Hannah

Hannah was one of those friends that made you revert back to being eight. Even at 17, whenever we got together we'd end up rolling on the floors of fast food joints giggling like little girls. Like a real life reenactment of the movie BIG, we had adult bodies, but inside we were pre-pubescent children.

When I saw her after freshman year of college something was different. She was too spaced out to even smile at me. We'd try to have conversations, but she'd stare blankly because she was too distracted to know what we were talking about ten minutes earlier. When we went out at night she would make up an excuse to leave after twenty minutes. If her earring fell out, she would start to panic, and she had difficulty going into public bathrooms on her own.

While I had spent the second semester of my freshman year deciding which frat party to go to, she had spent it dealing with the aftermath of a rape. She was spacey because of the anti-anxiety medications, and if she didn't take her meds she would suffer from "unexplained" bouts of fear and rage. Any little thing that reminded her of the rape would put her in bad mood at best, or at worst throw her into a full fledged panic attack. Although it's impossible to completely convey the distress that lies in the aftermath of a rape, I can tell you that that summer I watched my best friend lose 30 lbs., her sense of innocence, and her ability to exist free of fear.

So then we must wonder, if the experience of being raped is this traumatic, why is it only reported 39 percent of the time? Or why, five years ago, was my neighbor part of a jury that failed to convict a man who admittedly pointed a gun at a woman's head and raped her? And why is it that this acquittal isn't just a random fluke of a redneck town, but rather the fate of 84 percent of accused rapists.

Perhaps the answer lies in the way that we see glorified rapes on television, or how we casually talk about rape in everyday conversations. We watch General Hospital and see the studly Luke rape Laura, and then watch Laura fall in love with him. We don't see the realistic depictions of rape victims bleeding, crying, and shaking. We don't hear the part of the story where they suffer from the headaches, health problems and mental disorders that plague real life victims.

If we talk about rape in our everyday conversations, it's in a completely irrelevant context. We complain about how we were "ass raped" by a chem exam. We don't even blink when we say, "man, those late fees will rape you;" as though a $7 late fee, or a C on an exam is as traumatic as the actual experience of being raped. We don't want to deal with rape, so we tone it down, and speak about it as though it's a minor setback on the journey of life.

And when opportunities arise for us to learn more accurately about rape, we don't take them. We don't go free viewings of rape documentaries, or panel discussions about rape in other countries. Rape is dismissed along with tampons as a "girl problem", something else for those hairy-legged feminists to bitch about. We hear rape statistics, but they roll off us like water on a Teflon pan, as numbers have a way of obscuring the faces of victims. We don't talk seriously about rape because it makes us uncomfortable, so we'd rather not know. In fact, I'd bet that a good number of people who started reading this column didn't make it all the way through because it's not funny, and might put a damper on an otherwise monotonous Wednesday.

But as much as we'd like to distance ourselves from rape and rape victims, we can't. They are our teachers, our lab partners, our mothers and our girlfriends. They smile at us on the way to class, and sit at the table across from us in the cafeteria. Rape victims are not just bad girls, dumb broads who walk down dark allies in the middle of the night, or poor women from bad neighborhoods. They are the women we come into contact with every day.

So out of respect, maybe we could be more sensitive when making jokes about roofies. We could show some tact and choose not to have Kobe Bryant's face as a buddy icon, and attempt to censor how loudly we call his accuser a "lying whore" until we hear more of the facts. And just perhaps we could show some discretion in how we use the word "rape," as three out of every 20 women and one out of every 33 men wont find the phrase "I raped that test" the least bit witty.

All statistics for this column were taken from www.rainn.org, the rape, abuse and incest national network.