Woman-to-Woman Sexual Violence Quotes

“The thought of a woman rapist is even more removed from our sensibility. A woman sexually harming another woman? Penetrating her with an object or her fingers? (…) Holding her down? Verbally harassing her? Her against her? This is tough stuff. Just ask the women it happens to.”
― Lori B. Girshick, Woman-to-Woman Sexual Violence: Does She Call It Rape?

“I wish I would have been more aware of what woman-to-woman sexual violence was – what it looked like so that I might have acknowledged for myself what had happened to me, that I had been violated. I felt violated but didn’t have words to put to the experience or the knowledge to put words to it.”
― Lori B. Girshick, Woman-to-Woman Sexual Violence: Does She Call It Rape?

“I have a very difficult time saying “rape”. Mainly because I thought it wouldn’t happen to me and if it did it would be a man.”
― Lori B. Girshick, Woman-to-Woman Sexual Violence: Does She Call It Rape?

“What, sadly, many women say they might expect from a man (everyone knows that rapists are men) is unexpected from another woman. As woman we are not prepared, we feel totally without safety, and the depth of the betrayal is greater. While rape and battering are different experiences, they share the same societal belief that women do not rape and women do not batter.”
― Lori B. Girshick, Woman-to-Woman Sexual Violence: Does She Call It Rape?

“To speak of woman-to-woman sexual violence breaks a barrier of silence, to admit what society denies, and to debunk a myth of lesbian utopia.”
― Lori B. Girshick, Woman-to-Woman Sexual Violence: Does She Call It Rape?

“I always suspected that men could hurt you, but never, ever fathomed that a woman would take that away from another woman.”
― Lori B. Girshick, Woman-to-Woman Sexual Violence: Does She Call It Rape?