Shattering Silences

Strategies to Prevent Sexual Assault, Heal Survivors, and Bring Assailants to Justice

Christopher Johnston

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781510727588
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

An in-depth look at revolutionary new ways to handle sexual assaults. Every two minutes someone in the US is sexually assaulted, and each year there are nearly 300, 000 victims of sexual assault. But victims are no longer silent, and new practices by police, prosecutors, nurses, and rape crisis professionals are resulting in more humane and compassionate treatment of victims and more aggressive pursuit and prosecution of perpetrators. Shattering Silences a is the first book to cover these new approaches and partnerships. Christopher Johnston shows how the people and organizations implementing these new approaches are having far-reaching impacts on helping victims heal and making it more likely that predators will be arrested and sentenced. His in-depth portrayals of the altruistic and hard-working people behind these radical approaches—based on seven years of interviews—provide a template of best practices for other organizations and communities to follow. With sexual assault taking center stage these days, Shattering Silences is more important than ever.

PART 1

What Cleveland Has Learned

Chapter 1

Abandoned Evidence:
Shondreka Lloyd’s Case, Part 1

SHONDREKA LLOYD REMEMBERS standing on the front porch of her friend Vincent’s house. She could barely walk. Her head hurt and her brain buzzed. Then she started vomiting purple.

Earlier that afternoon, she had fallen asleep after braiding Darlell’s hair. She didn’t really know him well, but he was Vincent’s friend. They had been hanging out together, waiting for Vincent to return from Saturday school. She was fourteen and a “skinny-minnie.” Darlell seemed a lot older, so when he started hitting on her, she took him to McDonald’s and treated him to lunch to change to a more comfortable situation before they returned to the house.

“He just sat there, and he was just cool, like everything was cool,” she recalls. “So, I’m thinking everything was cool, and he’s off it.”

When Vincent came home, she woke up and told them she was thirsty. The two boys gave her a large glass of a dark liquid to quench her thirst; she thought it was Kool-Aid, because it tasted so sweet. Soon, the room started spinning, until she felt herself stumbling outside. She realized later it was Cisco, a fortified wine known on the street as “liquid crack,” mixed with she’s not sure exactly what else.

She made it to the front yard before she vomited more purple stuff. A lot more purple stuff.

“Get that girl in the house,” said an old man sitting on the porch who she later learned was Vincent’s grandfather. “She need to go lie down somewhere!”

She couldn’t walk up the steps. She remembers hearing laughter as she crawled up the stairs on her hands and knees. Painstakingly, she crawled into the house. More laughter exploded above and behind her. She stood and fell forward onto a bed. Just layin’ down. Chillin’. Trying to get her swirling brain to come to a stop.

The next thing she knew, she was fighting somebody off of her body. The slender, athletic tomboy had on her trademark T-shirt and silken shorts that fell past her knees. She never dressed flashy. She didn’t even know she was pretty until she got into her twenties. People would tell her, “You’re pretty,” but she would just think, “Whatever.”

Now, Darlell yanked at her dark blue and gold basketball shorts. He picked her legs up over her head. She felt like a baby getting its Pampers changed. She tried to fight, but every time she could force her legs down, he punched or choked her.

At one point, Shondreka realized there was a window above and behind her head. She moved to scream for help.

“If you holler out that window, I’m gonna kill you,” Darlell scowled.

He jerked her away from the window and punched her in the face. Harder, more viciously this time. Throwing her whole body backward so forcefully that her head got stuck between the bed and the wall. He shoved his forearm across her throat, holding her down.

She realized there’s only so much you can do when you’re drunk and you can’t breathe . . . and you’re fourteen. She thought, do I fight or do I just let him do it? She fought.

“Oh my gosh. I’ve never had sex before,” Shondreka recalls thinking. “You’re not just going to take something from me. I’ve been a fighter all my life. You’re not just going to take my virginity from me like that.”

But he did. He raped her. All alone. On a small bed. In someone else’s house. While she was sick, scared, and confused. And fourteen.

After it was over, Darlell gave her a funny look. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry?”

Shondreka curled up in a ball and began perseverating, rocking on the bed. She couldn’t believe it had happened. She didn’t know what to do.

Vincent entered the room. Where had he been this whole time? Was he in cahoots?

“Are you okay?”

At first, she was too stunned to utter a sound. When he began to exit the room, she moved to say something. Darlell kicked her in the face. The thought that she was being held hostage and it was going to happen all over again overwhelmed her. She’d lost all track of time and any sense of what was happening to her.

