How the truth was changed without my realization.

How the truth was changed without my realization.

It happens to many, and I would not have even thought about it unless I had looked back at my journal entries to help with my healing. After I had been sexually assaulted, I had known it. I had written in my journal that night that I knew I had been sexually assaulted; my supervisor had tried to rape me. I was righteously infuriated by the response of not only my fellow comrades, but also the Captain, who was our compound commander, especially considering we were Security Police. I had gone straight to the desk, straight to tell what had happened; only to learn the perp, my supervisor, was already there and saying that it was a joke. During the assault his own Military Working Dog also knew what was going on and attacked him. So he tried to say that he was tickling me and that is when his MWD bit him, the “joke” that he said was that his dog did not want to lose an “easy piece of ass.” I could not believe the others were not only buying the lie but laughing at it, at me, at the sexual assault. I read on through the next months to see the change in the truth, the change that I was now buying into. So many had continually told me that I had just “misunderstood” the assault, it was just that he was tickling me.  Because of the continual harassment and further horrors I went through from his doing, eventually I began to question myself, did I really misunderstand? Did it really happen the way that I knew it had? Under extreme stress I started to say that I had been tickled, that even though the “joke” I knew was still sexual harassment, that is what it became. The truth had changed; they had been successful in changing what was a sexual assault to sexual harassment, even in my own statements that I made, I could see how torn I was. I wasn’t torn that night of the assault, I knew what happened when I wrote about it, yet even with the complete understanding that it was a sexual assault, where had I began to question my own truth?

            Did your truth change because of what others told you? Did you ever question what you had known was right, known what happened, what it was, to something else? It is the ploy of the perp as well as others to do this, to change the truth to protect themselves, to make something horrible not so. Most understand the perp’s reasons, but why the others? There are many reasons. In the military, one of them is that you do not turn on your own. Even though the victim has been the one who was turned on, it is easier to go along with the perp, to discount the abuse, discount it was sexual, discount that your unit is not cohesive, discount that dishonor runs rampant through the services. Since the majority of perps are higher in rank than the victim, many just see the stripes, the shiny pieces of metal on the shoulders and that is all they see, rank vs rank, and in the majority of the cases that means the victim loses before she or he even opens their mouths.

            One of the hard parts in this path of healing has been to look over what I have accepted because of the want of others to replace the truth with something else. I do not blame myself for their brainwashing. I am not of weak character for it to have occurred. Just as they wanted what happened to be something else, I had also, for different reasons though. I really wanted it to have never happened; I wanted it to be a “misunderstanding.” I wanted to accept their lies because it was easier, it was less horrible than the truth. Now I know that although I still would love the truth to not be what it is, that is not healthy for myself or others. What happened did, it was sexual assault, it was attempted rape, his MWD did attack him (even his own dog knew), I was betrayed. As hard as it was to accept what I knew as the truth, what I had written, it is so much better.