Real Rape: What Nobody is Telling You

He ignored me. He betrayed me. He broke me into a million pieces. It was as if someone had cut me open, slashed deeply into each of my organs and stitched me back up again to live a nightmare-bleeding from the inside out. I didn’t know I had become a statistic for a crime that you never hear about.

We, as a society, hear the word rape and picture a woman being attacked in a dark alley by some drifter. We, as media-educated drones, envision a college co-ed going to a party and being assaulted by a gang of frat boys. We, as women, imagine some sicko holding a knife to our throats to get what he wants. Is that rape? You bet. But, all those scenarios account only a few percentage of the cases reported.

That leaves 72%* of rapes that don’t fit the stereotype. Huh? How can we not know what most rapes are like? That doesn’t make any sense. What we know as rape isn’t the majority. Why? How can it be that so many rapes committed aren’t what we know rape to be? No one wants to talk about real rape. No one wants to put it out there for discussion. No one wants to admit that our society has a large majority of rapes that are unspeakable, let alone unthinkable. Or even worse, society just doesn’t think the majority is as bad as the stereotype. If that’s the case, we’re dead wrong-every last one of us.