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.”

» E-mail Britany Lueras @ britanyl@sfsu.edu

My sister sent me this video of protests in West Hollywood. She was there along with my other sister.

She’s 21 years old, and this is her civil rights movement. We can’t allow discrimination like this, the legality of marriage shouldn’t be based on religious concepts of marriage or sexuality. 

It’s WRONG.

Since the music is so loud in my store I wasn’t sure if I heard right, and it’s so dark in there I couldn’t read his lips. But he kept repeating the need for this gift to be something that would get some girl in bed. 

Really? I didn’t know what to say, and so to keep myself from ranting my view on what he was doing, I suggested a sweater. I told him a nice cable-knitted sweater would probably be good. I couldn’t believe I said this. I really should have told him that maybe this girl might be offended, because I know I would have been.

He didn’t look convinced, so he said “thank you” and went on his way – hopefully to the jewelry store across the way, because I would think a woman is worth more than a $70 sweater.

I’ve been working on a story about rape for my university’s magazine, and so I’ve been even more sensitive to the way men treat women than I normally am. I felt like telling this man that he shouldn’t try to essentially bribe this woman into having sex with him. I mean, if this was something that woman had agreed to or even was the type of woman to demand gifts in exchange for sex, that’s cool, people can do that if they want. 

This whole scene yesterday reminded me of last weekend when I went to an Artists Against Rape event.

 I walked into the brick building and there was a table with a man and a woman sitting behind it to sell tickets. After standing at the entrance with my photographer for a couple of minutes, looking around, I noticed the man looking hungrily at a woman wearing a short dress. 

I know, I know, he was expressing his sexuality. But it somehow just seemed really inappropriate to me, given that we were at an event where survivors of rape had come together to share their experiences.

“Where’s your candy?” he asks, pointing to his piles of glow-in-dark beaded necklaces and bracelets.

“Oh, is this your first time to a rave?”

“I don’t have any.”

“Nope.”

He slides a bracelet off of one of his wrists and hands it to me. “Here. My name is Peter Pan.” I said “thank you” and smiled politely, not really sure if I heard correctly. Peter Pan?

That was several years ago when my boyfriend was still DJing at underground, often illegal parties, and until last night, I haven’t been to any illegal or underground raves.

At about 9 PM myself, my boyfriend, and his two friends, Jerry and Ryan, all pile into my car and head over the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin county. We have no idea where we are going. Ryan calls the info line in order to find out where the map point is located – some random spot where we are supposed to pick up a piece of paper from some random guy, so that we will be able to find the secret location. “Go to the Seven-Eleven,” the voice of the recorded message says. “There will be a guy standing near some pay phones. This is your guy. Get the map from him.” We had to get to this guy by 11 PM otherwise we were out of luck and wouldn’t know where the party was.

Shortly after crossing the bridge, we find the phones, and the guy, except we don’t know if the guy standing by the pay phones is “our guy.” Because, you know, it’s so uncommon to see random guys hanging around the Seven-Eleven pay phones on a Friday at 10:30 PM.

But he’s our guy, and we were able to get the “map,” which is really just a page full of text. “Continue on HWY 1,” the directions state. We do. We drive on the curvy, nausea -inducing road, yelling whenever we see a deer.  ”Go until you see the white road marker with 11.0 on it. When you see this IMMEDIATELY begin slowing down. There will be a white gate to your left.” This is where we are supposed to park before crossing the highway. The directions warn us not to cross the road if there’s a car approaching, because it might be a cop. Once we traverse the highway,  we follow a hiking trail into the dark, dark woods.

Although we have three flashlights between the four of us, they aren’t enough to compete with the blackness of the night that swallows us as we make our way down the narrow dirt path. To the left I hear the trickling of a stream, and I can slightly make out that if any of us were to lose our footing, we’d fall several feet down into the unknown.

After walking for five minutes, the bass of the music grows louder. We stumble into a clearing of trees and we can suddenly see. White circles of light swirl on the trees, the large boulder stuck in the side of a hill, and on the forest floor. The trees near the turntables are red. The moon peaks through the leaves of the canopy, but its no match for the white and blue rope lights and other lights placed on the perimeter of the clearing.

