I came across this bit of information three months after I was raped for a second time:

In a 1999 longitudinal study of 3,000 women, researchers found women who had been victimized before were seven times more likely to be raped again. (Acierno, Resnick, Kilpatrick, Saunders and Best, Jnl. of Anxiety Disorders 13, 6.)

and my first reaction was to think, “WTF?! Do I have some kind of f***ing permanent target on my back or something?”

Maybe. And that makes me scared. I started this blog because I don’t want to be victimized again. I want to recover and be able to look back on myself someday and say, “I beat that S.O.B.!” The idea that I may not be able to avoid self-destruction is my worst nightmare (see why in my post about Fantasia Barrino’s lifestyle).

But I’ll put panic aside for a moment. I don’t know my future, so I really can’t be sure that there isn’t some ‘rape doom’ attached to the rest of my life. But why did it happen to me again last August – as if the first rape wasn’t trauma enough? Why do a lot of rape victims find themselves attracting more rape? Honestly, I don’t know, but here are some speculations:

Rape makes you feel worthless. Believing in that feeling and writing it over your self-image will change the way you approach the world, and I think the world can spot the difference in you. If you feel like you’re worth nothing, you might be reeling negative experiences into your life that reinforce that.

Rapists typically look for easy victims. Low self-esteem or a low self-image makes a person the perfect ‘easy’ victim, aside from other factors like your gender, your size and physical appearance, socioeconomic status, and maybe even your race. Also, if the attacker is someone you know, he or she would be in a better position to gauge your personal support system – that being your friends, family, and whoever else – than a random attacker. In other words, they could easily figure out if anyone cares about you, if you have a lot of people around you or you’re isolated.

When your view of the world has been tainted by rape, it’s easy to develop a “who cares” attitude about everything. Taking more risks with your safety and switch to behaviors that form damaging habits, like drinking and drug abuse, is not uncommon – prevention is one of the reasons that victims are usually urged to seek counseling right after an assault. Being careless with yourself would make it easier for a rapist to take advantage of you.

A person can turn super-vigilant after rape, too, and try to screen every sign of trouble out of their lives by judging people and situations harshly. Having someone tell you that you’re trying to hard to control things could leave you doubting yourself, confused about how to strike a balance between having boundaries and being vulnerable enough to be a healthy social being. From then on, you could get bad vibes about somebody and convince yourself that you’re “overreacting” instead of trusting your gut, opening the door up to let just about anyone fly under your radar.

If you were raped in an abusive relationship (e.g. parent-child, spousal, romantic), maybe you were afraid to leave, or couldn’t imagine escaping. Maybe you felt you had no other place to go, or no other support in the world. So staying in that situation would definitely invite a repeat.

Growing up in an environment that was constantly abusive could also factor into the kind of treatment you expect out of life, even if it’s just subconsciously. If your parents or caretakers were verbally, physically, emotionally, or sexually abusive towards you, it could train you to look for more of the same as you get older because that’s what you’re most familiar with.

If you didn’t report the rape, tell anyone, seek counseling, let it out of your system somehow – basically if you absorbed it – then you unwittingly robbed yourself of your power to counteract. Maybe you didn’t believe that you were worth defending, or maybe you were terrified of future consequences. Nevertheless, the rapist performed a hit-and-run on you. Maybe that sends a signal out to other potential rapists that says, “here’s one who won’t be any trouble.”

It’s not my intention to offend or be insensitive to anyone reading my list. I truly apologize if my speculations are upsetting – I was also pretty upset while writing this. But can I admit that I see my 25-year-old self in all of the above?