I Was Raped By My Friend. I Was So Ashamed, I Did The Unthinkable.

I was 18. I was outgoing, funny and very sure I knew how the world worked: good and bad, black and white.

And yet, when it happened, I couldn’t name it.

He was my friend. I had known him for a year. He came from a good family, and for months he had been telling me how much he liked me. I had told him more than once that I didn’t want to have sex with him.

That day, at a student picnic, he kept pouring more and more vodka into my cup. It happened in the woods. It was September, and the days were still long.

I suddenly realised I wasn’t wearing my underwear. It had been left in a pile of leaves. I remember starting to piece the fragments of memory together in the middle of my drunken haze: my virginity had just been taken from me somewhere in the middle of the woods, not far from a stupid student party.

It was my first time having sex, and I didn’t even remember what happened. I had always believed that sex is supposed to feel good, and your first time is supposed to be romantic. I thought it would happen in a beautiful place, with rose petals strewn about, and that I’d do it with someone I loved.

My friends and I had talked about consent before, but in a way that made it seem like something that wouldn’t ever be necessary for us – and certainly wasn’t sexy.

I even remember we laughed about it – that’s how removed from reality I’d been. “Imagine you’re on a date, everything’s going great, you’re waiting for him to kiss you, and then this dork asks, ‘Can I kiss you?’ That’s it, the moment’s ruined!” That’s how we joked back then in the Eastern European country where I grew up. How naive I was.

I remember fear and panic starting to wash over me as I began to comprehend what he’d done. I remember the shame I felt when another classmate asked if I was OK, and how I forced a smile onto my face and told him, “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” even though I had just been raped by a man who was supposed to be my friend.

“I convinced myself that if I did not say ‘no,’ it was the same as saying ‘yes,’ even if I hadn’t been capable of saying anything at all.

I convinced myself that if I did not say ‘no,’ it was the same as saying ‘yes,’ even if I hadn’t been capable of saying anything at all.

I now realise that out of all........

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