By Paula Lucas | Founder
Eve loves India. She had been to India before and decided to spend some time in Northern India.
She was confident traveling solo and always stayed in hostels where there were people from all over the world. She was very careful and took precautions. She had also taken some self-defense courses. She did not openly disclose her identity as an LGBTQ person.
Unfortunately, one night, she woke up in the middle of the night with a man on top of her trying to force his penis into her.
Eve screamed and was able to maneuver her way away from him. Others came to help her and they held down the man until the police arrived.
When Eve emailed our crisis email, she was distraught. When the police arrived, her attacker told police that she had met him earlier in the day, she had invited him into her room to have sex and it was consensual. But when he tried to have intercourse with her, she said no so he stopped. In his words "nothing happened."
It was his word against hers. She had sat at a table with a group of other travelers for lunch at a nearby restaurant earlier that day and he was also at the table. They did exchange a few words but he spoke very little English to her and she didn't speak any German.
The police seemed to shrug it off as a misunderstanding between two foreigners who spoke different languages and seemed disinterested in the situation. When the police asked him how he got into her room, he told them she had let him in.
Eve felt that this was not the first time her perpetrator had done this as he was very convincing in his story. She wanted to press charges, but she also felt that it would be useless. She felt defeated and shamed. She did not want to tell the police she was a lesbian as she felt that might make matters worse.
We helped Eve process her trauma, believed her, validated her experience, supported her in her decisions, let her know what rape crisis resources were available for her and connected her to a rape crisis center with an LGBTQ specific counselor in her city in the USA as she only had three days left in India before she returned home.
Without donations like yours we would not be able to provide support to American LGBTQ victims of sexual assault via our crisis email to help them feel supported, heard and believed.
Thank you from the Pathways' Team
By Paula Lucas | Founder
By Paula Lucas | Founder
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can recieve an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
Support this important cause by creating a personalized fundraising page.
Start a Fundraiser
