According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program, in 2016 there were nearly 96,000 rapes reported to the police, an increase over the prior 3 years. (According to UCR data, reported rapes have been increasing since 2014.) As most criminologists know, rape is an underreported crime for various reasons. More accurate numbers may be found via the Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization (NCVS) program. Counter to what the UCR data show, the NCVS data indicate that rapes actually declined from 1994 through 2010. From NCVS data we know that most rapes involve a perpetrator that the victim knows; and that many victims never report the assault.
I was mulling over my own experiences with harassment - not rape - this past weekend. I've never thought of myself as a 'victim'. As Dani Bostick describes in her TEDx Talk, people who self-identify as victims can incur - unfairly - all kinds of backlash. Not self-identifying as a victim for me had little to do with a fear of any backlash, but more that I thought of my experiences as not that bad. Certainly not bad compared to what some others have gone through. Just sort of 'garden-variety' harassment, if there can be such a thing.
(1) When I was about 12 or 13 and sitting in our town's public library reading, I became aware of a man sitting next to me. He was breathing heavy, and - what really caught my attention - his legs were spread wide open. His crotch was pointed toward me. He kept inching his chair closer and closer to me. Pant pant pant, inch chair closer, pant pant pant, etc. I don't specifically recall my parents ever having the 'good touch/bad touch' conversation with me, but I knew this creeped me about. Uncomfortable, I got up and walked away.
(2) Around the same time, my friend Amy's older sister's older boyfriend (named Louie or Louis, maybe) told me once when we were alone in a room, "I could rape you right now and you couldn't do anything about it." I didn't know what to say at the time, so I remained silent. Nothing happened, but I guess he got his point across, communicating to a girl four or five years younger than him - a 12 or 13 year old - that he could overpower and assault her. I saw him years later and thought he looked very familiar. Maybe 10 years had passed by that point. I think it was at a restaurant where he was working as a waiter. He walked right up to me and said, "Hi, Connie." Yup, still a creep.
(3) Worst experience - when I was 17 years old and a freshman at Rutgers University, I was briefly on the women's crew team. Having to get across town to practice, I hopped on an extremely crowded bus. Some guy got in right behind me and proceeded to press himself up against me from behind. True, the bus was crowded, but not that crowded. He was using it as an excuse to subject some unsuspecting woman (me, this time) to an unwanted full body press. I could feel his erection on my backside. I tried to maneuver away, but he stayed firmly pressed against me. I started to shake uncontrollably. In hindsight, I probably should have reached around and grabbed him, hard. But I didn't. I endured the ride - a full 15 minutes - until I could get off. Once I got off, I turned to look at him as he also exited the bus. He looked back at me, and I knew that he did it on purpose. My nerves were too frayed at that point, so I skipped practice and just went back to my dorm room.
(4) During the summer between sophomore and junior years in college, I went to France to study for six weeks as part of an arrangement that Rutgers had with a university there. Students - females particularly - were warned that when crossing through the woods from the dorms to the cafeteria, we needed to watch out for the Masturbating Men. Sure enough, two or three times fellow students and I had to walk by men standing in with woods, wearing no pants, masturbating and calling out to us to look. "C'est bon, oui?" ("It's good, yes?") I remember one of them calling out. <blech>
(5) Some years ago on a NJ Transit train, I was sitting alone or virtually alone in a train car. This creepy little man came in and sat down right next to me. Many empty cars, but he chooses to sit next to me. I'm sitting in the window seat, and he's in the outside seat, blocking my exit. In my peripheral vision, I notice lots of activity happening with his hands, in his lap. I glance over and sure enough, he's wearing clingy velour pants and, it seemed, no underwear underneath. He was arranging his clearly-visible penis back and forth in his lap, back and forth, back and forth. The point was for me to witness this. Fucking gross. I got up immediately and said - because I had to get around him - "MOVE". He smiled - SMILED - at me and shifted his legs so I could get by. Flustered, it wasn't until I got out of the train car that I realized I had left my ticket back at the seat with the pervert. This would mean going back to retrieve it. I decided against this, and when the train conductor/ticket-taker - a woman - came up and asked for my ticket, I explained what had happened. She looked at me unhelpfully/flatly/unsympathetically and said, "You need to talk to the conductor." I see - I've just been subjected to an unwanted sexual encounter by a pervert on your train, and you've got the empathy of... I don't know what. (Like, WTF?) I sought out another conductor (for the record, a man), who 'got it'. He gave me a pass on not having my ticket, and went into the car to handle the perv.
These are my #MeToo experiences. Nothing major, nothing earth-shattering. Just garden-variety, rite-of-passage yuckiness that females get subjected to. And maybe that's part of the problem - the assumption that this is somehow normal. Except that it shouldn't be. Just because it happens often doesn't make it right.
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