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Marcella Chester Guest Blogger

Marcella Chester

Thanks to Jill for inviting me to be a guest blogger on Feministe for the next 2 weeks.

My name is Marcella Chester and I’ve been blogging about sexual violence and related issues at Abyss2hope: A rape survivor’s zigzag journey into the open for over 2 years now. Because of my experiences and the gendered nature of most sex crimes, I write primarily about girls and women being assaulted by boys and men.

I also founded the Carnival Against Sexual Violence which comes out on the 1st and 15th of every month with a submission deadline 3 days earlier.

Before I started blogging, I was a volunteer victim advocate which included answering my local rape crisis line, going to the hospital to be with rape victims and going to the law enforcement center as sex crimes were reported.

My mission is to make the world a safer place by doing everything I can to stop rapists and other abusers from being able to find rationalizations for their violence and the sexual exploitation of others. Just as important is my goal to make sure other rape survivors have more information and insight than I had when I was raped.

The messages I internalized after being raped had me feeling crazy, but it wasn’t me who was crazy, it was the contradictory messages being sent about sexual responsibility so that most rape victims could be described as bad women while most of their rapists could be described as good men.

I now reject those messages. That means I don’t tolerate the excuses of rape minimalists/denialists or the harm their words inflict no matter how nicely those words are spoken or how convinced those people are that they are absolutely against “real” rape. I’m a nice person, but nice doesn’t always get the job done. If it takes being harsh to get people to wake up and stop contributing to the problem of sexual violence so be it.

Note: For anyone who gets triggered by discussions of rape or domestic violence the rest of my intro may be triggering so read on with that in mind.

Here are key parts of my history:

I was raped by my first boyfriend when I was 15 and didn’t disclose my rape to anyone for years. I did try to reach out to helping professionals in 3 different fields when I was still a teenager, but those I reached out to didn’t see rape as even a possibility since I hadn’t been snatched off the street. 

After that if I couldn’t avoid questions about my sexual history, I answered as vaguely as possible. Most of the years I was silent I would have sworn that I was completely over having been raped, but I’ve learned that suppressing trauma isn’t the same as truly being over it. 

For me rape was more than traumatic, it was a life changing event. Having someone I had known most of my life and trusted completely decide to rape me not once but twice changed my view of the world. My attempts to self-medicate made me a seemingly happy rebel, but about a year after being raped I came dangerously close to dying of acute alcohol poisoning thanks to 2 guys who thought it fun to pour alcohol down my throat after I’d had enough.

At 18, I in effect repented my rape and my messy reaction to having been raped in an attempt to get my life under control again. At 19, I got swept off my feet by a nice Christian man who seemed to have all the certainty that I’d lost upon being raped. Unfortunately, I learned that meeting a nice Christian man didn’t guarantee meeting a non-abusive one. Thankfully, I got out alive and began to believe that I wasn’t dumb or useless. I made plenty of mistakes after that but none of them left me in fear for my life.

What made me decide to find a way to tell my truth was listening to clueless people around me discussing a date rape case as if they were experts. I wanted to tell them how wrong they were, but I didn’t have the words. That frustration led me to write an autobiographical novel titled Cherry Love which captured my relationship with my boyfriend before and after rape. I was determined to capture the good in my rapist and the bad in myself.

When the book was done I still hadn’t told anyone that I had been raped and I wanted to keep it that way. Between finishing the book and seeing it published, I attended an anti-violence rally where I learned about my local rape crisis line and realized that not enough had changed since I’d been raped.

Without revealing that I was a rape survivor I signed up for the 40 hour training program. With the number of times something in the training triggered me, I’m sure the volunteer coordinator easily deduced that I’d been raped. I made it through training and started taking 3 shifts each month. My first call out to the hospital was in the middle of the night and as I was getting ready to go home another victim was brought in. The illusion that my relatively safe town was free of rape was broken for good.

