How It Feels To Know He Is Behind Bars

Posted on 01/24/2009 by Jane Devin

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This is one of the men who raped me when I was a teenager. He was 19 then, he’s 51 now, and he is still a rapist. I look at him and see a life gone wrong, but I feel no pity. I imagine that at one time he was a little boy who liked action figures and riding his bike, but that something (or someone) terrible happened in his youth that robbed him of his innocence and his conscience. Still, I feel no pity. I wish him only a long life behind bars, where he will never again have the opportunity to lay his hands upon a child.

I feel guilty. It would not have been safe for me then to tell my parents or authorities, so I told only my older sister, who earlier that day introduced me to him as her friend. She didn’t tell, either.

I feel pride in the young girl who braved whatever circumstance she was in to tell her story to family, law enforcement, attorneys, and then in court. Giving the details of a rape, over and over again, is uncomfortable for adult victims — for children it can be excruciating. Whoever she is, she did something that likely saved other children from knowing the same kind of pain she experienced. I wish I could have done that, but I suspect it wouldn’t have ended up the same way. It was a different time and place.

I feel angry at the never-ending cycle of child abuse and neglect — at the society that helps perpetuate it through weak social services and laws — and at those who continue to bear children they don’t want, or can’t love and care for properly. It is likely that this rapist, like so many others, was sexually, physically, or otherwise abused as a child. It may also be that he is a sociopath, and would have been one regardless of his upbringing. In either case, it seems to me that there were opportunities to derail his sexually violent tendencies before he began victimizing children while he was still a teen himself. The recidivism rate for molesters and rapists is extremely high, the cure rate near zero — but I can’t help but wonder what might happen if we turned more of our attention toward preventing the causes.

I feel hopeless in a way. We live in a time of such desensitization that child abuse and rape have become cliched topics. The victims are getting younger and younger. The rape of infants, once a horror story limited to third-world countries and sick child pornographers, is becoming more and more commonplace. The sentences for child rape can range from one year to five to life in prison. All rape is heinous, but those involving prepubescent children should be especially repugnant in a civilized nation, and there should be long mandatory sentences in place to protect society from poor judicial discretion and the plague of repeat offenders.

I feel gratefully far removed from the abuses in my own youth, but connected to those who are experiencing the same now. I wish I could do more. I wish I could change the laws, right all the wrongs, and make every child safe. It’s an impossible task, but I’ll never stop talking about it, no matter how many people refuse to listen.

I feel relief knowing that, at least for now, a serial rapist who once affected my life is incarcerated.

I feel genuine joy for every child and woman left untouched by this crime. I feel blessed for knowing that there’s innocence left in this world.

I feel strong, and alive, and lucky.

I feel like I can tell now, so I do.

Mothers Don’t Let Your Daughters Read Harlequin

Posted on 03/25/2008 by Jane Devin

I came late into my own sexuality, tumbling into it with all the confusion of a molested and battered child, and the shadowed blinders of a woman who thought her worth, even her ability to survive, was dependent upon making others, namely men, happy.

I never wanted to marry. While other girls were gracefully sashaying their Barbies down the suburban sidewalk aisle, I was dreaming the life of a writer, who had a small beach house overflowing with books, a mahogany desk littered with papers, a warm and tattered gray sweater, and two dogs named Holden and Phoebe. As I grew, so did the dream. I’d have friends, but not so many that they’d interfere with my writing – and I’d have a lover I’d see maybe two or three times a year – but they would be very passionate times, fueled by all the searing love letters we’d write to each other in-between writing Great American Novels.

Funny how things work out. I ended up pregnant and married in my late teens to someone who hated books, dogs, and romantic dreams. As I stood in the Justice of the Peace’s office, eight months pregnant, listening to the vows read by Mildred Pierce (yes, that really was her name), I had something of a breakdown. I began to laugh hysterically and couldn’t stop, a situation which only got worse when Mildred, in a sing-song whisper, sealed our vows with an “Indian blessing” that had something to do with the fruit of loins and a harmonious teepee.

