Rape on the Rise | November 17, 2008
Chimine Arfuso, twenty six, recalls being sexually assaulted at her home. Photo by Kimihiro Hoshino
[X]Press Magazine, December 2008
http://xpress.sfsu.edu/archives/magazine/011872.html
By: Britany Lueras
Photo: Kimihiro Hoshino
He hid behind her bedroom door, waiting for the seventeen-year-old high school student to come back upstairs, knowing that her family’s home in Irvine was empty. It was a Friday, and Chimine Arfuso had just gotten home from school. She went upstairs to call her best friend and to put her stuff down in her room. She then left the house to check the mail.
When she returned to her room, he attacked her. “I thought it was a joke,” the young woman with dark, bobbed hair recalls of the moment the man lunged at her. “I thought it was a friend of mine playing a joke on me.”
Arfuso is now twenty-six-years-old, and as she sits with her legs curled up on her brown and teal couch, she recalls the event of January 8, 1999. After realizing this wasn’t a joke, her attacker said, “I just want money. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Fine, take whatever you want. Go for it,” she replied.
“And all of a sudden, he said something like, ‘You know, you’re really sexy,’” she says, mimicking his soft, yet threatening tone. “I was like, ‘Oh, fuck.’”
He then bound her with the shoelaces from her own sneakers. “He tied up my wrists, tied up my ankles and then blindfolded me…with something like a scarf that I had,” she describes in a matter-of-fact way.
“And then at some point he took off my pants, he took my underwear off and he tried to penetrate me. At that point I was still a virgin, so I’d be crying and saying ‘Ow,’” she continues, her brown eyes becoming glassy. “So he would try to put his penis in my mouth.”
“I don’t really remember the sequencing of things exactly,” she acknowledges. “I was too busy doing Our Fathers and Hail Marys and praying.”
Swinging her feet onto the floor and scooting to the edge of the couch, Arfuso places her hands behind her back, demonstrating how she was restrained. “So I’m tied up and now he’s going back and forth, and at some point, I just reached over and wiped my mouth on my shoulder,” she says, twisting her head toward her right shoulder. “That was actually the DNA that connected him.”
Every two and a half minutes, someone is sexually assaulted in the United States, and one in six women will be raped in her lifetime, according to SF Women Against Rape’s (SFWAR) website.
From January to September 2007, the San Francisco Police Department reported 94 cases of rape. This year, that number has jumped to 130 in the same time period. “It’s tricky trying to figure out whether or not the increased number is from more people reporting it – because we’re doing a better job of getting our message out – or if more cases are happening,” says Karla Castillo, a prevention education specialist for The SAFE (Sexual Abuse Free Environment) Place at SF State.
“Traditionally, women have been reluctant to report rapes because they are afraid no one will believe them,” Castillo says. “Women are afraid that they will step into an atmosphere where they will be judged.”
Regarding the number of students who visit her office in the Student Services building at SF State, Castillo finds that it varies from year to year. She notices that the number of incoming freshmen is directly related to the number of people who visit The SAFE Place. “Freshmen may be living away from home for the first time and not be fully aware of the dangers they may be facing by trusting people they may still not know well enough, or drinking in environments that may not be safe.”
In nine out of ten cases of assault, the perpetrator is someone the victim knows. “Be aware of the people you surround yourself with,” says Castillo. Another key to personal safety, especially while drinking, Castillo says, is to develop a buddy system. “And not just a group of friends in which all of you are going to get drunk. Have some friends who are going to be sober and be able to help you.”
The silver bracelets on Castillo’s wrist jangle as she says, “Although physically fighting off the attacker is important, saying ‘No’ or ‘Stop’ loud and clear is just as important.”
Unlike the majority of cases, Arfuso didn’t know her rapist, and she proposes a different solution in addition to Karla’s advice of stopping rape – talk about it. “It’s such a taboo crime,” she says. “It’s taboo and society does not want to talk about it. They don’t want to deal with it, and they don’t.” Arfuso believes that although it is important to keep an eye on your drink and to know that people you hang out with, these actions need to be taken a step further by bringing the issue of rape out into the open.
“Something needs to be done differently, and we need to start changing the way we think about [rape],” she deems. “We need to change the way we perceive it…how we react to it, because otherwise we’re not going to have different results. We’re going to create more of the same, and then it’s probably going to get worse.”
While attending group counseling, Arfuso encountered many women who had been sexually assaulted. “The one woman that’d been molested as a child, she was thirty-five at the time, and she [was] still struggling wanting to be alive,” she recounts. “I saw her and I was like, ‘that will not be me.’ She was never allowed to talk about it, so I was like, ‘Well, I’m going to talk about it.”
By talking about rape and by setting and communicating boundaries with others, Arfuso believes we will be one step closer to ending sexual violence. Women should be able to say ‘You know what, I’m comfortable with going down on you, but I’m not ok with having sex,’” she repeats a phrase her business partner advocates.
At the hospital after the rape, “They took me into the ‘Mickey Mouse room’ and stuck a camera up there, saw bruising, and plucked pubic hairs,” Arfuso states. “Being raped was unpleasant, [but] sitting there with my legs spread, getting my pubic hair plucked was way more unpleasant.”
Arfuso is a proponent for reporting rape, and for anyone that may feel hesitant to do so, she encourages, “Just when you think you can’t deal with more, you can. So dig deeper. It could always be much worse. We are alive – we were not killed – and in being alive, we have a responsibility.”
She cautions that although you may not want to report the crime after being raped, don’t assume you’ll never want to. “In case, a week later, two weeks later, a month later, if you want to go and report it, you can preserve [evidence] in a paper bag in the freezer. Take your own urine. If you’ve been drugged, you can get your hair tested.”
“There’s a big movement about women not being victims, and now they’re survivors,” Arfuso avows. “Well to me, ‘survive’ means I just made it. I’m into thriving. I’m into being an activist.”
Almost a year after the attack, Arfuso faced her attacker in court and forgave him. “I could have been the other people in the courtroom who said ‘I hate you,’” she says. “It’s not going to make you feel better by hating someone else. What we have to understand is that it’s hate and anger that are the root of these crimes, and the root of any sort of violent crime, so if we allow anger to reside in our hearts, then we’re perpetrating the same crimes. So it’s about forgiveness.”
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