Two-time rape survivor shows others how to cope
By DONNA KOEHN |
[email protected]
October 25, 2010
If someone had told Marilyn Bray several years ago that she would be speaking about her devastating sexual assault before a crowd â using humor, no less -- she would have considered it a sick joke.
But Friday night, Bray and about 20 other survivors and professional performers will take the stage at Sacred Grounds Coffeehouse in Tampa to present "Voices of Strength: Night of Expression," featuring dance, poetry, dramatic readings, original songs and comedy. For many of the men and women, it's the first time they publicly have acknowledged a past sexual assault.
"So often, rape survivors are stuck in that pain, and that is how we are portrayed in the media," says Bray, 28. "But people really do find that healing. This performance will give survivors the opportunity to further their journey in a positive way. We're focusing on the transformation that occurs through healing."
When Bray was raped at age 19, she didn't tell her closest friends at the University of Tampa. At a bar with friends the summer after her freshman year, Bray met an older man who drugged her without their knowledge. When he offered to take her home, her friends, grateful for his help, gave him her address. He raped her in her childhood bedroom at her parents' house in Detroit. "It was a sense of my world closing in," she says. "I had tunnel vision, like being in a nightmare where you can't move. The next afternoon, I came to, battered and bruised and sore."
Her parents took her to the emergency room, where she had a seven-hour wait. She recalls feeling dirty and shameful as she discussed details of the assault with a police officer in the middle of the busy ER. Finally, she learned the hospital didn't have a rape kit and she would have to go to elsewhere.
Even though she identified the man in a line-up, the police told her they couldn't charge him because she had been too drugged to know what she said to him before the rape.
"All of that kept me silent and in pain," she says. "I couldn't sleep, I had PTSD, I was constantly afraid of men. I was an empty shell."
She remained that way through her graduation from UT.
In 2004, she again was attacked.
"It's every survivor's worst nightmare," she says. "It was a neighbor who hid in my apartment. I disassociated at the time. My boyfriend came in and stopped it. My apartment was destroyed.
"I remember beating my head against the hardwood floor. I realized I had two options. One was that I didn't go on living. The other was to get help."
She chose the latter, and ended up at the Crisis Center of Tampa Bay, which is where rape victims in Hillsborough County are taken for testing and counseling.
"I was greeted by a nurse with very kind eyes, who was so gentle," she recalls. "My boyfriend was counseled by a volunteer about what he could expect, because he was traumatized, too. It didn't look like a hospital, either. It had butterflies on the wall and everyone was so kind."
The idea for "Voices of Strength" arose when Bray, volunteer chairwoman of the Sexual Violence Task Force of Tampa Bay, and other survivors participated in "Take Back the Night," an anti-crime rally in April.
Several of the participants said it was the first time they had spoken about their attacks. At first, "Voices of Strength" was planned as a poetry reading, but "it exploded," Bray says.
Professional performers from Silver Glass Productions volunteered to help.
Bray, who now works as development coordinator for the Crisis Center, also has established a group for men interested in helping stem violence against women.
"The premise there is that men should be accountable for societal issues of violence, not just women," she says. The group includes lawyers, men who work for non-profit organizations, and those who know a sexual abuse survivor.
Meetings are open to the public. "Sexual Violence 101," a free training workshop, will be noon to 3 p.m. Nov. 9 at the Crisis Center, One Crisis Center Plaza, in Tampa.
Admission to Friday's performance of "Voices of Strength" is free, but organizers ask for donations of new, loose-fitting clothing. Often, those who have been attacked have to give police all of their clothing as evidence. At that point, they don't want to put on someone else's used clothes, Bray says.
Bray now discusses her attacks at national forums, something the long-ago traumatized 19-year-old would have thought impossible. It isn't easy, but speaking out helps show others there is hope. She says she was saved by the rape support group at the Crisis Center.
"I saw women who were empowered," she says. "They taught me how to work through it, that there really was life after the assault; that survivors don't have to suffer forever."
http://www2.tbo.com/content/2010/oct/25/rape-survivor-no-longer-a-victim/news-breaking/
) I have no desire whatsoever to converse with those two again. Anyone that would fall for that absolute perversion of the truth is best left to themselves.
