A survivor’s story amid a record number of reported rapes

She clasps and unclasps her hands as she begins to tell how he raped her.

As with many such cases, he wasn’t a stranger. He was her high school boyfriend. It happened in her Wichita-area home – while her mother was upstairs, unable to hear it. She was 16 then.

Five years later, the memories still trigger anxiety.

But she wanted to tell her story. Not just for herself.

“I want to be able to open a door for other survivors to come forward to report their assault/rape … and not be ashamed or afraid to do so,” she said.

Other survivors need “to know that they aren’t alone.”

Her rape case is one of hundreds that are investigated in the Wichita area each year.

And more cases are being reported now than at any point in the past 30 years, according to Wichita police data.

In 2016, 352 rapes were reported to Wichita police.

That’s almost one reported rape a day in Kansas’ largest city.

“Reporting is a good thing,” Wichita Police Chief Gordon Ramsay said. “There are still a number of victims that don’t report.”

District Attorney Marc Bennett estimates that only about one-third of rapes are ever reported.

Nationwide, rape remains one of the most under-reported crimes, said Wichita police Lt. Jason Stephens. He heads the unit that investigates sex crimes against people 16 and older.

“I would like to think that more victims are coming forward,” Stephens said.

The crime of rape involves the victim being “overcome by force or fear,” he said. In some cases, a person could be unconscious, physically powerless or otherwise unable to give consent.

Her account

The woman interviewed for this story, now 21, said she wishes that she had not waited weeks to report her case to police in the suburb where she lived. She later realized that the delay made it tougher for authorities to pursue her case.

Since then, she says, she can see that the 18-year-old she was dating was physically and emotionally abusive before the rape.

She was raped in August. The air conditioning in her house wasn’t working well, and her mother had retreated to a bedroom to cool off by a window-unit fan that drowned out other noise.

In the basement, her boyfriend shoved her onto a futon.

“I screamed, ‘No,’ I don’t know how many times.”

Her mother couldn’t hear her.

He put his pocket knife against her neck.

She had never had sex with him before.

During the rape, she said, she felt as though she was “floating above” her body. She could see him taking her pants off.

When he got up, he looked at her with solemn eyes, is the way she describes it. He picked up a board game and walked upstairs.

She put her clothes on – later washing them, not realizing that it would destroy possible evidence.

After the rape, she said, “I went back upstairs like nothing happened.”

She broke up with him.

Acquaintance rapes

Most rapes are what Ramsay, the Wichita police chief, calls “acquaintance rapes,” where the rapist and victim know each other. With acquaintance rapes, victims often wait a day or two before contacting police, he said. During the delay, victims are dealing with the trauma, their emotions and the question of whether to report it.

But the delay can mean the loss of crucial evidence.

A “key piece of evidence is the victim themselves,” said Stephens, the supervisor in the sex-crimes unit. Specialists do sexual assault exams to gather biological evidence on the victim’s body or clothing. A special camera filter, for example, can detect minute injuries.

“Injury documentation is a huge piece of it,” Stephens said.

Crime scenes can disappear. Bedding with crucial evidence can get washed.

Interviews of victims are crucial, and detectives have to take special care when asking people about something so traumatic. Stephens encourages investigators to explain to victims why they ask certain questions. One example: When the investigator asks victims whether they had consumed alcohol, it’s not to suggest that they were at fault. It’s to help determine whether the person was able to give consent.

The issue of how to deal with rape victims – some people prefer to use the term “survivor” – goes way back. In 1974, the Wichita Area Sexual Assault Center was established out of women’s concern that there was a “lack of understanding given to victims of sexual assault,” the group says on its website.

Ramsay said rape is a “complicated crime” partly because detectives sometimes get conflicting versions. Who should they believe?

“Our goal is to be the fact finder,” he said. “We have many cases that we suspect that it happens, but there’s just not enough evidence to get a prosecution.”

On its website, the Sexual Assault Center says “1 in 6 women have been raped or are the victims of an attempted rape.”

But men “are increasingly coming forward about their victimization,” said Kathy Williams, the center’s executive director. Last year the center, which provides an array of support services, served 230 men and 1,320 women. They are all ages. Ninety-one percent live in Sedgwick County.

How case played out

Weeks passed after the rape. Her mother started noticing that she was not talking, that she was closing herself off in her room.

For a while, the mother said in an interview this past week, “I thought, ‘Oh, just a moody teenager.’ ”

One day, the mother’s intuition drove her to confront her daughter. She had the teen take a pregnancy test, and it showed she was pregnant.

When she asked her daughter if the sex was consensual, she said, “I told him, ‘No.’ ”

Once her daughter realized she was pregnant, the mother said, she remembers her getting “hysterical.” Her daughter cried out, “You get this monster out of me right now.”

The 16-year-old got an abortion, the mother said.