Outside of the birth of my daughter, which was like a beautiful epiphany that reinvented and expanded my heart, the snapshots from 1981-1983 are sad and grainy – full of attempts that never hit the mark, and love that felt wrong and misplaced. I see me standing in the kitchen (wearing a skirt! I hated skirts!) making spring rolls and prime rib, neither of which he would enjoy because the first was too “ethnic” and the second was a waste of money. Me, hiding candy bars in my glove compartment because at 145 pounds, I was too “fat” for his liking. Me, constantly accused of infidelity and being checked on twenty times a day to ensure that I wasn’t fucking one of the neighbors in-between diaper changes, feedings, baths, housecleaning and cooking.

Me, in the midst of some cosmic accident where I ended up married to the enemy, feeling all at once adult and locked into a life of dread and spiritual poverty.

Of course, it ended quickly. The last pretenses were discarded the night he slapped me and threw my typewriter in the outdoor dumpster. I had one of my first freelance writing jobs, and an assignment that was due in the morning. He wanted me to put it away and watch television with him. When I said no, he lost it – and I lost the last of the love, or pretend love, that I had for him. I kept our daughter, and the son that I was two months pregnant with. He skipped out, never saw his daughter again, never met his son, and never paid child support.

It would only be after this, when I realized I was solely responsible for the outcomes of three lives – two of which were totally defenseless and dependent on me – that I was shaken into understanding that I had better learn who I was, and quickly. I could not afford to rent my dreams to the intentions of others, or to pretend my way through an existence with two children.

Sexuality was the reason I got pregnant, and the reason I had married a man I had nothing in common with, and in fact, sexuality had played a huge role in my life since I was first molested over the summer at age 10, when I was sent away by my mother to live with an ex-babysitter and her husband. It was a summer of horrifying and increasingly invasive moves (his) and increasingly creative, evasive tactics (mine), but like many children I stayed silent, fearing my mother would blame me, or that I would not be believed. I also took the molester at his word that he would kill my sisters if I told, so I didn’t. I swallowed the experience, and looked for answers elsewhere – which, in my case, meant books.

Being 10, I didn’t check out proper books on sex and sexuality from the public library – instead I stole them from the “free” book exchange that Washoe County offered in the library entrance. I scoured the jackets looking for any mention of sex, which is how I ended up reading “Last Tango in Paris” under the covers with a flashlight in my fourth grade year.

It’s how I learned that men were brutal and rough, and that women loved them despite, and maybe because of, their brutality. That, according to Harlequin and Harrold Robbins, fear was an aphrodisiac, and a bodice-ripping rape was an exciting and bloodless act that turned a faint-hearted girl into a swooning heroine.

When I was violently raped at 13, and left to lay in a puddle of blood, there was still nobody to talk to – I was alone in a repressive world where obedience to authority figures dominated any other consideration. I had already had my share of troubles earlier in the year for failing to tow the line, including a six-week stint at Wittenburg Hall Juvenile Detention Center, for possession of my sister’s boyfriend’s marijuana (I wouldn’t narc then, but I think it’s safe now). In my sixth week at Wittenburg, my jaw was broken in eighteen places and my teeth shattered by Dana Stevenson’s baseball bat. (She thought I stared at her boyfriend. I didn’t even know who he was, and was unlikely to be staring at boys in any case).

I bled for three days after I was raped. I took a lot of baths. I was afraid to look in the mirror. I was scared of what the wound might look like, and I was afraid it would never heal.

There was no one to talk to, but people talked to me.

Joy Pribyl and Marlene Cain were two girls Galen Miller told of his conquest, which is what the rape was in his 17 year-old mind. He was proud to have pinned me down to a boulder and taken my virginity, and he was proud of the blood, which he told them about, apparently with great relish and in detail.

“Like a stuck pig,” Joy chanted.
“Now you won’t think so much of yourself,” Marlene said.
“Fucking slut.”
“Whore.”
“Crybaby.”
“Loser.”
“You deserved it.”

And I wondered, really, if I did. I wondered if reading all those books – seeking them out like I had and devouring their contents – led Galen to stalk and then rape me. Did having all those words and scenes in my head translate into some signal I was subconsciously emitting?

