I came home with two dark hickies on my neck when I was 16 years old. They were poorly covered in thick layers of cheap drugstore foundation, and I walked into the house wearing (and sweating in) a purple scarf. It was late spring and the Southern heat was already closing in on us.

From that moment on, I don’t remember many details. All the while, the sour, unwanted taste of semen remained on the back of my tongue and I was confused as to why there was so much pain between my thighs.

I spent the following weeks crying and literally repenting at church for what I thought I had done wrong, when the reality was, a boy I knew, trusted, and liked took me out on a faux date, in which he drove me to an abandoned lot, locked the car doors, and shoved his hard penis into places I did not want it to be. I was too paralyzed in a cloud of fear to even think about escaping. More importantly, I was convinced that it was all my fault. That I deserved this.

According to the Guttmacher Institute survey, 37 states currently require that information on abstinence be provided in school's sex education programs, and my suburban Georgian school was no exception. In the classroom and at church we were taught that “good girls” saved themselves for marriage. The adults said if we really loved “God” and respected ourselves enough, we would refrain from sex until we were married.

In an attempt to obey these orders, I decided to do nothing more than kiss this boy. But he was on top of me in the blink of an eye, and in the midst of all the physical agony and terror, all I could think about was the fact that I was going to be in big, big trouble.

I spoke with Nicole Cushman, the executive director of Answer, an organization that promotes access to sex education, and also an adviser to AMAZE,a group that provides online sex education for young teens and resources for parents and educators.

“Many abstinence-only programs instill fear and shame related to sexual behavior. They may teach young people that they are dirty or tainted if they've had sex,” Cushman says. “This can make it harder for them to disclose sexual abuse because they feel ashamed and worry they'll be judged for what happened to them.”

Hiding this kind of trauma from loved ones and the authorities “can have long-term effects,” Cushman reminds us. Whether it’s physical or emotional pain, it can last well into adulthood.

For example, Nicole, 26, (another Nicole, not Cushman) didn’t report her sexual assault because she wasn’t even “aware that it was assault at the time of the incident.” Growing up in a religious, conservative home, there was an unspoken expectation that she would wait until she was married to explore her sexuality. As a result, she was too ashamed to tell anybody that her best friend assaulted her three separate times when she was 16 years old.

“I was diagnosed with vaginismus 10 years later,” Nicole says. The trauma of the assault stayed in her body, and although she’s since sought treatment, she’s never told her parents the truth.

According to The Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN), only about 344 of every 1,000 sexual assaults actually get reported to police. Surveys don’t definitively show why this is the case, but there’s no doubt that a lot of survivors of sexual assault feel an overwhelming burden of shame, especially the ones who have had abstinence drilled into their heads from a young age. For them, it’s safer to keep their rape a secret rather than exposing to the world that they were involved in a sexual encounter.