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Sexual Assault As your rapist walks freely around society. do you keep tabs on your rapist?

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So, why did I look him up on social media, again? I see him standing in the snow with his happy smiling wife, kids and dog. He also posted stuff about his daughter’s team. As I was telling this to my T, I realized why. I have been very hypervigilent lately. I was actually checking to make sure he still lives on the other side of the country. Then, I also noticed that my college friend who was in a frat with him, the friend I told about the rape last year, 24 years after the fact, had clicked “like” on the picture. (This friend was from my inner circle or I wouldn’t have said anything)

Have any of you kept tabs on your rapist? How do you deal with it? I go through moments of how this is unjust, moments of seeing the happy family and thinking maybe I was never raped/did my mind make the whole thing up? Moments of feeling completely unsupported by a friend that I confided in.
 
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My therapist told me I needed to stop doing this and she was right. One of my perps has kids and one of his daughters is the age I was when he raped me. He married a woman who also went to the same high school. Looking at their pictures on social media fills me with disgust and fear and self-doubt.
 
I’d dump the friend. Staying friends with her is crazy making triangulation.

I think you have to make an active choice to not check up on your rapist. My abuser is still in my community and I don’t give a flying f*ck if I run into them. I say this to illustrate that it’s about you and choosing to not let him affect you, no matter where he is.

Your rapist lives on the other side of the country. What are the chances he’s moving anywhere close to you? I’m guessing nil as you’ve moved since, too.
 
I sort of keep tabs on one of them to basically make sure that he doesn't move too close to where I live since we live at about a 30min train ride from each other. But I don't talk about him if I can avoid it because I've found that it hurts me more than it's worth: it feels unfair to be stuck with the memories and everything else when he gets to live some apple pie life.

Sometimes I wonder if I made the whole thing up too, but most of all I wish I did, because he is a family member and it affects my way of relating to family. Every time that I say that I am not in touch with my brother, I have to explain why I don't want to talk to him anymore and I'm the villain. I understand them not understanding, but if they don't accept that it is the way it is right now, and that I know how I feel about things and what I want to handle or not, I don't bother anymore. I'm worth more than that. We all are.

Hope it makes sense.
 
Hi Tex :hug:
I have done the same thing, I’m trying not to because it always upsets me more. My rapists are still walking free and it kills me to see pictures of him on Facebook holding his girlfriend with the same arms that held me down, smiling, living his life like nothing happened and all his family talking about how great he is- it makes me sick. My mother was the one who I told and she is still Facebook friends with him even though I asked her not to be, as is the rest of my family I told (although I’ve now cut ties with them it still hurts). You aren’t alone Tex, I can relate. I still get urges to look, I deleted my Facebook to try and avoid temptation, but still do sometimes. I go to friends and tell them or just talk with them that can help with urges to look. As soon as I think of it I tell myself no and think how upset I’d be if I did.
 
Personally, I'm not that concerned about people that were rapists, plain.

One lives in the same city with me, pretty close. Has a family last I knew of. Said to treat them decently. I don't care, as we have nothing in common, I don't bump into him & I have other people to worry about.

But in your position, I'd cut ties & dump toxic friends. Impartiality is siding with perpetrator, and people not on your side aren't friends.
 
Have any of you kept tabs on your rapist? How do you deal with it?

No way!!!!! I want to stay as far away as I can from them and never have to look at them ever again in my life. No way that this kind of thing would work for me but it would send me into a real tailspin and ultimate burn and crash and that would be the enc of my hard won stability that I now have.

I’d dump the friend. Staying friends with her is crazy making triangulation.

I agree she is a flying monkey. Unfriend her as soon as you can because she is talking to him, I am pretty sure based on my own past experience with a person who is in the middle by choice. She is surely not for you. I know how hard this would be because I have done it and it does hurt awhile. But it sure spared me much future grief with them. Less suffering for me as a result too. I am still safe.
 
Yes. I keep track of where he is and whether he’s still working with kids. Motivation to keep pestering the polics about pursuing their investigation, and to motivate me not to give up. And that’s critical - I need a good solid reason in my mind before I hit google and Facebook, because otherwise it’s nothing more than an exercise in retraumatisation.

The big big thing to remember about Facebook in particular? Is you get a very contrived picture of who this person is. You get pictures that will uniformly support the idea that this person is: attractive, successful, popular, adventurous, socially aware, and funny. Only those posts that support that particular contrived image go on the FB page. It’s not real.

The person that assaulted you on the other hand? The person IRL? Wasn’t funny, or attractive, or socially conscious. They were a rapist. That didn’t make their FB page. How they looked at you, treated you, spoke to you, assaulted you? Those moments are real, and are as far from the image they’ve created for themselves on FB as possible.

I think morbid curiosity about “what are they doing now?” is both normal and common. But keep in mind that the image you get on FB is not a real person, and it’s definitely not the person that assaulted you.

As for friends who know what happened and still stay friends with the rapist? I personally have never been able to reconcile that. In order to try and treat myself with respect, I’ve had to let them go.

Be gentle with yourself.
 
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