Mennonite Central Committee

If you've just been Sexually Assaulted

If you have just been sexually assaulted, you alone can decide the best response. To take the necessary and appropriate action to protect your personal health, safety and well being, you may want to consider the following:

• Go to the hospital emergency immediately
• Do not wash or change your clothes
• Take a support person with you, a trusted friend or someone from Victim Assistance
• Call the police at 911
• Call the Rape Crisis Line listed in the front of your local phone book

Many women, at least 1 in 8, experience sexual assault in their lifetime. Less than 10% of sexual assaults are reported to the police. Measuring Violence Against Women: Statistical Trends 2006 (Statistics Canada, 2006), page 16.

If you have been sexually assaulted, we encourage you to be gentle with yourself. You didn't deserve this. You didn't choose to be sexually assaulted. You are not responsible — the one who assaulted you is. You did the best you could, and you did well — after all, you're here to read this.

 

If you were sexually assaulted at sometime in the past and you:

• Still feel angry
• Have nightmares
• Feel depressed
• Feel that God has abandoned you
• Wonder what you have done to deserve such abuse
• Are crying a lot
• Feel ashamed, somehow responsible
• Feel completely numb, dead, alone

These reactions are normal human responses to the type of trauma you experienced.

They will ease in time - Right now your spirit is telling you that you need to attend to your own healing.

You did not deserve this, and you do not deserve to continue to pay for someone else's offence.

You do deserve help in working through this. Some helpful options may be to:

• Join a support group
• Seek counselling
• Seek spiritual counsel
• Lay charges against the offender

 

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