Thanks for the replies.

Some necessary information here: Some of you seem to be under the impression that I am still a teenager and still undergoing these things. No, I'm in my 40's and they are well in my past, but I am working on getting over it. Sometimes things like that leave you scarred for a long time. I am in counseling, and I plan to bring these questions up in my next session. In fact, I'll probably print this thread out for use during that session. Also, the verbal instances I described are over and above the blatant, unquestionable SA that I know did happen. Here I'm telling my story. If I'm wrong to do that on this site, I sincerely apologize. This may trigger. Please proceed with caution.

I was repeatedly molested by an adult neighbor when I was 5 years old. He was the only perpetrator who went to jail for what he did. I wonder if the fact that he was also the only perpetrator not related to me, is a coincidence, or is it that we must protect family at all costs?

When I was 6, an uncle put his hand where it didn't belong, and then asked me not to tell anybody. For years I excused that one, telling myself he was just a child too, but the truth is he was almost 13. That's old enough to know better. If he had the foresight to ask me not to tell anybody, he knew it was wrong.

When I was 12, mother's husband #4 molested me on several occasions. My mother didn't know it at the time. I waited until after she had left him before I told her. She really should have had him put in jail, but for some reason I can't figure out, she didn't. In fact, three years later, she almost got back together with him. She told me she had confronted him and he denied everything, saying it wasn't possible that he would do such a thing. Then she said, "I told him, I think she hates you, and he cried." Like that was supposed to make me feel guilty? Oh yeah, something else: She got angry at me for mentioning it in front of my younger sister. She didn't want HER traumatized by knowing it had happened to me. Never mind the trauma it caused ME. Apparently that wasn't important.

The year I was 14, *both* grandfathers had a turn at me. The one, my mother's father, you already know about. The other, 87 years old and feeble, I was helping to turn over in bed when he grabbed me somewhere he shouldn't have, asked me if I liked it, and I said no. I dismissed that as him not having his full mind anymore, but then it turns out I wasn't the first young female relative he had grabbed like that. I was, however, the last, because he died not long after.

Age 15, I was abducted and raped by a stranger on my way home from school one day. He was arrested, but not for rape. According to the police, I didn't fight hard enough to make it a rape. His charge was sex with a minor. (This was at a time when rape awareness classes were telling women to be passive, because he might hurt you if you put up a fight. So then we do exactly as they tell us to do, only to be told we weren't raped because we didn't fight?) That was Florida in 1980.

During college, I was acquaintance-raped by a man visiting my roommate. I had gone to bed but the lock on my door malfunctioned, and he came in. I pretended I was asleep, hoping he'd get bored and go away. Again the police said it wasn't a rape, because I didn't physically fight him off. I tried to tell them how I'd been repeatedly molested as a child, and therefore was conditioned to freeze up, and it didn't matter. "You're an adult now. You had the right to resist him, and you didn't." So they didn't even arrest him. Kentucky, 1988.

About 7 years ago, my daughter's (now ex, for obvious reasons) boyfriend raped me forcibly. The police photographed the bruises on my arms where he held me down. I did tell him no, and I did fight. But they still didn't consider it a rape, and didn't arrest him. He claimed it was consensual, and the police decided they couldn't prove it wasn't. Texas, 2003.

I am now afraid that if I am ever raped again, no matter how hard I fight or what the physical evidence, I won't be believed because I "have a history of crying rape."

As for my mother, she didn't escape that fate. I didn't know it until adulthood, but one of her uncles molested her and every one of her four siblings of both sexes. This was my grandmother's brother. I don't remember ever being alone with him, so probably the family wasn't allowing him to be alone with children, knowing what he would do. But I have sat down at many a Thanksgiving dinner with that man present, as if he was just any old normal uncle. Why did they never have him put in jail? Why was he allowed in their homes? Because he was family? So maybe my mother grew up thinking that this was... not good, something to be avoided, but not something to prosecute unless it's from outside the family?