Black women and rape: the shocking secret no on talks about

Ebony, Nov, 1998 by Kelly Starling

She was 17 when it happened. The high school senior had become friends with a guy from her after-school job. Feeling the gentle stirrings of romance, the two shared small talk and shy glances as they rode a city bus to their respective homes. One night, the young man invited to hang out at his house. They watched TV in his room, kissed and petted fully clothed. When he wanted to go further, she told him to stop and that she was a virgin. He said he would help her out. With his parents just a few doors away, he raped her then paid for a cab ride to send her home.

By the time she crept into her apartment aching and broken, her family was asleep. She sat motionless in the kitchen for hours before shuffling to her room. When she awoke, Marie (not her real name) took a shower and began to prepare for her high school homecoming that evening. She made a vow to tell no one what had occurred.

Nine years passed before the 26-year-old woman summoned the courage to tell someone about the rape. In that time the secret infected her spirit. Ashamed of her body, Marie wore baggy clothes to hide her figure. Rubbing her arm protectively, the graduate student says that even today she has crying spells, periods of depression and intense anger. She still flinches at the word rape.

Marie is one of hundreds of thousands of Black women and men, girls and boys, who have suffered in silence the devastation of sexual assault. A 1991 study from the National Victim Center of Arlington, Va., found one out of every three American women will be raped in her lifetime -- most before they reach age 18. Experts say for several reasons, including socioeconomic factors, the number of Black women assaulted is almost certainly higher. According to one national study, one in five White women are raped after age 18, but for Black women the ratio jumps to one in four.

Within recent years, several high-profile Black women have publicly admitted they are survivors of rape and molestation. Many say the surprise surrounding those admissions makes rape the Black community's most shocking secret. For every person who reports a rape, experts say, there is another person who keeps quiet.

"The one thing I didn't want was pity." says Charlotte Pierce-Baker, author of Surviving the Silence: Black Women's Stories of Rape, which includes the account of her own sexual assault. "I bought into the whole mythology of rape. I felt this had sullied me or dirtied me in some way. I thought it made me less touchable."

Pierce-Baker, 54, was raped in 1981 by two burglars in her Philadelphia living room while her husband and 9-year-old son were bound upstairs. When the men left, she said they stole more than her family's belongings; they stole a piece of her soul.

"With reluctance and trepidation, I pulled David [my husband] aside and told him -- the first time I'd said the words -- 'They raped me...,'" she recalls in her best-selling book. "David looked stunned, but immediately reported the news to the police... David never flinched at my revelation. He merely held my face with my hand and said, 'I loved you before, I love you now, I'll love you forever...'"

Family rushed to be with her as she struggled to deal with the pain. But her biggest concern was not her physical or emotional scars, but that no one speak of the experiences she had endured.

"There's an element of protection in the silence," says the visiting professor who teaches a course on trauma studies at Duke University. "There are so many myths that say Black women have been oversexed from the time of slavery, and that questioned how could we be raped since we were sexual property. Somewhere along the line, we absorbed that into our subconscious."

The author says some Black women remain silent out of a sense of duty to the race. Sisters carry the burden of being strong for everyone from their men to their children. Some feel they are betraying that trust by reporting rape. Like women of others races, officials say Black women are assaulted most often by men of their own race. Pierce-Baker remembers looking at a lineup of Black men at the police station and feeling guilty because she recognized the rapist among the faces she saw.

"I did not like that feeling of putting one of my own on the line," she says. "I wanted to say if he would just apologize to me.... That's really aberrant when I think back on it. But I did not want to finger this man. Still, I had to do it to protect other women."

Feelings of guilt come often for rape survivors. Rather than direct anger toward the rapist's actions, some turn it inward to themselves. They wonder if they should have screamed louder or if they got what they deserved.

"Most victims go through some kind of blaming of them selves," says Toylee Green, director of women's services for the Harriet M. Harris YWCA in Chicago. "They say, 'If I didn't go out last night or if I didn't have a drink or wear these clothes, it wouldn't have happened.' But the fact is this could have happened regardless of the circumstances, because it wasn't their fault. Someone else decided to make it happen."