A VICTIM SPEAKS
Silence and secrets

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By Dina Gerdeman
The Patriot Ledger

When Anna was 14, she was afraid to tell her parents she was sexually assaulted after a high school dance, afraid she might get in trouble for drinking beer or being alone with a boy in his car.

So she kept the horrible secret hidden - and she suffered the consequences.

“I walked around with that for years,’’ said Anna, a South Shore woman who is now in her late 40s. “If I had told them back then ... I wouldn’t have been so afraid and so socially stilted.”

Anna, whose name has been changed, had a great time at the school dance. Afterward she left with a group of friends to hang out and drink. Anna had one beer. Then an older boy, a popular football player who sat next to her in a foreign language class, offered to drive the group home.

“He drove everybody else home but me,’’ she said. “I kept saying, ‘There’s where you turn for my house.’’’

The boy suggested they go park somewhere and listen to music.

A red flag went up briefly in Anna’s mind, but she quickly brushed it aside. She wasn’t late for curfew, she thought, so why should she feel uneasy?

It started innocently enough with some kissing, but then the boy started going too far, and he wouldn’t stop.

“I remember saying, ‘No, I don’t want you to do this,’ and ‘no’ having no meaning,’’ she said.

He drove her home without saying a word. She opened the door to a silent home - her parents were already asleep - and she took her secret to bed.

A couple of months later, she worked up the courage to tell an older girlfriend, and she asked the friend for advice: Should she tell her parents, should she report her attacker?

The girlfriend said no, that she should keep it to herself because no one would believe her, and she would probably get in trouble if she told.

Hearing those words was like a slap in the face - and further confirmation in her mind that she was the one who had done something wrong.

“After she told me I would get in trouble, I felt that I would be shunned,’’ she said. “This guy was a big man on campus, a football star.”

Anna sunk into a deep depression. She cried all the time and had panic attacks. She stopped going to school dances, grew quiet around her friends and shied away from boys, and she constantly thought about killing herself.

“He drove everybody else home but me. I kept saying, ‘There’s where you turn for my house.’’’ – Anna

It didn’t help that she had to face her attacker every day in school. He continued to sit next to her in the foreign language class for the rest of the year.

Anna worked every day at masking her sadness.

“I tried to pull myself together so nobody would think I did anything wrong,’’ she said. “I was a good actress. I was hiding it pretty well.”

Now she wishes her parents had pressed her, had insisted she tell them what was wrong.

Or better yet, she wishes she had had the courage to tell them.

She finally did tell her parents in her early 20s when she sought therapy to deal with the assault.

“It was a huge relief to be able to shred the shroud of secrecy,’’ she said. “So much of its power in terms of being able to hurt me was gone.”

Anna feels she has put the incident behind her, but more than 30 years later, talking about the assault makes her uneasy.

“I haven’t talked about it in detail for years,’’ Anna said. “It’s still hard to talk about.”

Anna regrets that she didn’t report her attacker. Now she has to wonder about the boy. Did he assault other women in college?

Besides, she feels she could have saved herself a lot of pain if she hadn’t kept the assault bottled up inside.

“Once I was able to tell my parents, I could work through the issues and move on to have healthy, normal, intimate relationships.”

Dina Gerdeman may be reached at dgerdeman@ledger.com.

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