Still Room for Hope

by Alisa Kaplan

  That was an intense period in my life. I was working full time. Two nights a week, I went to classes, and another two nights a week, I did the training for Project Sister. I need eight hours of sleep a night, and I wasn’t getting anywhere near that amount, but I powered through. I knew I was taking important steps toward what I wanted to do, and I wanted all of it so badly that I found I could stay positive and focused on my goals, even on the hard days. I wasn’t drifting anymore.

  Everyone in my life was thrilled to see that I was getting my life back on track. A couple of weeks after I decided to become a victim’s advocate, I got a call from Shirley, asking if we could meet for lunch. Since I’d gotten clean, we’d become very close; she and my mom and I would often meet up to go shopping together or for a meal. It meant a lot to me that she’d been supportive when she’d heard about my experience at the retreat in the mountains and the news that I was regularly attending church. As a person of faith herself, she knew it was the right thing, and she took an almost maternal pride in the transformation that was taking place in me. And of course, she’d been over the moon with excitement when she heard that I was planning to follow in her footsteps professionally.

  At lunch, Shirley dropped a bombshell. After forty years of helping victims, she was retiring to spend more time with her grandkids, and she had something she wanted to give me.

  The box she pushed across the table toward me was gorgeous: thick, textured pink paper, with a beautiful white cut-paper flower on the top. The box was so pretty, I thought it was the present.

  “Open it,” she said.

  Inside, there was a smooth, clear crystal, oval like a river stone, and the perfect size to fit into a small person’s palm.

  I knew what it was. Shirley had given this clear stone to every one of her victims to hold while they were on the stand. It was deliberately small enough to be carried, unnoticed, in the palm of a victim’s hand. Shirley would push the stone into your palm, saying: “This is the hardest thing you’ll ever do, and you are so strong for doing it. Hold this crystal while you’re up there, and put all of your strength into it, and I’ll pass it along to the next girl who needs that strength. You’ll be her strength, until she finds her own.”

  It was the crystal that had been taken away from me at my own trial.

  The crystal was a reminder to victims that they were strong, at the very moment when they felt weakest. It was a call to service: If they couldn’t be brave for themselves, they could be brave for other victims. It was a physical reminder that someone believed them and believed in them. And it was proof positive that there was an “after.” Other victims had gone through the valley of the shadow of darkness, and they had gone on. They had given the crystal back to Shirley, and with it, a piece of their strength.

  We hugged each other and cried. It was one of the most meaningful gifts I had ever received and became one of my most treasured possessions. I keep it on my dressing table, right in plain sight, so that I can never lose sight of what it means. I hold it myself sometimes, when I’m struggling and praying on the struggle.

  In March 2012, I became a state-certified victim’s advocate and crisis intervention counselor.

  I volunteer about eighteen hours a month at Project Sister. I respond to crisis calls from women (and they are mostly women) who have been sexually assaulted. I spend a lot of time with their families, as long as their family members aren’t the perpetrators of the crimes, counseling them on how they can help the survivor and what to do with their own feelings.

  With the survivors, I mostly listen. I hug them if they want a hug and hold their hands if they want that contact. I stay with them during their medical exams, explaining every step, as Tiare did during my own. I tell them that I’ll listen if they want to talk, and that I’ll answer every question they have, if they have any. But mostly I tell them that I’m here to be here. I’m here so that you have somebody here who is just for you. I’m here to support you and to remind you that you’re not alone. We will get through this, I tell them, and we will get through it together.

  The question they always ask is, “Why did this happen to me? Why did he think it was okay to do this to me?” I don’t have a good answer for that one, but I try to give them as much hope for the future as I possibly can. I understand what they are feeling because I have felt it, and often I can help them because I’ve been there myself. Better than anyone else, I know that sometimes all you can do is hold someone’s hand while she cries.

  Once I have my college degree, I will pursue a job as a victim’s advocate in the district attorney’s office. When I do, I’ll take Shirley’s crystal with me.

  Chapter Twelve

  Transforming the Road

  I’m often asked if it isn’t difficult, given my history, to work with women who have been sexually assaulted and abused. Doesn’t it bring up bad feelings and make it harder for me to move on?

  The answer is no. I have been doing this work as a volunteer for a couple of years now, and I truly see it as my purpose in life. There is a passage in the book of James that I have marked so I can return to it whenever I need a reminder of why service is so important:

  What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. (James 2:14–17, NIV)

  That passage resonates strongly with me, probably because it echoes what my counselor Tina had always said about showing up and doing the footwork. You can get sober, but if you don’t do the footwork, your sobriety is dead, even if you never touch another drop of alcohol or do another drug again.

  The same thing is true about faith. It’s my role, as a Christian, to bring light to the darkness. I honestly believe that if I’m not doing anything to serve God and my fellow humans, then I’m not doing everything I was put on this earth to do.

