The State Raped Me.

​*Trigger Warning: Rape, Assault

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Since getting arrested, I’ve been trying to figure out how to explain how I feel. Every day, someone asks me how I’m doing. That phrase: “How are you doing?” is a kind-hearted gesture, but I genuinely don’t know how to respond. I have yet to find a word encapsulating the feeling of getting arrested. Shock. Traumatized. Grief. Anger. Numbness: None of these words capture the emotion, so I usually settle on “I’m good” in response.

 

You can’t possibly know how it feels unless you've been arrested. Although the United States has some of the highest rates of incarceration in the world, unsurprisingly, given how white and wealthy people who attend Ivy League universities are, there are very few people here who can begin to understand what I’m going through  (at least before MayDay). I’ve been trying to find a way to convey the feeling of getting arrested for months now, and this is ultimately what I’ve settled on.

 

To get arrested is to get raped publicly by the state.

 

In full view of everyone, caught on tape and circulated online and across the news, armed men acting on behalf of those who hold power seize control of your body and drag you away. You lose control of your body. You lose your autonomy. You lose any power and respect you once thought you had earned.

 

They press you against a car. Lights flashing and blinding you. Two men stand behind you; wrists taught in their grasp. They pat you down, their hands sliding down your body as the cold metal of the cuffs around your wrist reminds you there is nothing you can do to stop them. His hands slide into the front pocket of your jeans, removing your headphones. Who knows how you, a criminal now, could wield a pair of AirPods as a weapon. You, a criminal, are not worthy of possessing anything. They confiscate your phone, too. Escort you to the back seat of the cop car. The metal cuffs scrape against the hard plastic seat as you stare ahead at the prison bars separating you and the cops who had just arrested you.

 

For the rest of the night, you will have no control over your body. You will walk where they tell you to walk. You will remove your mask when they tell you to do so for your mugshot. You will press your fingers into the scanner as they instruct you to. Your body is no longer your own; it is a weapon that has been confiscated and disarmed by the state.

 

The state publicly raped you. From now on, you will receive emails, DMs, text messages, notes, and glares from the rape apologists who walk amongst you. Occasionally, a man will roll down his window and shout at you. Except now they yell “fucking terrorist” or “faggot” instead of the usual comments most women receive about our bodies. Every time you travel, the TSA will pull you aside and pat you down once more because you are no longer human; your body is a weapon - a threat to the state - that they have the right to confiscate.

 

They will say you consented. That you had to have known it would happen. Their reasoning that by choosing to protest, you are consenting to arrest sounds like a new rendition of the same arguments they use to slut shame women after they’ve been raped. You went to the party or his dorm room, so you consented to sex. You went to the protest, so you consented to getting arrested.

 

In so many ways, I was lucky though. He didn’t beat me, even though he could have. He could have taken longer to pat me down and spent more time feeling every inch of my body. He could have insisted on a cavity search and actually penetrated me. When I was arrested, I was lucky enough not to be physically penetrated, but the experience in itself penetrated my psyche permanently.

 

The state raped me from the inside out, and continues to rape me every day. Burrowing inside my brain is the constant reminder of where I can and cannot step—the constant reminder of what I can and cannot do. The state penetrated my skull by force and without consent and continues to remind me every second of every day that I am being surveilled and that they can take my body at any time.

 

If this is not rape, then I don’t know what rape is.