A personal connection

So, it’s the beginning of my second year at UCLA. It’s the middle of training for my first year as an RA in Rieber. I am settling in to my single room with my furniture and shelves and everything. It’s my first night inside my own room. At Fall training, we train till late at night, and sometimes we wouldn’t sleep until 2am only to wake up at 7:30am.

It’s getting late, but then my phone starts to ring at 1am. I answer it and find that it’s my friend calling me and that she wants to come by and say “hi” (she’s around because she’s a Move-In-Assistant) and I think to myself, “Why the hell not, right? I could show her my new room!” So I bolt my door open and resume organizing stuff on my computer.

10 minutes later there’s a knock on my door. And when I open the door, I see my friend standing there, with no shoes on, swaying left to right a little, and smiling. I give her a hug. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (or the north-campus equivalent) to determine that she might have had a little too much to drink.

I became concerned. I sat her down and made sure she’s okay. I ask her where her shoes are and how much she has had to drink.

But then I also wonder… what if I get in trouble? What if people knew that I had a drunken person inside my room?

Please understand, I was a new RA in my room for the first time and I was nervous.

So, instead of purely following protocol and calling an EMT to check on her or even being nice and just letting her knock out on my couch, I did a separate option that I thought, at the time, was perfectly okay:

She was pretty coherent: she knew where she was and who I was. She was able to say where she lives (the building right next door) and how to get there step by step. So I stood her up and told her she should try to go home. I told her that the moment she is back at her room, to call me and tell me so. And I walked her to the elevator.

And I waited for her call.

And I wait…

And she calls! She tells me she’s at her door, and that she’s keying open her door at that moment. And now that the door is open. I’m glad, so I her farewell and we exchange “Good-nights”.

Pretty anticlimactic, right?

Well… a month later, I’m talking to the same friend again and that night comes up in conversation. We’ve talked about it before and she’s told me how she doesn’t remember any of it or even remember coming to visit me. But this time, she tells me that she knows how the rest of the night went after I got off the phone with her and that she just never had told me.

She begins to tell me what happened. She begins to tell me what I had no idea about. She tells me that after she had hung up the phone, a friend who saw her come into the hallway that night, had followed her into the room and raped her.

Because she couldn’t resist, she had lost her virginity that night to some friend who saw an opportunity.

For so long I struggled and blamed myself for it, that I was responsible for her getting taken advantage of. I could have kept her in my room for the night. I could have walked her back to her room. I could have done anything. It was exactly how they say; Inaction was the biggest form of action.

It was that night that I learned that there are so many ways that our campus is broken;

First: There are so many men who are willing to do horrible things to get what they want, at the expense of others, at the expense of women. These men who treat women like they’re objects and not real people with real emotions and real hurts. They treat them this way so that when they have their way with them, guilt is at the minimum.

Second: There are so many women who have trouble understanding that affirmation and love doesn’t need to come from other men, so instead they (and I say this with as much compassion as I can) intentionally or unintentionally put themselves in situations where they can get hurt.

And finally, there’s people like me. A person who decides to stay quiet and do nothing. And I wonder… what does it matter that I am a good guy if I am a good guy doing absolutely nothing?

It sucks that this had to happen for me to realize that the women I love need more that just strength for themselves but that God calls us into friendships and relationships that require everyone to support and protect each other. I wish I could have known this lesson without needing an experience that would force me to know it.

I sometimes worry that people who have been sexually abused have to relive that experience whenever someone refers to “the rape trail” or casually talks about how they “raped that test.” It absolutely sucks that I had to wait for this experience before I would relive my friends’ experience every time someone said it.

So I want to tell everyone this story, and I want to tell everyone that statistics says that 1 in 4 women have been sexually assaulted, and I want to tell everyone that each one of those persons has a face and name and story, and that they’re more than just some stupid 1-in-4 statistic, but that they’re my friends and that I love them and that I would never want this to happen to any person, friend or not.

I want to see more Christian men stand up and show our sisters’ in Christ that we support them in all that they do and that we want to protect them and show them God’s love. I want us to step up and tell women that they are beautiful and that they have value in God’s eyes and that to all the women that have been mistreated or hurt or abused, that I’m sorry, I’m really really sorry. God did not want those things to happen to you and neither do I.

And if my spreading this awareness gets even just one guy to rethink what he might do to one of my sisters in Christ, then Dear God, it’s worth it.

-earl

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