Once my novel’s pub date approached I tried to present Cherry Love as informative without revealing how I got that information. Looking back it makes absolutely no sense. It was only when I started talking to reporters about Cherry Love that the problems hit home. When a reporter from my local newspaper focused on the source of my expertise I mumbled as indirect of a response as I could as I tried to fight the feeling of being triggered. I can still remember getting a copy of the paper which contained an article about my novel. Only it wasn’t an article about my book. It was an article about me and the headline had me considering a move out of town.

New Author Writes About Date Rape From Experience

That’s how I came out as a rape survivor. Rather than getting the scorn I expected, I was given many, “Me too” responses. Friends didn’t turn from me as I feared. And I started to hear stories from women who recognized me from the paper. Their stories contained familiar patterns. Once I started hearing patterns in the behavior and rationalizations of rapists who had never met, I started thinking about how they learned these patterns.

I realized that the pattern of beliefs which led me toward self-blame were the same ones which helped my rapist believe that forcing me was something he should be able to do without having to consider for one second that doing so would make him a rapist. By the time I encountered the first jerk who believed and repeated all that old victim-blaming garbage, his words didn’t have the power to make me believe his lies about rape.

That consideration of patterns and the continuing occurance of rape is what ultimately led me to create my blog Abyss2hope when I could no longer commit blocks of time to answering my local rape crisis line.

Thinking about and talking about rape can be painful, but turning from the subject allows rapists too much freedom and too much peace of mind.

5 thoughts on Marcella Chester Guest Blogger

  1. Glad to see you here and looking forward to your posts.

    This sentence stuck out for me, and I wonder if it’s evidence that even those who work hard at fighting a victim-blaming culture have a hard time avoiding it, especially when it comes to themselves:

    “I made plenty of mistakes after that but none of them left me in fear for my life.”

    (in reference to the abusive, Christian man.)

  2. Hey Marcella! As you probably already know, you’re one of my favorite bloggers. I’m really glad that you accepted the invite and look forward to your posts!

  3. Dr. Confused, I don’t blame myself for being abused.

    Marrying that particular Christian man was a mistake on my part even though I didn’t have any of the information which would have let me know he was capable of being physically abusive. I made a mistake by marrying my second husband, but he didn’t turn to abuse even at the most stressful moments of our marriage.

    My mistake related to that first marriage was letting fear of an unknown future allow another person’s certainty about my future to make my decision for me. One of those decisions was to have a short engagement.

    That mistake was made easier by societal messages which I had internalized long before being raped and it was made easier by those who knew he had a history of violence and who said nothing about that history until my marriage was over.

    One woman at my parents’ church said nothing when she learned of my engagement because she assumed he’d gotten me pregnant and an out of wedlock baby was worse in her mind than an intact family where the husband and father was abusive.

    Making lots of mistakes after being raped is simply a reality. I used to feel guilty for all of them, but I don’t feel guilty about any of those mistakes now that I understand why I made them.

  4. I need to add about my first marriage and my first husband that there were parts of him and our marriage which were wonderful — and I don’t mean only in honeymoon phases after abuse. Some of my favorite memories involve him.

    His coping skills sucked and when we moved to be closer to his mother that brought out a side of him I had never seen before. When things went wrong he was quick to look for a scapegoat and his mother supported this habit. Her baby could do no wrong or if he did it was never his fault.

    Before that move there wasn’t a day I had to walk on eggshells even though some of his behavior back then still makes me shake my head and I realize now that he was an exercise anorexic who thought healthy was zero percent body fat.

  5. I’m looking forward to your posts.

    I really, really hate interviewers’ obsession with finding out where fiction “really comes from.” I see it all the time – “So, this character’s husband is murdered. Was your husband murdered? WAS YOUR HUSBAND MURDERED!?” If it’s not okay to ask about that kind of stuff in normal conversation, why does it suddenly become fair game if someone wrote about it?

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