What was it Tom Jones sang? “A woman wears a certain look when she is on the move, and a man always knows what’s on her mind”. Was I that woman? Was I on the move in some way? Were men only reacting to what I had read and learned and had etched into my mind? Even before the age of 10, wasn’t I thinking about things I shouldn’t have been thinking of? What was wrong with me? What did I do to cause this?

I was thirteen then, but I would be tormented by this major mind-fuck until I was in my mid-twenties.

I thought I was alone. I was not, but it would take me — and so many other women of my generation — years to find each other, and in the process, find ourselves.

Outside the Bounds of the American Dream

Posted on 05/01/2007 by Jane Devin

There are predators who can intuitively pick out the insecure and solitary child. The cautionary childhood watchfulness I learned at my mother’s feet had not evolved to warn me of other people’s intentions, only to observe their features and actions with some amount of fascination or horror. The idealistic daydreams I relied on as saving grace and escape did not save me from the actual ill-intentions of others. I was molested twice by the age of ten, and raped twice by the age of fifteen.

There was no trusted adult or friend to confide in and I bore my own secrets uncomfortably, seeking solace from books — from writers who invented tragedy or shared their own experiences. I remember being frustrated in my search. No book I read really captured the futility of a child’s fight against an adult — like a fly trying to push away a bear, and almost none spoke of the days of bleeding, or the excruciating pain. Instead, novels often made rape a bloodless event and sometimes, in Harlequin-type novels, even a desirable one, where brute force and helplessness collided and turned into romanticism.

As a teen, I began to write of rape in metaphors of war and catastrophes, where I could fill page after page with anger, devastation, and pain. In time, my epic poems became shorter and less catastrophic, and I began to heal. My final poem on the subject, “Cousteau’s Daughter”, which I first drafted at fifteen, , is the result of integrating my experiences with molestation and rape into a singular event that I could break away from with hope and imagination.

All at once shamed and seeking, I dropped out of school in eighth grade to work full-time. As a young teen, much of what was previously fluid and difficult to grasp seemed to take on more solid form. My propensity for daydreaming transmuted into an appreciation for creativity, and my mental wandering transformed into earnest idealism. My watchfulness, as well as my aptitude for reading, lent me the ability to learn new tasks quickly, which proved useful in the adult workplace.

A few months short of my sixteenth birthday, I left home in search of the Promised Land where it was said that hard work and ingenuity allowed even those on bottom rungs of society to realize their greatest dreams. My dreams of adulthood were not large or opulent. I wanted to live an ethical, kind, and dignified life. I wanted personal security, good friends, guileless intimacy, and just enough money to pay for the basics and keep the cupboards full. I imagined retiring one day to a small cottage on the water, with a fireplace, a porch, a mahogany desk, and two friendly dogs that would fetch sticks while walking along the beach with me.

I could not be Cousteau’s daughter, but I thought that if I could learn to navigate the adult world — if I could learn to swim with the tide — I might be able to realize my dreams. One of the premises of American life is that the circumstance one is born into need not be permanent, or determine the future. History is filled with stories of everyday people who overcame huge obstacles and achieved their missions, and poor men who came from nothing and built lasting empires. I was determined to set aside the labels and hardships of my childhood. I gathered my strength and courage and a suitcase full of books, and set sail as an energetic, aspiring, and hope-filled individual.

My journey was a somewhat hobbled, spirited, and often bewildering adventure that took me so many places — places I never imagined or intended. I could never have imagined holding down the dozens of jobs I did to support my writing career — from factory worker to substance abuse counselor to advertising executive — or starting college in my late twenties, or meeting the great number of incredible people I did, under so many varying circumstances.

My circumvention of the American dream was not intentional. Some may argue a case for predetermined or obvious destiny, but their hopes were surely different than my own. As an adult, I’ve never needed more than what I could give myself, and never wanted anything other than a multifaceted life experience.

From the reservoir of childhood pain, a river of words began to flow. From that river came healing, and from healing came the challenge to live my own authentic life. in all its haphazard but veritable glory, even if it’s a life lived on the periphery of American tradition and outside the bounds of social convention.

Jacques Cousteau once said, “From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to earth. But man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free.”

The father of my imagination always knew what to say to me.