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San Benito County Victim/Witness Assistance Center
419 Fourth Street, Hollister, CA 95023
Sexual Assault
What is Sexual Assault?
Sexual assault is any unwanted sexual contact or attention. Force may take the form of threats, bribes, manipulation, or violence. It may be verbal, visual, audio, vaginal, anal, oral, or any other form which forces an individual to participate in unwanted sexual contact or attention. Sexual assault includes rape or attempted rape. But it also includes date and acquaintance rape, marital rape, and stranger rape. It also includes child molestation, voyeurism, exhibitionism, incest, and sexual harassment. Sexual assault may be committed by adults, children, males, females, strangers, friends, dates, acquaintances or relatives. Anyone may be sexually assaulted, regardless of age, sex, sexual orientation, economic, ethnic or religious heritage. WHAT TO DO IF YOU ARE ASSAULTED If you are raped it is very important that you get to a safe area as soon as possible. Call for help or have someone call for you as quickly as you can. Do not change your clothes, comb your hair, shower, douche or change anything about yourself, until after you've had an examination by a doctor. Valuable evidence can be destroyed even by something as simple as drinking water or going to the bathroom. Try very hard not to do these things. Most of the time police will want to keep your clothing for evidence. It's a good idea to have someone bring you a complete set of clothing. If you report the crime, the police may have some very difficult questions for you to answer. The questions may not make a lot of sense to you at the time but there is a reason behind all of them. If you feel uncomfortable answering personal questions with a male, you may ask for a female officer. You may also request a Victim/Witness staff member be with you during questioning and any physical examination, or a support person of your choosing. Some statistics are saying that the chances of being raped are 1 in 4. Rape is a crime. It happens because someone wants to take advantage of someone else. It has little to do with sex, and is more a crime of power and control, where sex is a weapon used against you. You are only responsible for your actions; not for the actions of another person. The most important thing to remember is that you survived the attacked. You will ask yourself, repeatedly, "Why did this happen to me?" There aren't any easy answers. It comes down to a choice one person makes to control another person. Rape isn't a crime about sex. Sex is only the weapon used. It's even harder if you know the person who raped you. Yet studies show us that, most of the time, the person is known to the victim. This doesn't mean, however, that what happened to you isn't rape, even if you have had consensual sex with this person in the past. You may feel completely betrayed, because the person who did this was someone you knew and trusted. That's part of what makes this crime so hard from which to recover. However, the actions taken against you were wrong and not your fault. Any shame that you feel is shame that belongs to the attacker. There's no shame in doing what you have to do to survive a rape. Feelings Most Frequently Experienced Following a Sexual Assault FEAR
GUILT
ANGER
SHAME, EMBARRASSMENT
BETRAYAL
LACK OF TRUST
POWERLESSNESS AND DEPRESSION
What Others Could Have Done To Help Me
Things Not To Say And Do
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