Triage

I know what happened. I was there.

In the end, nobody can take that truth from me.

It was the word triage that did it. The second that word was thrown on the table I knew the investigation was over. It had never even begun. They don’t explain the need to triage cases to the people that are first in line, only to those who are on their own.

It was that word that pushed me past scared and straight to pissed.

They had already spent a year defining and redefining the word rape for me, and for so many others. One man had changed our lives, and the lives of our friends and loved ones. Nothing was the same after Prince Charming. Were we wrong in thinking that he owed us something in return?

He had taken something from each of us, without permission, without compassion, and without warning. We can’t just take that something back. It’s gone. One night in jail for each night we cried ourselves to sleep. One day of hard labor for each sleepless night. He deserves to know what it is like to live in the same fear he kept us in for so long.

Those of us who survived built something new and better in its place, but the scar is there and it will always be there. We deserved something in return. I still believed that the justice system worked back then, that it was created for people like me, not people like him. I was so very wrong.

Time and time again I found more system than justice.

This person said that person had the case. That person said someone else was handling it. Someone else said they’d never heard of it. I was a piece of paper lost in the shuffle. I’d already been branded a troublemaker. I could hear it in their voices when I called. They knew who I was. They knew what I wanted and they really didn’t want to deal with me.

Each time I called, “Nope, we still don’t know anything, but we will call you as soon as we do.”

Shuffle some more papers around.

They never called.

Nobody ever called.

A year later there I was, sitting in front of the cop with that cocky little grin on his face, listening to him brush us off. “Triage.” They had already decided that I didn’t need their help. It was a done deal for them. I really was on my own.

Triage: Sorting and allocating aid on the basis of need for or likely benefit from.

I came home and read that definition over and over for the next few months, hoping to find some reason, some rationality, but there was none. They couldn’t help me? They wouldn’t help me? They just didn’t want to?

They only spend their time on cases that they think they can win.

Triage: Padding the win-loss record. Padding the conviction rate. Padding the numbers.

They didn’t want more victims. That was the one number they didn’t pad. In the year I filed my rape case, I know at least two other girls who did as well. Yet the statistics for that year, and many other years in the files, say no sexual assaults were reported.

Victims don’t look good on paper. We got shuffled around again.

If anybody wants proof that politics have ruined this country they need only look in the courtroom for confirmation.

There were cops who were kind and compassionate over the next few years. There were cops who were impatient and condescending. There were a few cops who scared me even worse than Prince Charming did. I found the same types of people no matter where I went, even among the attorneys I spoke with, and among the judges I dealt with.

Nobody could do anything without blaming three other people. Finding a real human being to talk to is getting more and more difficult. Being treated like a real human being is becoming more and more rare. Justice has become a well-oiled bureaucratic machine. It isn’t efficient, it isn’t effective, and it mostly just makes a lot of noise.

It also doesn’t respond well to sand in its gears.

We aren’t technically rape victims until the court grants us that indignity. We are just grains in the gears. They shuffle us around just long enough for us to get lost. Eventually, we do go away.

Prince Charming is still on the streets, a lot of Prince Charmings are. No matter who they are or where they come from, they know how to exist within that bureaucracy; sometimes I think they are the oil that keeps it running. The machine did more to protect Prince Charming than it ever did to protect his victims.

They told me that I couldn’t go around calling him “the rapist.” Prince Charming could brand nearly a dozen girls as liars, sluts, and even delusional psychotics who imagined the whole thing, but we couldn’t call him what we already knew him to be without a judge's approval.

I know what happened. I was there.

In the end, nobody can take that truth from me.