Discussion List for campus-based and allied personnel working to end gender-based violence on campus.

["Keith E. Edwards" <>]

From today's New York Times

Rape Counselors See Their Work Altered by Issues in Bryant Case

August 22, 2004
By KIRK JOHNSON 

DENVER, Aug. 17 - A few months ago, a young woman walked
into the office of the Rape Assistance and Awareness
Program, like so many women before her, to describe how she
had been assaulted and to ask for help. 

But she ended up talking about Kobe Bryant. Not the law or
the criminal sexual assault case against Mr. Bryant, the
Los Angeles Lakers basketball star, said Marisol
Solarte-Erlacher, a counselor, but rather the harder, more
nebulous questions of belief and perception. 

The young woman said her friends did not believe the
account from Mr. Bryant's accuser. The implications of that
terrified her when she realized her friends might not
believe her. The fear became paralyzing. 

"She never did report to the police," Ms. Solarte-Erlacher
said. 

The Bryant case, in which jury selection is scheduled to
begin Friday, has become part of an extended and tangled
conversation about sexual assault, the boundaries of
privacy and the power of celebrity. But for groups like the
Rape Assistance and Awareness Program, the Denver area's
oldest and largest private assault counseling agency,
conversation has become context. 

The issues raised by the case, staff members and rape
survivors say, have altered how counseling and
rape-awareness education is done and how victims think
about their choices, their prospects of recovery and
themselves. 

Mr. Bryant, 25, has admitted having sex with his accuser on
July 30, 2003, but told the police it was consensual. He
pleaded not guilty. The woman, whose name has not been
officially released, said that she went to his hotel room,
near Vail, voluntarily and that they kissed, but that he
became violent and raped her. 

"This case has raised sexual violence as a topic," said Dr.
Sheri Vanino, director of victim services for RAAP
(pronounced rap). "It's become an everyday discussion
around the water cooler in a way that it hasn't been
before." 

But some repercussions for RAAP are in fact quite positive.
Counselors, administrators and rape survivors say elevated
awareness could help, for example, in getting financial or
political support for their work. 

The number of people seeking help at the agency has jumped
sharply this year - up about 50 percent in the first six
months of 2004, compared with the average of the last three
years - even though the Denver police say the number of
assaults has remained flat. Part of the explanation
counselors have given is a process they call triggering,
when wounds and memories from an assault that might have
occurred years earlier are re-exposed by new stimuli. And
with news of the Bryant case, the stimuli can come nonstop.


"It really, really touched a nerve," one rape victim who
received counseling at the center this year said. When she
watches television coverage of the Bryant case, she said,
her rage sometimes boils over. 

"I have actually found myself yelling at Katie Couric," the
woman said. 

Having more people thinking about sexual assault also
creates a new fight for groups like RAAP because,
counselors say, the Bryant case has reinforced many myths
they work to fight: that women claim rape for revenge or
attention or money. But they also worry about being seen as
too partisan in accepting the account of Mr. Bryant's
accuser. 

The center's education specialists, who talked to about
13,000 schoolchildren last year, say the Bryant case is so
pervasive in Colorado that questions about it are part of
the drill. 

Clare Johnston, a community educator at the agency, says
she tells students she does not know what happened in the
Bryant case. Ms. Johnston added: "I then say, 'But there
are things I find upsetting.' That's the angle that I take.
I really try to turn it around and talk about
victim-blaming and why it's so harmful." 

Often, the education specialists say, questions about the
case come in the form of declarations about Mr. Bryant's
innocence, and sports allegiances, especially among high
school boys, are usually involved. 

Ryan Lusk, another community educator, said his strategy
was to say that he was a Boston Celtics fan, and ask if
anyone thought Celtics fans were more likely than Lakers
fans to think Mr. Bryant was guilty. 

"I'll say it's kind of messed up that you're letting your
sports team affect your thinking on this," Mr. Lusk said.
"Usually they sit back and think about it." 

Among survivors, the nuances of the case have played out in
sometimes surprising ways. 

Melissa Bishop, a special education teacher who was raped
in college 15 years ago, regularly talks about the Bryant
case with a woman she met at RAAP. It is filtered, Ms.
Bishop said, through the intensely private process of
recovery and memory. It is not a conversation outsiders
would understand, she said. 

She said the case had reinforced what kept her from telling
the police what happened to her: the thoughts of having to
prove one's own victimization and overcome doubt. "This
case plays out the very reason why I didn't report," she
said. 

Ms. Bishop's friend in those conversations, Aimee Stoffel,
who did go to the police and saw her attacker sent to
prison, said she had to stop following coverage about the
case. 

"I know what happens when you go through something like
this - how hard it is," she said. "It just hits too close
to home." 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/national/22rape.html?ex=1094263005&ei=1&en=a13f6d86522ba3f1


, and teach."