31 Quotes Addressing Sexual Assault

In a world striving for awareness and social change, addressing the critical subject of sexual assault remains paramount. Words have the power to heal, inspire, and educate, offering solace to survivors while igniting the drive for justice and change in others. In this post, we've compiled a carefully curated collection of the top 31 quotes addressing sexual assault. These powerful words, from activists, survivors, leaders, and artists, serve both as a beacon of hope and a call to action. May they offer strength to those fighting personal battles and spark inspiration in those championing this crucial cause.

1. “You save yourself or you remain unsaved.” - Alice Sebold

2. “Now, should we treat women as independent agents, responsible for themselves? Of course. But being responsible has nothing to do with being raped. Women don’t get raped because they were drinking or took drugs. Women do not get raped because they weren’t careful enough. Women get raped because someone raped them.” - Jessica Valenti

3. “She looked at her hand: Just some hand, holding a cheap pen. Some girls’ hand. She had nothing to do with that hand. Let that hand do whatever it wanted to.” - Cynthia Voigt

4. “And we're all good, everything is forgiven between Beethoven and me because this is the part of me that hasn't changed. In this monent I'm not defined by the other things, the things that happened to me, the things I didn't choose. This is the part of me that defines me for all time, for always. The thing I choose completely.” - Daisy Whitney

5. “War can condition a person to be resilient, tolerant, dependable, strong, and capable of so much more than one who had experienced nothing of it; it can bring out the very best in us, but also the very worst. Where is it, I ask, the proper conduit through which a soldier should be raised from whence they would become an upstanding citizen of the world, instead of a single country?” - Mike Norton

6. “When a woman didn't enjoy it, she leaves early in the morning. Those who had a nice time will wait until the sun comes out, requests breakfast and taxi money. In the morning that lady requested breakfast and taxi money. You don't ask for taxi money from somebody who raped you.” - Julius Malema

7. “Not being assaulted is not a privilege to be earned through the judicious application of personal safety strategies. A woman should be able to walk down the street at 4 in the morning in nothing but her socks, blind drunk, without being assaulted, and I, for one, am not going to do anything to imply that she is in any way responsible for her own assault if she fails to Adequately Protect Herself. Men aren’t helpless dick-driven maniacs who can’t help raping a vulnerable woman. It disrespects EVERYONE.” - Emily Nagoski

8. “In spite of hopes to the contrary, pornography and mass culture are working to collapse sexuality with rape, reinforcing the patterns of male dominance and female submission so that many young people believe this is simply the way sex it. This means that many of the rapists of the future will believe they are behaving within socially accepted norms.” - Susan G. Cole

9. “Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men's eyes when deciding what provokes it.” - Naomi Wolf

10. “Now piercèd is her virgin zone;She feels the foe within it.She hears a broken amorous groan,The panting lover's fainting moan,Just in the happy minute.” - John Wilmot

11. “All women love semi-rape. They love to be taken.It was his sweet brutality against my bruised body that made his act of love so piercingly wonderful.” - Ian Fleming

12. “The silences after his last gasp were sung together by a blackbird. I lay there, my eyes unable to close. His were unable to open. I listed the places where I hurt, and how much. My loins felt ripped. Something inside had torn. There were seven places on my body where he had sunk his fangs into my skin and bitten. He'd dug his nails into my neck, and twisted my head to one side, and clawed my face. I hadn't made a noise. He had made all the noise for both of us. Had it hurt him?” - David Mitchell

13. “But no one could say he hadn't gotten even. He could not count the field women whom he had sexually degraded and demoralized and in whom he had left his seed so their bastard children would be a daily visual reminder of what a plantation white man could do to a plantation black woman whenever he wanted, nor could he count the black men whom he had made fear his blackjack as they would fear Satan himself, making each of them a lifetime enemy of all white people.” - James Lee Burke

14. “We lay there with our bodies touching, and as I shook, a powerful knowledge took hold. He had done this thing to me and I had lived. That was all. I was still breathing. I heard his heart. I smelled his breath. The dark earth around us smelled like what it was, moist dirt where animals lived their daily lives. I could have yelled for hours.” - Alice Sebold

15. “The punishment for rape should be castration.” - Amit Abraham

16. “Rape is a more heinous crime than murder since the rape victim dies throughout the period she lives.” - Amit Abraham

