In January 2012, for the first time since 1929, the US federal law on rape was updated by the Department of Justice. The new reading of the law now includes boys and men.
I was raped by a pediatrician in the fourth grade. While it was happening, I did not understand what he was doing (or why). But he was an authority figure and you had to respect authority figures unconditionally because if you didn’t, your father would beat the shit out of you. My parents were big into beating kids and authority.
I knew it hurt.
Where were my parents. My dad was nowhere to be found. My mother was waiting patiently in the dark (it was after office hours) in the waiting room in her old cloth coat. I do not know why I remember that coat so well, but I do. I think I see that old cloth coat (in twenty years I never saw her wear another coat) as a symbold of our poverty.
When Wikipedia explains to you all about what an evil man I am, they never refer to rape as an instrument of terror and parenting.
I go to a health clinic in Asheville. I will not undress or wear patient gowns. They characterize me (it is a federally defined category) as a survivor of sexual violence.
I allow them to take my vital signs but that is it. They begrudgingly accept this. They almost kicked me out at first; refusing to see me as a patient.
We got beyond all of that.
Almost.
“Isn’t it about time you started dealing with this,” my doctor says.
What he doesn’t understand is that I deal with it every day. And in the same nightmare night after night.
Newspapers have described me as a very angry man and defiant. So.
To this day, I have a huge problem with the fact that my parents failed to protect me.
I do not trust most authority.
Especially if it comes wrapped in a white coat.
I pushed the memory of it away for years. But now I remember. I remember the look on his face and he was mean. I think he hated children.
It wasn’t sex. It was violence.
I do not know how my mother never questioned the whole after office hours thing. His office was dark. Only a few lights were on. I remember thinking: What are you DOING to me. I had never heard of the word rape. I had no idea what it was.
I know now what rape is.
I keep wondering if they sold me.
Yesterday, the Department of Justice redefined the legal definition of rape to include men and boys.
Most of the people I know were surprised the law has never included men or boys.
The law also stated that in the case of females who were claiming rape, the female had to prove she had resisted.
The old law was draconian.
The new definition of the federal statute was only realized after years and years of pressure by the survivors of rape like me.
Doctors and priests who rape children will go DOWN.
The kids at Cinematheque are constantly hounded by men. One is a computer guru from Teas (who claims to know me which is a lie) who gets email addresses and harasses and stalks us on the Internet). There is another one who lives in Cyprus and goes by the name of VizJim. I call both of them them haters. They are sexually attracted to young boys. Most of the boys in Cinematheque are also the survivors of sexual trauma. When we are stalked and harassed, we fight back. We are constantly being challenged to come out in public ways. But why should we volunteer to trot ourselves out there — to be abused — and to relive it (or repeat the experience) again and again. To do that would be a recipe for suicide.
The new definition of the federal law regarding rape — now to include the male of the species — is going to change a lot of lives.
The fight with the bureaucracy to include men and boys was worth the grief, the work, the anguish, the rage.
Personally, I was shocked the law got reviewed at all. Let alone changed. Rape is bad enough. But when people who rape children are protected by the institutions they are associated with (our stalker is only somewhat protected by proxy servers but we do have his location) or work for, the walls that protect the castle must be challenged. It is not enough to tell me to simply “deal with it.”
I am dealing with it. I was instrumental in changing the way the law is interpreted. For a woman to have to prove she resisted being raped is antediluvian. Many women are targeted because they can’t fight back.
The new interpretation of the law now reads to include such ideas as the use of alcohol and other drugs. Meaning: just because you might be too drunk or wiped out to know you were raped, you are still being raped, and it’s still against the law. The federal statue against rape had not been reviewed since 1929. The year my mother was born.
The doctor who raped me is dead.
I do sometimes wonder how many other children he got his animal hands on.
I didn’t know what rape was back then as a kid growing up in Lansing, Michigan. Another bitter little town where they claim (on the rooftops) they love their children.
It’s crap. The sexual abuse of children in the school system there was rampant. I do not know how I survived attending West Junior High School. I had to stand naked at attention while a teacher inspected me. Time and time again.
I have always written about that place as if it were a nightmare populated by monsters because to me it was.
When people say — WE LOVE OUR CHILDREN — I know rhetoric when I hear it. You only love your children when they shut the fuck up.
The law needed to be changed. It was changed. Some of us are no longer willing to sit patiently waiting in the dark in our old cloth coats. — tim barrus
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