She couldn’t breathe. She began hyperventilating. She kept rocking.

“Oh my gosh. What am I going to do?” she thought, sucking in air. “I done fucked up. How did I end up here?”

Vincent and Darlell entered with a pot of boiling water. Vincent told her if she inhaled the steam, it could help her breath more easily and deeply. She was unfamiliar with the remedy.

The handles on the pot were loose. The two knuckleheads let it slip and dumped the boiling water on her left foot. Driven by the intense flash of pain, Shondreka jumped up and ran out of the room. She ran out of the house, past the old man on the porch. She ran down the street to her friend Charles’s house.

How she ran anywhere, she still can’t tell you. By the time she showed Charles and his mother, all of the skin on her foot, from her ankle to her toes, was slimy and hanging loose. When she saw how it moved, it made her nauseous again.

“I have scars to this day, so I have an every-day memory of what that motherfucker—I’m sorry—did to me,” Shondreka, now thirty-eight, steams.

Just before the ambulance arrived, she had started to tell Charles and his mom that this dude down the street had raped her.

First the ambulance paramedics, then the ER nurses at St. Luke’s Hospital on Shaker Boulevard, not far from Charles’s house, bombarded her with questions.

“What’s wrong? What happened to you? Where is your mother? We have to call your mom right now!”

Her mother came to the hospital. It was a bit of an uneasy reunion, because they hadn’t seen much of each other since, earlier that year [1993], she had told Shondreka she was no longer welcome to live at her house. Because Shondreka was a minor, the nurses wanted her mother’s consent to perform the sexual assault kit examination to collect evidence of the rape.

“I don’t believe she was raped,” her mother said. “She shouldn’t have had her ass in the streets in the first place.”

“That’s besides the point,” the teen responded. “I want it done. Fuck y’all. I know what happened to me. Y’all not goin’ to play me like I’m some fool or something. I want you to focus on what happened to me now!”

A nurse performed the sexual assault examination. It was thorough. Took almost two hours. It was invasive. For many years afterward, Shondreka would cry quietly whenever she endured a pelvic exam or a Pap smear.

After the rape kit was complete, Shondreka lay on the exam table. Her mother had made a quick exit. Shondreka wanted to pursue her rapist, but her mother didn’t believe her and told the police she wouldn’t allow her daughter to participate in the case. Shondreka spoke to the police officers that the nurses had had to call by law to report her rape. They interviewed her. She told them his name was Darnell instead of Darlell, because that’s what he had told her when they first met. They took her report. They took the rape kit. They left.

She overheard the medical staff discussing what to do next with “the patient.” Her mother had reported her as “unruly” to the police, so she thought the juvenile detention facility was coming to take her. “I got raped, and you’re going to lock me up?” she thought.

She looked around the exam room and started grabbing every bit of sterile gauze and wrapping she could hold and stuff into her clothes. She snuck through the curtains and out of the emergency room. Despite the excruciating pain shooting up her leg, she limped the several miles to the Garden Valley Projects, where Paula, the sister of her extended cousin’s baby daddy, lived. She knew she couldn’t stay long, but she just needed a safe place to “heal and medicate,” to get herself together.

Her stay turned out to be shorter than she thought. Nor was it as safe a haven as she had hoped. A number of cousins, baby mommas, baby daddies, and babies populated the two-bedroom apartment. At night, some of the young men would touch her inappropriately.

“Like you’d be sleeping, and they would try to put their penis in you,” she shudders. “Like what the fuck?! You know what I mean?”

Shondreka stayed just long enough for her foot to heal. Then she returned to her perilous life on the streets.

“In my mind, it was me against the world, because I had nobody,” she says. “When I say nobody, I mean nobody.”

Returning to her mother’s was not an option. It had never been great, especially since her mom preferred her younger brother to her and her sister. Home life had gotten so bad before her exile—the neglect, the yelling, the arguments—that she became obsessed with finding any way to gain attention. Her mother’s. A teacher’s. Any potentially caring adult, really. Then she started a wrestling match with God. What is my purpose? Why am I here? Why am I going through this? Do you not love me? No answers.

Shondreka struggled with the teen’s plague: acne. She talked her mother into taking her to a doctor so she could get some acne medicine. Hoping to kill herself, she swallowed the entire bottle of pills. It didn’t do anything except give her a stomach ache and make her throw up.

“I know it was a messed up way to get her attention,” Shondreka admits. “But I wanted her to feel for me. Like, what if I wasn’t here? What if I killed myself? Would you love me then?”

