The story of a teenage girl who reported her rape but nothing happened

[JonLP24]

Twelve years ago, Amber Wyatt reported her rape.

Few believed her. Her hometown turned against her. The authorities failed her.

PART ONE

About that night
Aug. 11, 2006, was a sweltering Friday night in the midst of a long, fatally hot summer. A 16-year-old girl reported that she was raped that night, in a storage shed off a dirt road in my hometown of Arlington, Tex. Nobody was ever prosecuted for it, and nobody was punished except, arguably, her: By the end of the fall semester, she had disappeared from our high school, leaving only sordid rumors and a nascent urban legend.

I never saw her, the rising junior-class cheerleader who said she had been assaulted by two senior boys after a party. I only heard about her. People whispered about her in classrooms and corridors as soon as school started that year. The tension in the school was so thick that the gossip about what had taken place trickled down even to the academic decathletes and debate nerds like me, the kids who could only speculate about what happened at the parties of athletic seniors. I was a 15-year-old rising sophomore, and even I formed a notion of what had happened, or what was said to have happened.

Leaving school one autumn day in 2006, I stood at the top of the concrete stairs at the back exit, with the senior parking lot spread out before me, cars gleaming in the still afternoon sun. Several of them bore a message scrawled in chalk-paint: FAITH. They looked to me like gravestones, brief and cryptic in neat rows.

The next day, people whispered about the word in the halls. It was an acronym, I learned, meaning “f--- Amber in the head,” or “f--- Amber in three holes,” which I awkwardly explained to my parents when they asked me one evening why so many cars around town were thus marked. The idea struck me as brutally, unspeakably ugly, and it was the ugliness that came to mind each time I saw some rear windshield dripping the word in streaky chalk at the local Jack in the Box or Sonic Drive-In. Eventually I heard the girl had recanted her allegations and then had gone away; the writing on the cars, too, went away, and the question of what had happened that night.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/opinions/arlington-texas/?utm_term=.f6936fb5ea0b Long read

[MineralMan]

1. It's an old, old horror story.

Similar stories can be told in almost every town and city in the United States, and in almost every decade.

It is one of the most shameful things about our society that women and girls have to fight to be believed and are often demonized for being victims.

[radicalliberal]

2. Especially when the rapists happen to be school athletes.

Pity any rape victim who "gets in the way" of a football program. Just ask Sandusky's victims, et al.

[BigMin28]

4. Or Baylor University

Ken Starr helped with the cover up.

[radicalliberal]

9. Please don't get me started on Ken Starr! n/t

[saidsimplesimon]

3. It's still happening as we speak against it.

This is not who we are. The majority of men and women are decent human beings with an internal compass to measure direction. I call them the "Moral Minority" representing the worst in human behaviour. imo

[radicalliberal]

10. The problem is that the people who persecuted the rape victim in her home town . . .

. . . happened to be in the MAJORITY.

[Johnny2X2X]

5. It's hard to find a woman who hasn't had some level of assault or attempted assault

Been close with a lot of women in my life, some family, some lovers, some just close friends. Every one of them was a victim at some point in time.

Wife was drugged at a bar by a stranger and was lucky enough to stagger to her car and lock herself inside and pass out while the man knocked on her window.

Best friend in college passed out after the bar and woke up the next morning having been raped by the guy who brought her home.

Best friend in high school's boyfriend got angry with her and forced himself on her violently.

Younger girl who was dating a buddy in college came to me and told me she was raped by him, I confronted him and he admitted it to me then later said he never admitted it, half the friend group ostracized me.

Group of guys after high school took a drunk girl on a car ride and one had their way with her.

etc etc etc. Most cases nothing happens to the abusers, it's just part of our culture to assume the girl is lying. And for too long it's been part of our culture to shame the woman publicly. It reminds me of the pretty girl in high school who got drunk and had sex with 3 guys at a party, she was called a slut for years afterwards, never occurred to me that maybe that was rape.

Some progress is being made, but we are a long way from where we need to be.

Women have to be believed, they must, it has to be reversed from what it is now. And I say this as someone who was actually falsely accused, I still am fine that some people believed her, but I was relieved when she recanted and apologized. Fact is she deserved to believed still.

[Bettie]

6. There are probably hundreds of stories just like this

out there.

There are some men and boys who believe that it is their absolute right to do whatever they want to young women.

Sadly, they usually get away with it and if the woman or girl says anything, they are dragged through the mud, ruined.

