The Anatomy of Silence by Cyra Perry Dougherty

Author:Cyra Perry Dougherty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Press Ltd
Published: 2019-11-16T16:00:00+00:00

The Surprise That Surprises No One

Michelle Bowdler

TWENTY YEARS AFTER a violent home invasion so terrifying I could barely function, until I could again, the memories returned. Their reawakening stunned my nervous system, and I spent many a day feeling that there was still a knife at my throat. I got help and began to understand I was not alone. Unprocessed memories too overwhelming to feel at a moment of terror have to go somewhere. Think of them like a cancer that goes into remission—not ever truly disappearing but lying in wait, finding a way to pop up at the most inopportune time.

The Boston Sexual Assault Unit was formed in July 1984, a week after my attack, the last of a series that summer. The unit was formed so that police departments in neighboring jurisdictions could coordinate efforts in identifying if there was a pattern to the multiple break-ins and rapes terrorizing women across the city.

Decades later, I learned my case was never investigated.

And it was never solved.

After more than half of my life spent working to help women find justice for their rapes and sexual assaults, I yet again shout to the world #MeToo and look this time for change. What will happen this time? Will we be seen? Will we be heard? Will these crimes be taken seriously? Will perpetrators be held to account and see even a modicum of consequence?

SOMEWHERE IN THE CITY of Detroit sat an abandoned warehouse. Birds flew in and out of open windows, the floor littered with stray feathers and rat droppings. Long ago, its thermostat broke and what lay stored inside became subject to temperatures that sweltered past 100 degrees in summer, and dropped below freezing in the cold Michigan winter. Inside the building sat boxes stacked from floor to ceiling, filled with forensic evidence. Over 11,000 untested rape kits were discovered there a few years back, each representing a person who, on one of the worst days of their lives, submitted to a multi-hour intrusive physical exam hoping it might help identify their rapist. For the 11,000 human beings that each of those uninvestigated cases represented, no call ever came. Worse still, when the city finally began to go through these old evidence kits, they found matches to serial rapes that would have been prevented had they tested them sooner.

What happened in Detroit was no anomaly; human rights groups identified cities that ignored rape evidence over decades—Dallas, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Memphis, Las Vegas, Houston, Milwaukee, New York City, and dozens more. Estimates of close to half a million evidence kits that held DNA of violent criminals simply had never been tested. They were disregarded, shelved, and left behind.

Those kits were gathered from the private folds and spaces of women whose bodies themselves had been transformed into crime scenes. I remember all too well my own visit to a Boston emergency room in the mid-1980s—overwhelmed during the hours of questions and physical intrusion. Rape victims in cities around the country went through this

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