In the middle of the dirt dance floor, a man in a black lacy skirt, four-inch platform boots, and the hair on his head sticking up in pony tails, is dancing. He spreads his black and white stockinged legs wider than his shoulder width, and stomps the ground in time to the bass line. “I don’t want to be Peter Pan, and I don’t want to be in Never Never Land,” I turn and whisper into my boyfriend’s ear, although my whisper is more like normal voice volume as I battle the music.

It’s midnight, so he leaves me and wanders off to the DJ “booth” and waits to begin his mix. I stand, mostly alone, toward the back. One guy with purple and green glow sticks around his neck, who had been sitting at the base of a tree earlier, bobbing his head, decides it’s a good idea to climb the side of the hill to my right in which a large boulder lies. He disappears behind the boulder for half an hour, and while he’s gone, a large burly man moves the red dots of two laser pointers on the ground. These two red points of light, dancing according to his hand movements, are the only things that matter to him. It seems that as he’s in his trance-like state, he could forever be happy just watching these two red dots among the smell of pot, cigarettes and beer.

More people appear from the dark path from behind – some young girls dressed in their Hollister outfits. A skinny man walks up to me, a white bandana around his mouth, and asks me something I can’t quite make out. “Where’s tha booze?” I thought he asked. “I don’t know. I don’t drink,” I reply. “No. Pills. You want one?” I vigorously shake my head.  He scampers off to take quad stacked E pills with his girlfriend. A big guy, probably in his thirties, is dancing, his legs going a million miles a minute in every direction.

It’s now 12:30 AM and the kid that took an adventure behind the huge rock slides back down the steep hill. He’s just in time to see a short guy with black hair slicked over his eyes swing balls of fire through the air. I turn around to watch, thinking “How stupid can he be? He’s going to catch the whole forest on fire!” He swings the chains with the fire balls at the end around himself, and over his head, where they almost touch the dangling leaves of the tree above. I’m amazed at his confidence as he circles the fire behind his back, that is until he catches his pants on fire. I’m just glad there was someone who was smart enough to be standing by with a fire blanket.

The crowd is thick at 1:30 AM, although there aren’t more than 30 people. My boyfriend zig-zags through the stumbling dancers, and joins me. Time to go!

Once again the night of the woods engulfs us as we return to the path in order get back to the car. A quarter of the way into our trek, we hear an animal in the bushes to our right. It sounds large, and it retreats from us. But then, we hear it coming back up the side of the hill – back towards us. “That has to be a predator,” my thoughts race. “A rabbit would have kept running from us.” I was so scared, my breathing became fast and heavy. All I wanted to do was get back to the “real” world. To get back to where my cell phone would work.

It showed the abuse and torture that humans inflict on fellow earthlings — animals.

It showed how we throw the lives of our companion animals away because we don’t spay and neuter. It showed how our food is brutally killed — tortured with pleasure — before it is displayed in neat little cellophane-wrapped packages. 

Watching all of this, the ground turkey I ate for dinner felt like guilt in my stomach. I don’t know if you know what guilt feels like in there, but it’s not good. It’s a heavy, nauseating feeling that you just want to get out of your system.

I seriously don’t think I can eat meat anymore. 

I have a dog — a Cavachon — and I know that she feels pains, and that when she feels pain, she suffers just as I do. I know that when she’s scared or upsets (yes, she gets sad!) she runs to find me, and jumps in my lap. I would never eat my dog or wear it’s fur. So why should I feel any different about a cow? Maybe it’s the separation the farm factories have created between the slaughter house and the supermarket shelves which keeps people comfortable with eating the carcasses of tortured animals. I know, I know, it’s life — animals are meant to be consumed — but is it our right to make the lives of these animals miserable? To torture them before taking their lives so that we can eat them?

Toward the end of the video, the narrator made a great point: he said something along the lines of ultimately, is this what it means to bite the hand that feeds?