -- which created good reason to feel guilty. I knew that reporting the incident might help the police to catch my attacker, whom I had gotten a pretty good look at. For days later, I would see men who remotely looked like him, feel as though they were looking at me, and shudder. I made the excuse that if my parents had known about the attack, they would pull me out of school. I have no idea whether this would have happened because I never uttered a word to police, much less my family. I also made the excuse there was no physical evidence because of the nature of the assault.

Illinois Issues is in-depth reporting and analysis that takes you beyond the headlines to provide a deeper understanding of our state.

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Illinois Issues is produced by NPR Illinois in Springfield.

Maureen Foertsch McKinney is news editor and equity and justice beat reporter for NPR Illinois, where she has been on the staff since 2014 after Illinois Issues magazine’s merger with the station. She joined the magazine’s staff in 1998 as projects editor and became managing editor in 2003. Prior to coming to the University of Illinois Springfield, she was an education reporter and copy editor at three local newspapers, including the suburban Chicago Daily Herald, She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Eastern Illinois University and a master’s degree in English from UIS.