Police in the suburb where the girl lived were notified of the potential rape case on Oct. 18, 2011, and immediately began investigating, said a lieutenant with that department who was contacted this week.

Over the next few days, police interviewed the teen and her boyfriend at least twice. Both cooperated. He said it was consensual sex. She said it was not.

Eventually, the lieutenant felt there was enough to arrest the boyfriend. Three days after police began their investigation, they booked the boyfriend into jail on suspicion of rape.

But when police presented their investigation, a prosecutor declined to file a charge against the boyfriend.

Although the lieutenant said he didn’t know why a charge wasn’t filed, “looking at this case, there were a lot of holes, no physical evidence, and it was one person’s word against the other person’s, and we had no eyewitnesses.”

“It doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen,” he said.

The woman said in her interview this past week that she had a mixed experience with the police. One investigator was a “phenomenal guy” because he seemed to be understanding, but another “handled the situation horribly,” she said. “He pretty much told me that he didn’t believe me.”

A day before the suspect went to jail, the mother filed a petition in Sedgwick County District Court saying her daughter needed protection from abuse from the boyfriend.

“While dating he raped my daughter in Aug. 2011,” the mother wrote in the petition. “He continued after breakup to come by and try to contact her. Used derogatory language. She is afraid of him and his anger.”

The same day the mother filed the petition, the court granted a temporary protective order. A judge later imposed a final protective order lasting a year.

The mother said that for a time it was “very, very scary” for her daughter to pursue the case “because she was worried about the backlash at school, about people not believing her.”

The story of what happened to her daughter spread, partly because she and her family were open about it, the mother said.

The mother recalled that she had seen the boyfriend being abusive to her daughter before the rape. One day in the kitchen, she heard her daughter tell the boyfriend that he should “be like a man.”

His reaction: “He was pissed,” the mother said.

He grabbed her daughter’s arm and pulled it behind her. The mother said she immediately corrected the boyfriend.

He came from an abusive home, the mother said. She had felt sorry for him.

Fallout, consequences

When the former boyfriend and his family found out about the abortion, the woman said, she received death threats from his sister.

For the next year and a half, she suffered night sweats, night terrors. She relived what happened. She started sleeping with her mother. Her own bed was downstairs, where it had happened.

“I still can’t go down there,” she said. “Not if I don’t have to.”

Her mother felt guilty that she had been right there on the floor above her daughter while she was being raped but didn’t know it was happening.

Word spread in the teens’ circle of friends. She lost friends she had had since elementary school.

“They couldn’t see him as being a rapist,” she said.

Some people at school “made me the outcast after that.”

She felt betrayed.

“I still don’t trust a lot of people till this day.”

Triggers

The woman said she has blocked some of the experience from her memory. Some things remain triggers for her:

If someone comes up from behind and gives her a hug.

Anything that looks like the pocket knife that she says was used against her.

The song he sang to her.

A certain kind of caress: Sometimes he would rub her shoulder to the point it almost made her skin raw.

The time from August to October, which is when it happened and the fallout occurred.

The woman’s current boyfriend joined her recent interview with reporters; she said she would feel more at ease if he was there. She talked for about two hours. He held her hand. He noted that he has asked her to tell him what might be a trigger so he could avoid it.

On their second date, she told him what happened to her when she was 16. At first, he was shocked, surprised. It was the first person he had known who had been raped.

“I just kind of saw her strength,” he said.

He described himself as “pro-life.”

“This is the only abortion I would support.”

Not a victim

The woman has received therapy off and on since it happened.

Although she had been consumed with the idea that the fetus was a monster, there were times when she felt she “had let down this thing inside of me,” she said.

Still, she thinks the abortion was the right thing for her.

She hasn’t been diagnosed with PTSD or anxiety disorder but sometimes feels both, she said.

Recently, she noticed her ex-boyfriend’s best friend in her university class. “I could definitely feel my heart racing … almost to the point that I could hear it through my ears.” She waited for him to leave class first. “I know he recognized me.”

She feels anxiety in speaking out about what happened to her. Still, she said, it’s the right thing to do. It might influence others to come forward, to report it to authorities, and sooner than she did. A therapist told her that sharing her story was one way to help others.

“Thank God for the counselors,” her mother said. “They had her talk things out. They gave her a journal. They made her go at her own pace.” They helped her cope with the emotional turmoil.

In some ways, her daughter’s experience had some lasting positive effect, she said.

It gave her empathy. It “gave her confidence because she had to stand up for herself,” the mother said.

Now, her daughter says she is a survivor, not a victim.

To her, “victim” conveys a sense of shame, powerlessness.

She’s not ashamed. She’s not powerless.

“You’re surviving something, and you were able to pull through it.”

This story was originally published February 3, 2017 at 4:54 PM with the headline "A survivor’s story amid a record number of reported rapes."