Feminism

I was 19 years old when I was drugged and raped at a fraternity party at the University of Texas. One member spiked my drink, and a man I had called a friend sexually assaulted me as I lay dazed and helpless. The next morning, that “friend” told me “you tried to push me off” as he laughed about it.

His fraternity brothers later joked about what happened, about how my attacker had been picked up by police for public intoxication and immediately after his release, “got laid”.

It was traumatic, life-shattering and life-altering.

....

It would be a decade before I finally felt able to talk about what had happened to me. But then, as I learnt more about Texas law around sexual assault and intoxication, I was horrified to find that it may not have even legally counted as rape.

At the time, Texas, along with at least 23 other states, had drawn an almost incomprehensible legal distinction around intoxication. In these states, if a victim of sexual assault voluntarily consumed drugs or alcohol, they were responsible for what happened to them. This meant a person could be so impaired that they were incapable of consenting, but the law treated them differently because of how they became impaired.

Rather than looking at the actual assault, the Texas statute focused on whether the perpetrator himself had administered the substance without the victim’s knowledge. In my case, I was drugged by one person and raped by another.

The law cared about that distinction. I did not.

...

Last year, the Texas legislature passed the Summer Willis Act. The act sets out that a sexual assault occurs when the perpetrator knows the other person is intoxicated or impaired to the point of being incapable of consenting, and established a definition of consent in Texas law.