  My work at Project Sister is hard, and it was even harder when I first started doing it. Some nights I’d go home from a shift and I’d cry until I didn’t have any tears left. It still boggles my mind, the things that men do to women and girls, the things that human beings do to one another. Some of those nights, I didn’t even want to belong to this species anymore. Dealing with the little kids is the hardest for me; I think that’s true for most of us, including the advocates with twenty years of experience. Still, every time I pulled an all-nighter on the hotline or went to the hospital with a survivor, I knew I was doing something important, something that I was supposed to do.

  I stayed mindful of the idea, though, that God gives us our specific talents and experiences so that we can use them to serve. I knew I was a good listener and that the women and girls I worked with felt heard and comforted by me. When I was younger, I’d always been the person my friends came to for sympathy and comfort, to cry with and to ask advice. I am good at keeping secrets, as long as they’re the kind of secrets that should be kept, and I can listen with compassion and without judgment.

  But as I got more experienced, I realized that I was as engaged with the educational work I was doing at Project Sister as I was with the accompaniment work. For instance, I felt called to spend time with the partners and family members of the survivors. We call the partners, friends, and parents of sexual assault victims “secondary survivors.”

  There was a lot to help with. Sec­ondary survivors often feel surprised by the intensity of their own feelings. Sec­ondary survivors have to deal with the fact that they weren’t able to keep their loved ones safe. Isn’t it the first thing we pray, that those we love stay out of harm’s way? It’s common for secondary survivors to feel deeply helpless and angry that they weren’t able to offer protection, and they often benefit from finding someone of their own to talk to about those feelings.

  As I
knew too well from my own experience, secondary survivors often aren’t sure what to say to the family member who has been hurt. But what families and friends do say is important. The support and love that a survivor receives, especially in the immediate aftermath of an assault, can be a huge factor in their recovery.

  Families also need to understand that survivors may have difficulty, going forward, with intimacy and connection. I had a lot of problems with my dad in the immediate aftermath of my own rape—not because of anything in particular that he was doing, but simply because he was male. I know that it helps when I can tell a victim’s dad that he shouldn’t take his daughter’s anger or skittishness personally.

  Working with the families helped me to see that while I wanted to keep helping victims on a case-by-case basis, I also wanted a broader reach. My case had been so extreme and so high profile, the media attention so ferocious. Why had I been given such a platform if I wasn’t meant to try to bring these messages to as much of the world as possible?

  That became my new quest, to answer this question: How could I tackle big issues—topics such as victim blaming, or a culture in which it’s normal and accepted to reduce women to sexual objects—in a way that would not only benefit the specific girl whose hand I was holding, but a wider audience, too?

  I kept volunteering, and I kept praying. I knew God would give me a chance.

  A beautiful short video came out while the Steubenville rape case was still very much in the news. You can find it on YouTube.

  “Hey, bros, check who passed out on the couch,” a guy says to the camera. You can see an unconscious girl laid out on the sofa behind him. “Guess what I’m going to do to her,” he says—and like most women watching, I felt my heart seize up. But then he turns around, puts a pillow under her head, covers her body with a blanket, and leaves a glass of water near the couch, where she can reach it.

  He turns back to the camera and says, “Real men treat women with respect.”

  It’s only twenty-six seconds long, but it’s very powerful. One of the reasons it’s so powerful is that it dares to ask why we settle for so little when we could ask for so much.

  The story of the Good Samaritan is one of my absolute favorites in the Bible. I find it incredibly moving, a real testament to the power of humanity. I discovered recently that it was also one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s favorite stories in the Bible; he even references it in the famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

  I found that, in some of his other writings, King goes a step further. Yes, of course we need more Good Samaritans, more people who are courageous enough to do the right thing when they come upon a person in need. But King suggests that the real work is in transforming the dangerous road to Jericho. Why should we have to live with the expectation of being beaten and robbed simply because we are traveling from one place to another?

  I find this interpretation of the story inspiring. Like the Good Samaritan, every one of us needs to stop and help whenever the opportunity presents itself. But I also believe that we have to transform the road to Jericho by effecting bigger changes in the world. That is why that Steubenville video is so powerful. When a young man puts a blanket over a passed-out girl at a party, he’s a Good Samaritan. But when he appears in a YouTube video that goes viral about respecting women, he’s transforming the road to Jericho.

  People like me, who talk to young women about how to keep themselves safe, tend to put the onus of responsibility on the girl: We talk about how not to get raped. Don’t wear provocative clothing, we say. Don’t be promiscuous. Don’t go into dangerous neighborhoods. Learn self-defense. Don’t get so drunk or drugged that you can’t function. Go in pairs. Take care of one another.

  I’m not going to stop saying those things, because my goal is to keep as many young women as safe as I possibly can. Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) calls this risk reduction, and I believe in it. But when I speak at schools, I make sure to speak to the young men, too. Because the real way to end sexual assault is not to encourage women to dress less provocatively, but to get men to stop raping them.

