Date Rape: Maybe Prevention Is the Best Weapon

She met Glen at the beach--”my beach,” Elizabeth refers to the Corona del Mar cranny she once frequented with her clique of friends. It was also his beach, where he surfed and sailed every weekend.

He struck her as witty, intelligent, cute. Over a six-month span of lazy Saturday afternoon chats, she gradually got to know him. She thought.

“We started to become attracted to each other,” recalls Elizabeth, a 33-year-old landscape architect with typical Southern California looks--blonde, blue-eyed, naturally pretty. “One of my friends would say, ‘He stares funny, Elizabeth.’ I didn’t really notice it. There were little red flags that, in hindsight, I just let go by.”

Finally, Glen asked her out to dinner. “He never made a pass at me. He was a perfect gentleman,” Elizabeth says. “I was more impressed by the minute.”

They hit it off so well that they decided to get together again the next evening, a Sunday. Glen barbecued steaks at his house, and then challenged Elizabeth to a game of backgammon. “He said, ‘If I lose, I’ll buy flowers,’ ” she remembers. He lost.

“That night, we made love. No, we did not ‘make love’; we had sex,” she says, editing her phraseology. “I was wonderfully seduced.”

Elizabeth returned from work Monday evening to find the promised flowers on her doorstep--a pleasant surprise that kindled her nascent crush. “I was thrilled,” she says. “This man was doing everything right.”

She went to sleep around 11. A couple of hours later she jolted awake, though she doesn’t remember exactly why. “All of a sudden, I saw a figure at the sliding glass door in my bedroom,” she says. “He came in and put his hand on my mouth. He had a stocking over his head, but I knew who he was right away. I’d just been with this man. He has a very distinctive physique--lean, with rounded shoulders. He had on shorts and a sweat shirt that I’d seen before.”

“I said, ‘Glen, what are you doing? This is not funny. This is a bad joke. You’re scaring me.’ He pulled up the stocking enough to kiss me. I tried to get up; he pulled out a gun and put it to my temple, so I quit struggling.”

After spending four hours at the police station and then the hospital, Elizabeth came home, alone and disoriented. It was too early to disturb her friends or mother with a telephone call, she determined.

At daybreak, she sat down on her stripped mattress--its sheets confiscated by the police--and gave herself a pedicure. “I didn’t know what else to do,” she says, laughing over the memory’s black humor.

That was nearly three years ago. But Elizabeth’s voice still quivers and her eyes still tear as she relates the surreal nightmare. The healing process has been a slow one, as is common with victims of acquaintance rape.

“There’s no way to quantify pain, or to judge one kind of rape as worse than another,” says Jonnie Wesley, coordinator of the Orange County Sexual Assault Network in Orange. “Every rape victim is going to feel powerless, ashamed, dirty, angry, fearful.

“But with date rape, there are additional problems. A person raped on the street by a stranger can pretty quickly realize: ‘I really didn’t do anything wrong, I really didn’t ask for this.’ A date-rape victim is convinced that she is somehow to blame.

“She’s left with an extreme sense of confusion,” Wesley says. “Someone she trusted betrayed her trust in the worst possible way. So who can she trust?”

Free-floating uncertainties relentlessly plague Elizabeth, who now lives on Balboa Island with her boyfriend of two years. “He is as faithful and true as anyone could want,” she says. “But I always feel that the rug’s about to be pulled out from underneath me.

“Out of the blue, I’ll suddenly say to him, ‘If you ever decide you don’t love me anymore, I can handle that. But I can’t handle someone giving me the pretense of something they’re not. Just don’t lie to me.’ ”

In the United States, more than 75,000 rapes are reported to the FBI each year, more than half of which are “acquaintance rapes”--meaning that the victim knew her assailant, often romantically. And law enforcers estimate that only one in 10 date rapes go on record, because victims harbor irrational feelings of guilt.

“We’re trying to educate women that date rape is not just a lousy sexual encounter,” Wesley says. “Women have the right to say, ‘This is my limit, this is as far as I’m willing to go.’ If the other person says, ‘Too bad, you can’t get me this aroused and then expect me to stop,’ and he continues, that is rape, because he no longer has a consenting partner.”

Legally, rape can occur between husband and wife or boyfriend and girlfriend as well as between casual acquaintances, Wesley pointed out.