When her mother remained unmoved, then told her to leave, living on the streets became preferable. Shondreka sold drugs—crack and cocaine mostly—but she never did drugs herself, never drank after her rape, because when you’re drunk, you can’t fight. She watched people all around her abuse chemical substances. When “water” hit the streets, a deadly combination of PCP and embalming fluid, she saw a number of friends die while testing out their substance-induced superpowers by jumping off high buildings or driving faster than sharp curves allowed.

Shondreka sold guns. TEC-9s, AR-15s, Glocks, .38s, .22s. Easy access to guns today doesn’t surprise her, because back then she could acquire them fresh out of the manufacturer’s box. Her weapon of choice? The TEC-9 with an extended clip. She dropped fifty dollars on a double shoulder holster, with the goal of carrying as many guns as possible. She packed others into her baggy tomboy clothes. “I used to be a lil gangsta!” she claims. At night, in a field behind nearby Glenville High School, she and her crew would fire guns at bats, completely oblivious to the fact that bullets can carry for a mile or more and hit an innocent bystander.

She sold drugs out of the Town House Motel in East Cleveland, an area rife with cheap motels and low-rent apartment buildings filled with tenants popularly referred to as “crackheads.” A savvy street businesswoman at fourteen, fifteen, she was there to supply a great demand.

She made her headquarters in room 110. One fond memory: it was the only room with a waterbed (that’s how long ago this was). Here is how her drugstore in room 110 worked: the room had a window that opened onto a narrow, paved walkway behind the building. Her trusted salesman, Bubba, would solicit crack fiends and bring them up to the window, where Shondreka would complete the transaction.

“When I say I counted stacks of money the length of that bookshelf right there,” indicating a shelving unit about fifty feet long at the public library where we met, “I counted money the length of that bookshelf.”

People working the front desk of the Town House served as her security guards. They enjoyed an occasional snort now and again, so she would keep them in coke as compensation. In return, they would notify her when the police arrived. She would retreat to a second room that she kept on another floor until they left.

She always wore her double shoulder holster and other guns, because she never knew when she would get into a shootout with the Hastings Boys. Their territory was directly across the street from her pharmaceutical headquarters in the Town House. One day, the Hastings Boys crossed the main drag, Euclid Avenue, to jump her ex-­boyfriend, Mongo. (He survived that day but is now dead. She’s not sure what killed him.) Started with a fist fight. As usual, she was the only girl fighting. Then it turned into a shootout in the hallway of the Town House.

Seeing it play out in her head today, she says: “The streets is crazy. Crazy. I’ve seen people get their head blown off next to me. You see some very cruel people. Some mean, mean people out there.”

“I could have been dead so many times,” she adds after a pause. “When I say God has been with me, God has been with me.”

She got older. Old enough to stop being bounced in and out of juvenile detention facilities. She went through a series of abusive boyfriends. She finally left the streets and got a job at Popeyes Louisiana Chicken, where one of her boyfriends was the manager. He also turned out to be abusive. Hitting her. Holding a gun on her. Chasing her naked from the house. She left him, too. She had no adult to give consent for counseling, none to give consent for even playing high school sports. She was a pretty good athlete, but competing in track events and seeing the other girls’ mothers there to support them became too overwhelming, so she quit. Despite the lack of parental support, despite the random madness of street life, she found a way to earn her GED from the Job Corps so she could go to Wright State University. She wasn’t perfect. Who was? Spent almost a year in the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville for taking money from a joint account with a former boyfriend and he accused her of forgery. Married and divorced a guy who cheated on her.

No one ever talked about her rape. Shondreka didn’t talk about her rape. Her mother still didn’t believe her, and no one else seemed to care about that assault or her general wellbeing in any way. So she stayed silent. The silence served as a wall, a defense mechanism against thinking or feeling anything about her rape. It toughened her. Helped her survive in the jungle, where someone wanting to take your money, beat or kill you lurked around every corner. In fact, she didn’t talk much at all about anything. There were no adults in her life to advocate for her, to seek counseling, to press the police to investigate.

She didn’t know where her assailant lived or if he was even still in Cleveland, but Shondreka saw her rapist everywhere. Like that one time at a party. In the blaring, throbbing music and flashing strobe lights, she zeroed in on his face. There. Deep in the pulsing, vivid maelstrom of partiers in this suddenly psycho disco, there he was. The dude who raped her. It looked like his face. Maybe....