Hell, my rapist was my father. I went to our minister and told him. He called my father and forced me to apologize to him for making up such tales after giving me a lecture about how my sinful nature was clearly showing that I "wanted" such things to happen. Yeah, at three, when it started, I was such a temptress. At twelve, I learned that I just had to gut it out and wait until I could get out of there.

At least my humiliation and punishment wasn't public, but I never walked into that church again. I've never attended a religious service that wasn't necessary (in-laws are church goers) to keep family peace.

Victim blaming. If you are not-white, not-straight, not-male, not-christian...you are at fault for whatever happens to you in our society and that is sick.

[lapfog_1]

7. What the hell is wrong with our country???

Texas -

"Former sergeant Cheryl Johnson of the Fort Worth Police Department started counting around 2007, the year that Wyatt’s father said her case went before a Tarrant County grand jury. As head of Fort Worth’s adult sex crimes unit, she was sending dozens of rape cases to the Tarrant County district attorney’s office to be presented to the county’s grand jury. But again and again, the grand jury had “no-billed” her cases, deciding not to indict — even when they seemed open and shut to Johnson.

“We had cases where there were photographs and confessions from the suspects that were no-billed,” Johnson told me in 2015 in the tidy living room of her Fort Worth home. One case in particular stuck with her: A man admitted to giving a woman drugs that would render her unconscious — and then raping her after she had passed out and photographing the act. The victim was sent the photographs of her own rape, which she turned over to police. Still, the grand jury decided not to indict."

If this doesn't make your blood boil, absolutely nothing will. This is from the article posted above...
I really don't want to live here anymore. I don't want to live in a country where these MAGAts live and breath and vote.

[JonLP24]

8. That stuck out to me as well

Police departments all over the country have a horrible track record in investigating sexual assault/rape. Even worse when there are no indictments. I don't want to live here anymore either.

[Danascot]

11. I was struck by this passage:

"Wyatt’s case remains a dark reminder that vulnerability to predation occurs on more than one axis. Wyatt was young. But she was also someone who struggled with drug and alcohol use, and someone her peers understood to be working-class. For the assault itself, and for everything that followed, she was easy to discount.

Montaigne and Wordsworth lived near enough to the bloody indifference of nature to spare a thought for its victims. But the veneer of civility painted over modern life has paradoxically revealed a certain contempt for victims and the condition of victimhood. And perhaps, lurking in all the complaints about our putative culture of victimhood, there is something uglier than generalized contempt: a disdain for the weak.

It’s obvious that vulnerability will elicit viciousness from predators. But then there are the rest of us — the cast of Arlingtonians beginning with midnight partygoers and ending with high school rumor-listeners who, with honorable exception, ridiculed Wyatt at worst and ignored her at best. Wyatt’s story calls on us to inquire: What motivates otherwise ordinary people to abandon all pretense of mercy when faced with the abject need for it?

To look into the eyes of a vulnerable person is to see yourself as you might be. It’s a more harrowing experience than one might readily admit. There is a version of yourself made powerless, status diminished, reliant upon the goodwill of others. One response is empathy: to shore up your reserves of charity and trust, in hopes that others will do the same. Another is denial: If you refuse to believe you could ever be in such a position — perhaps by blaming the frail for their frailty or ascribing their vulnerability to moral failure — then you never have to face such an uncomfortable episode of imagination. You come away disgusted with the weak, but content in the certainty you aren’t among them.

Or they make you feel helpless, just by dint of how little you can do to stop what’s being done to them. The temptation in that case is to look away, let it all be someone else’s problem, or deny that there’s a problem in need of resolution in the first place. "

[Stuart G]

12. This horror story is real, it happened, warning, it is hard to read and disturbing.

Outstanding article, thanks for sharing with us. This is extremely well written, and catches the reader... I doubt I will ever forget this. Reminds me of a horror movie I saw once that was not real, but seemed real. "Psycho" That was awful, but made up, and realistic looking. The director was a master director, Alfred Hitchcock.

..This was awful, brilliantly written, and the truth. As I think about it, this is in many ways worse. I got to stop now. The real story about Amber Wyatt is hurting me. It could hurt you too.

[MaryMagdaline]

13. We Were the Mulvaneys

Joyce Carol Oates , 1996.

Pretty much says it all. Rape of daughter by high school boy destroys daughter and family

[Dorian Gray]

14. This article was heartbreaking

Elizabeth Breunig is one of my favorite washpo writers.

I hope this article brings about some closure for Wyatt.