  To be clear, I don’t think that men are, by definition, the problem. In fact, when we say “boys will be boys” and in all the other ways we apologize for unacceptable male behavior, we disrespect all the amazing men out there who know that it’s not normal to rape someone just because they can. I’m proud to say that there are men in my life now who would be sickened by the very thought of taking advantage of someone who couldn’t consent, and who wouldn’t think twice before tucking a blanket over that passed-out girl. Indeed, men can be—and have to be—very powerful allies in our transformation of the road to Jericho. But we need to educate a lot more men and think long and hard about how we raise boys before it’s a circumstance we can count on.

  I still accompany sexual assault survivors to court and to their medical exams; I still visit with their families. But I’ve also gotten more involved in the education outreach we do at Project Sister. In 2013, Project Sister announced they were adding a new volunteer advocate outreach and prevention group called Speakers to Educate and Prevent (STEP). Sophia, the outreach coordinator, asked if I would help lead the volunteers. My responsibilities would include giving presentations, training volunteers, and helping to develop ideas for presentations we’d be giving in the future.

  It was a huge amount of work, but I jumped at the offer. The topics we cover include sexual assault, child abuse, healthy relationships, bullying, Internet safety, self-defense, mandated reporting, and good touch/bad touch. Once trained, the STEP volunteers take different presentations and materials to elementary schools, intermediate schools, high schools, and colleges. We go to city events and meetings, and to health fairs. We do corporate trainings and we go to law enforcement agencies, too.

  The program has been an incredible success, and it’s one of the most gratifying things that I do. I can see that we are changing people’s minds and beliefs every time we speak. After we present the material, we open the floor up for a question-and-answer period, which is usually my favorite part. It’s hard to realize how little the public knows about what it means to be a survivor of sexual assault. But I never mind any of the questions as long as we’re engaged in a dialogue. For me, that’s the most important thing.

  And my work with STEP means I think a lot about how to talk to men, especially young men, about rape.

  The first thing I do when I speak is to remind them that rape is any sexual contact without consent. (Shockingly, a lot of boys don’t know this.) Oral sex without consent is rape. Touching someone without consent is rape. Using an object to touch someone without consent is rape. Having sex with someone who is under the age of consent is rape. I ask them: Do you know what the age of consent is? I’m always surprised by how few do.

  And consent, I remind the young men I talk to, should be crystal clear. Just because she can’t or hasn’t said no doesn’t mean you can assume consent. If she’s drunk, assume it’s a no. If she’s giving in because you’ve been so persistent or because she needs a ride home, it’s a no, too. Wouldn’t you rather wait until it’s an enthusiastic, no-question-about-it yes? We call this enthusiastic consent, and I think more young men—and young women—should know about it.

  I also ask young men to think about their participation in the culture at large. We live in a world where, until a couple of months ago, on social media you could find a photo of a woman with her mouth taped shut and the words “Don’t wrap it and tap it; tape her and rape her” superimposed on the image. I practically fell off my chair when I saw some of these: “Win her over with Chloroform.” “What do you do after raping a deaf mute? Break her fingers so she can’t tell anyone.” You could buy a “Keep Calm and Rape” T-shirt from Amazon.com until shoppers protested. These are signs to me that the road to Jericho needs a little work.

  So when I talk to young men, I ask them: Do you make rape jokes, or do you laugh when someone else does? Do you harass women on the street by ye
lling at them or making comments about the way they look? When you don’t like a woman’s opinion, is your default response to criticize the way she looks or dresses or to threaten her with sexual violence?

  This is especially prevalent on the Internet, where the comment sections of websites are often filled with truly appalling, often violent invective against the woman featured in the article—simply because the commenter doesn’t agree with her position on immigration reform or animal rights. Go spend ten minutes reading the comments on YouTube. (Actually, I take that back—I wouldn’t wish YouTube comments on my worst enemy. Take my word for it, and go look at pictures of puppies instead.)

  I also remind the guys I speak to not to trivialize the experience of rape when they hear about it. Unfortunately, statistically speaking, most of them will know a sexual assault victim in their lives. Don’t blame the victim by asking questions like “What was she wearing?” or “What was she doing at that party by herself anyway?”

  I remind them to be Good Samaritans if they can and not to be bystanders. “If something is happening that shouldn’t be, stand up and do something, and if you hear about an assault, contact the authorities.”

  Most importantly, I tell them, never forget that the women in your life are people.

  If we are serious about change, these are the conversations that all of us have to have with our sons and nephews—with all the young men in our lives. We have to talk about these issues.

  A woman came up to me once after I had spoken at a health fair. “You better believe our whole family is sitting down tonight to talk about what I’ve heard here today,” she told me. “Not just the girl, but the boy, too.” I felt so good about inspiring her to have that conversation with her kids—one that might just lead to a slightly better, safer world.