trigger warning

Robyn

I was sexually assaulted on Halloween at a party i was attending with many of my friends by someone who goes to a different university to me and that none of my friends know (i didn’t know him either, i wish it had stayed that way). Our friendship group is very large and I consider myself very lucky to have found an amazing group of people who all take care of one another and value each other very much; as a consequence i was unguarded, buffeted as i was by the idea that i was surrounded by all my great friends. We had been drinking since quite early on in the evening and didn’t get to the party until very late- by the time we got there i was wasted, so drunk i fell down a steep flight of stairs and actually felt no pain. I realise that no matter what state someone is in no one has the right to take advantage of them but i still can’t help blaming myself for not being more aware. I started talking to the boy who attacked me and after we kissed he led me upstairs to an abandoned room away from the main party and my friends. He proceeded to orally rape me, even though i was clearly uncomfortable and forced me for give him a blowjob, he was in the process of taking it further when two other people walked in and i was able to get away. I was so shaken by the incident that i became very emotionally distressed and ran from the house to get home while crying. i’m a virgin and i don’t have much sexual experience and apart from the emotional trauma this has triggered it’s furthered my already triggering trust issues concerning men and sex. i had a hard time trying not to blame myself for what had happened and was only able to tell a handful of people, whilst listening the next week to my friends talking about what a great time they’d had at the party unaware of what had happened to me in the next room. i also convinced myself that it wasn’t assault or oral rape and even now consistently have to look up definitions, even though logically i know what happened to me. A few weeks later i was drinking with boy at my university whom I quite liked and whom had made friends with one of my good friends from whom i’d heard that this boy had been saying things like ‘ive never felt more akin to another human being’ to (about me). I still hadn’t really recovered from what had happened on Halloween but i trusted this boy because he’d been kind and generous with me, and befriended my good friend. I went back to his house and he went down on me but my body went into a kind of physical trauma state and during this i started having flashbacks to what had happened. i asked him to stop and explained what had happened to me and that i was a virgin and that i wasn’t able to have sex with him just yet. he immediately responded with ‘wanna fuck?’. After that night he has since stopped talking and even looking at me whilst still remaining friends with my friend who has said he ‘feels bad about what happened’ to without ever coming to talk to me or apologise for openly ignoring me after i trusted him with information i haven’t even shared with some of my closest friends. I’m beginning to think the second incident is also some form of very real abuse, if more of an emotional kind, but i’m not even entirely sure how i even begin to deal with this. I still have to see him regularly on campus and it really upsets me every time it happens. A couple of months after this our university rolled out consent courses which i was incredibly pleased about until i attended one of them. While giving information on sexual assault the workshop facilitator kept pointing out that ‘not all men are attackers’ and that sexual violence occurs to ‘men too’. I was beyond angry and upset that even a step in the right direction still clearly had to be so gendered and backtrack. Telling me that ‘not all men are attackers’ doesn’t make me feel any safer, it doesn’t make me trust men, especially after two isolated incidents happened consecutively to me in such a short space of time.