17. “Masculinity is simply a conglomeration of the personality traits necessary for the patriarchal soldier-rapist: physically strong, emotionally cauterized, rational, domineering, cruel. All of this is supposed to add up to "handsome" as well. Likewise femininity is ultimately a description of the personality that results from trauma and powerlessness: weak, passive, yielding, emotional, hyper-vigilant to the needs of the dominators and desperate for the dominator's attention.” - Lierre Keith

18. “Madmen, criminals, and rapists! Isn’t it fantastic? All the romantic proposals I’ve ever got from anybody. Somebody up there has an extremely dark sense of humour.” - Olga Núñez Miret

19. “This whole time, I wasn't waiting for something in particular. Just someone who wanted me.Not sex.But me.” - Diana Peterfreund

20. “Secret ceremonies in which malevolent men and women cloaked in hooded robes, hiding behind painted faces and chanting demonic incantations while inflicting sadistic wounds on innocent children lying on makeshift alters, or tied to inverted crosses, sounds like the stuff of which B-grade horror movies are made. Some think amoral religious cults only populate the world of Rosemary's Baby, but don't exist in real life. Or, do they? Ask Jenny Hill.” - Judy Byington

21. “Coming to terms with incest is not easy. Learning to be a survivor, not a victim, gives new meaning to life” - Lynette Gould

22. “Half a lifetime ago, I was forced at knifepoint to a grabage dump and gang-raped.” - Janet Bode

23. “I found I could not not let the words flow.” - Janet Bode

24. “I want to empasize that rape is about human beings, not statistics.” - Janet Bode

25. “Those who support such survivors of abuse often find it difficult to hear the reality of those survivors' lives and experience and are often unsupported themselves. Rather than being supported, workers are often ridiculed, castigated or accused of being gullible or of giving the survivor false memories. Many workers work in isolation and a climate of hostility and are unable to talk about the work they do.Yes, despite all the odds, survivors of ritual abuse are beginning to speak out about their experiences, and some people, mainly in voluntary organisations, are beginning to listen to them and support them.[Published 2001]” - Laurie Matthew

26. “Some abusers organise themselves in groups to abuse children and other adults in a more formally ritualised way. Men and women in these groups can be abusers with both sexes involved in all aspects of the abuse. Children are often forced to abuse other children. Pornography and prostitution are sometimes part of the abuse as is the use of drugs, hypnotism and mind control. Some groups use complex rituals to terrify, silence and convince victims of the tremendous power of the abusers. the purpose is to gain and maintain power over the child in order to exploit. Some groups are so highly organised that they also have links internationally through trade in child-pornography, drugs and arms.Some abusers organise themselves around a religion or faith and the teaching and training of the children within this faith, often takes the form of severe and sustained torture and abuse. Whether or not the adults within this type of group believe that what they are doing is, in some way 'right' is immaterial to the child on the receiving end of the 'teachings' and abuse.” - Laurie Matthew

27. “In a nutshell, the process they [abusers in a ritual abuse group] use on survivors is designed to:break the will and personality of the person until they become as nothing... with no will of their own...no identity...then they... rebuild the person & shape their will in order to...try and make the person one of them...thus gaining powerIf abusers hold all the power, becoming one of them can, for some, be the only means of survival. However, this doesn't always work, instead survivors often find ways of regaining their own power and fighting back.” - Laurie Matthew

28. “Political prisoners describe:- extreme physical and emotional torture- distortion of language, truth, meaning and reality- sham killings- begin repeatedly taken to the point of death or threatened with death- being forced to witness abusive acts on others- being forced to make impossible "choices"- boundaries smashed i.e. by the use of forced nakedness, shame, embarrassment- hoaxes, 'set ups', testing and tricks- being forced to hurt othersRitual abuse survivors often describe much the same things.” - Laurie Matthew

29. “The town was more than ready to accept the window dressing that hid the ugly truth of Joe's guilt. Some shared the secrets and kept the silence. Others would not have believed if they had been told. They would not have wanted to know. As those who saw and ignored the smoke from the crematoria of Hitler's Germany, they did not want to know that their world was not as it seemed.” - Judith Spencer

30. “Marxism teaches that exploitation and degradation somehow produce resistance and revolution. It's been hard to say why. What I've learned from women's experience with sexuality is that exploitation and degradation produce grateful complicity in exchange for survival. They produce self-loathing to the point of extinction of self, and it is respect for self that makes resistance conceivable.” - Catharine A. MacKinnon

31. “I've always considered myself a good person. I've never done anything to purposely hurt anyone. I was in shock that this happened to me, and because it did, I turned into this vengeful person. I've never truly hated anyone, but I was glad when I saw him lying there on the floor.” - Maya Banks