What kind of trauma would lead a woman to ask her rapist to spend the night with her after getting raped? Aspen Matis, now 25, did just that when she was raped on the second night of her college. “Afterward I asked him if he wanted to stay. To sleep over. Because I desperately wanted to think I had wanted this, to feel that everything was fine,” she wrote in a New York Times article.
Years after the incident, while writing the New York Times piece, she remembered that and hesitated over including that one bit of information.
“I feared that people would say, ‘She wanted him to stay-how could this be rape?'” In the end, Matis decided to include the detail because “it was true, it was part of the experience, and it showed the complexity of my reaction honestly,” she said in an interview with Broadly.
In the article, she outlined her subsequent reactions to her rape – she dropped out of college after they not only failed to punish her rapist, they even relocated him to her dorm. She then decided to hike from Mexico to Canada alone in the hope of overcoming her trauma-and that eventually led to a book deal. It’s been six years since the assault; Matis is now 25, and her memoir, Girl in the Woods, came out recently to widespread critical acclaim.
But since the release of the NYT article and her book, Matis has heard from hundreds of girls who, like her, also asked their rapists to stay; some of these girls wrote their rapists poems and love songs. “Turns out that it’s actually an incredibly common reaction to want the boy who raped you to treat you well after, as if you could retroactively correct it,” she says.
“Because to call a rape a rape-to name it what it is-is to acknowledge that something terrible has happened, that your life is forever changed, and that’s a really terrifying thing to do. It makes the most sense in the aftermath of a trauma to try to carry on as if it never happened, as if you could-and then you realise that you can’t.”
Another woman who came out with her own experiences agrees with what Matis has to say. Helen Alison’s attacker was her own boyfriend, who raped and forced himself on her repeatedly. “For so long I didn’t think what had happened to me was sexual violence, because of the circumstances,” she told news.com.au.
“He would often cry when I said ‘no’, and shout at me. If I didn’t give in after this he would force himself onto me.”
She said there was even a running joke between her ex-boyfriend and the pair’s mutual friends that he “would literally have to pull my trousers off to get anywhere with me, I was that ‘not up for it’.”
Sydney-based psychotherapist, Jackie Nugara, who specialises in complex trauma and PTSD, said in an interview with the Courier Mail that Matis’ initial reaction is common and many women go through the same thing.
“Finding ways to distance from trauma is really common. With rape, often victims can go into shock. People deal with trauma in different ways. The stories that I hear, I wouldn’t say that it’s unreasonable.”
However, Matis’s real purpose in writing the memoir, according to her, was to raise US$1 million for RAINN, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network.
Image Courtesy: Facebook/Aspen Matis
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