Here is the first in a series of posts that I am calling The Jane Doe Project. If you have a story to tell, but are too embarrassed, ashamed or afraid to share it-then this project is for you. You can tell your story here & no one will ever know your true identity, because you will be known as Jane Doe. Help yourself, and someone else, by coming clean and sharing that thing that you’ve been holding onto for far too long. Let the healing begin…
Hello, my name is Jane Doe. Back in high school, I was totally in love with this one boy. He was my first boyfriend and the first person I ever kissed. He was kind, and gentle and sweet. He had this ex-girlfriend that I really did not care for at all! She was always trying to come between us & break us up. She didn’t like me and made it very obvious every time she came around. One day, she told him that I was messing around with another guy, an older guy that was in one of my classes. Truth is, I wasn’t! I was very hurt when my boyfriend did not tell her to go to hell… instead, he believed her. I made the mistake of telling the guy in my class that my boyfriend thought we were messing around. Right away, he started saying that we should, since my boyfriend already thought we had. This went on for weeks. The more he mentioned it, the angrier I became. Not at him, but at my boyfriend. How could he believe his ex over me? He was the first guy I ever kissed, and I made him wait months before I kissed him. I was scared that he wouldn’t want to be with me if he know I had never kissed anyone before! That’s all we had ever done, was kiss.
I finally gave in to the guy in my class. I know it was stupid, but I was just so upset at my boyfriend and the guy in class was relentless. He kept saying we needed to hook-up, to teach my boyfriend a lesson. I agreed to go out on a “date” with the guy in class. I knew what I was agreeing to. We were going to go to his house and have sex. It would be my first time- I was a virgin. When we got to his house, he started kissing me. It felt weird, I had never kissed anyone but my boyfriend. I didn’t have feelings for this guy. I mean he was attractive and many girls liked him, but I didn’t like him in that way. Before I knew it, we were on the carpet & he was pulling down my pants. “I can’t do this!” I said to him. “I”m sorry, but I changed my mind, I can’t do this!” He was on top of me, much larger than me, I knew I couldn’t push him off. I tried to keep my legs closed. I was using all my strength, but it wasn’t enough. I kept saying “I can’t do this, I changed my mind” over and over, but it was too late. At one point, he said, “Shh, just a couple more minutes.” The whole thing was over in a matter of minutes.
I remember sitting up and asking him, “What if I’m pregnant?” He assured me I wasn’t, “I pulled out,” he said. I then asked him to leave the room so I could get dressed. After I was dressed, we left his house. On the way out, he asked me why I didn’t “get into it”… all I could do was shrug my shoulders. Inside I was thinking, “Umm, because I asked you to stop, because I changed my mind and did not want to do anything with you! Because I don’t love you, I love my boyfriend!”
The next morning, when I was getting dressed for school, I noticed the bruises. I had very large bruises on the insides of my thighs. At first, I didn’t know what it was from-then it hit me. It was from trying to keep my legs closed so he couldn’t penetrate me. I bled for three days after the incident. In school, we didn’t didn’t really talk about it, we pretending everything was still the same, but it wasn’t. Every once in a while in class, he would give me this creepy smile.
It took me years to grasp what had actually taken place. He raped me. Yes, I had originally agreed to go with him, to “hook-up”, but then I changed my mind, and I told him I had changed it, but he didn’t listen. That’s date rape! I had always pictured rape as a very violent act, someone raping you at gunpoint or knifepoint … but it doesn’t have to be that way to be rape. I was never in fear for my life-this guy did not have a knife to my throat. He wasn’t beating me up. But he did not listen when I asked him to stop. He forced himself on me. He raped me. I was a virgin and then I wasn’t.
Rape does not have to be violent to be rape! If you say no-and the sex continues, it’s rape!