Elizabeth’s assault is an extreme example of date rape. “It had elements of stranger rape, in that it was clearly about violence rather than sex,” says her therapist, Jacki Sherman, who headed the Rape Prevention Education Program at UC Irvine for six years before recently going into private practice. Charges against Glen were dropped due to insufficient evidence.

Most date rapes begin as a shared sexual encounter--kissing, hugging, touching--and end with the man forcing himself on his victim.

“Men are brought up in our society to believe that when a woman says no, she doesn’t really mean it; she just needs a little coaxing,” notes Sandra Allen, coordinator of Laguna Beach Community Clinic’s program for sexual assault victims. “Women are made into mere objects for male pleasure by the fashion and advertising industries.”

“According to our cultural standards, to behave in a masculine fashion is to be aggressive, to be in charge, to be dominant,” Wesley says. “Rape is the ultimate display of domination.”

Traditionally, the woman holds responsibility for the consequences of sexual contact. “It is for the boy to try but the girl to deny,” Wesley says, repeating an adage she heard as a teen-ager. “When a guy gets out of control, we turn to the woman and say, ‘After all, you let him into your apartment. After all, you were kissing him.’ ”

Certainly, most men are not ticking time bombs, despite their acculturation. But likewise, men who do commit date rape are not necessarily sexual deviants. “In psychological studies, less than 3% of these men are diagnosed as being psychotic,” Sherman says. “They’re not marginal functioners.”

Kathleen Seabolt was an 18-year-old freshman at Chapman College in Orange when “a good friend” raped her. “He was a senior and had his own apartment,” she says. “One night I was over there and he started kissing me.

“I politely told him that wasn’t what I wanted, because I thought he’d just misconstrued my messages. At first I was flattered that he was attracted to me, but then I realized he wasn’t going to stop.”

Seabolt’s parents’ had discouraged her from engaging in premarital sex. “That I had saved my virginity for it to be taken in the way it was seemed absolutely ridiculous,” Seabolt says.

For more than a year, Seabolt kept her traumatic encounter to herself. “I thought it was my fault, that I must have provoked this. And I knew my parents wouldn’t understand my having been alone with a guy in his apartment,” she says. “I was afraid that if I told my friends, they would tell me I was dumb for getting into that situation in the first place.”

With sex suddenly devalued for her, Seabolt became--in her perception--”a promiscuous, silly party girl.” She drank a lot, which was unlike her, let her grades drop, and slept with a couple of guys for whom she had no long-term interest.

Seabolt’s only therapy came in the form of a script she penned for a screenplay-writing class the following year. Her creation turned into the award-winning educational film “Without Consent” (released by Pyramid Video), which focuses on date rape.

The theater major transferred to San Francisco State for her senior year. “I had wonderful friends at Chapman, but I was also surrounded by harsh memories,” Seabolt says. “I wanted a fresh start.”

“Date rape victims often go through a stage where they change their life style in an attempt to escape their experience,” Allen says. “They change jobs, they change locations.”

Counselors generally present prosecution as an option to date-rape victims but do not recommend a particular course of action. “We leave that decision to the victim,” Wesley says. “Prosecution is hell to go through. But a man who is willing to rape one of his dates is willing to rape any and all of his dates. The only way to stop a rapist is to get him into the system.”

Marv Stern, one of the eight deputy district attorneys in Orange County who specializes in sexual assault, points out that date rape is a difficult crime to prove. “It’s the word of the victim against the word of the assailant,” he says. “Rapes are not committed on the mound at Dodger Stadium; there are no witnesses.

“If the man can prove that he and his victim have had consensual sexual intercourse before, it makes it hard for us to convince 12 jurors that this time he forced it and she fought. While a lot of judges and prosecutors have received education about date rape in recent years, juries still have the same old chauvinistic concepts.”

Though not a fail-safe solution in every case, prevention is the best weapon against date rape. “When we hold seminars at high schools and colleges,” Wesley says, “we tell women: ‘You need to spend some time figuring out your limitations before you ever go on a date. And once on a date, you need to be prepared to communicate those boundaries directly and assertively--not the old “let’s slow down” routine.

“ ‘If you want him to stop, you need to say, “I want you to stop. Now.” ’ “