Date Rape Drugs Are Hard to Detect
The number of rape victims who believe they were drugged is climbing - although methods to prove their claims remain elusive
By: Deirdre Fulton
Rapists who use drugs to facilitate their crime face up to 20 years in jail, according to the US Drug Iduced Rape Prevention and Pushiment Act of 1996.Being drugged wasn't like being drunk, the women all say. It was different.
"My body was paralyzed in a way that I had never felt before," says M., a 26-year-old law student who lives in Jamaica Plain. "I remember being voiceless. It was like this body wasn't mine."
Five years ago, when M. was 21, she spent a summer in Fort Lauderdale, living on and fixing up a boat with her older brother. The tall, slim brunette, who picks at her fingernails and looks you right in the eye when she talks, was used to nights of drinking and having fun. But one evening, after having one or two beers at a bar with her brother and a friend, she felt tired and headed home. Along the way, she decided to stop at the boat of a man with whom she had had a short-lived fling earlier that summer. There was no lingering romance between them; she wasn't going over to have sex with him. "I remember being sober," she says.
M. trusted this man - she had no reason not to. He gave her a Corona, and she drank about a third of it. The next thing M. knew, she was coming to in the berth of the boat, with the man on top of her. "I opened my eyes and he was raping me." She faded back out of consciousness. The next morning, she felt "hazy, confused," and while she "knew something had happened," she didn't know quite what. It wasn't until later that she pieced together the truth: M. was the victim of a drug-facilitated rape.
One out of every six women has been raped, and date rape or acquaintance rape is more than twice as common as rape by a stranger, according to national Department of Justice statistics. (Of 209,880 rapes reported nationwide in 2004, a full 67 percent were perpetrated by an acquaintance.) Here in Massachusetts, the ratio is even higher. From July 2003 to July 2004, rape-crisis-center hotlines received about 2400 calls from rape survivors. Ninety percent of them knew their assailants, according to the state Department of Public Health.
National surveys show that anywhere from 55 to 90 percent of acquaintance rapes involve alcohol or drug use on the part of the victim or the assailant. In most of those cases, the substances are ingested voluntarily.
But in cases like M.'s, they aren't.
In the Boston area alone, the number of women who believe they were slipped something like roofies or GHB and then raped is growing - a total of 68 (out of 296 who called the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center [BARCC] hotline) in 2005, a jump of 21 women, or 30 percent, over 2004. Meanwhile, public-education programs about so-called date-rape drugs - on college campuses, in local bars and clubs - are on the rise (even while rape-crisis centers struggle for funding).
Date rape isn't going away anytime soon. But is it getting worse?
Phantom toxins
All rape stories involving drugs sound eerily similar: a woman was hanging out with a person or a few people with whom she felt relatively comfortable; she was with a man she had no explicit reason not to trust. She may have had a few drinks, but nothing out of the ordinary, no binge-drinking. The next thing she knew, she woke up to that man having sex with her, or lying next to her naked.
"The last thing I remember was sitting on a couch in a dorm room, watching TV," says 25-year-old P., who lives in Philadelphia. (All of these women, contacted through the BARCC and the national Voices and Faces Project, agreed to tell their stories to the Phoenix anonymously.) "The next thing I remember, I was in my dorm room two floors up. I didn't have any clothes on. Everything felt like it was moving really slowly."
It's difficult to know how often "date-rape drugs" are employed. That's partly because substances such as Rohypnol ("roofies," which produce a sedative effect 10 times that of Valium), or gamma hydroxybutrate ("GHB" or "Liquid X," which was originally marketed in the US as a bodybuilding enhancer, then banned in the '90s after it was found to be used inappropriately to cause blackouts and loss of consciousness) are rapidly metabolized, pass quickly through the bloodstream, wreak havoc, and then leave no trace. In high doses, the drugs - which are typically slipped into a victim's drink - induce a state of extreme relaxation (both are often used in small amounts as club drugs to reduce inhibitions) and can cause slowed heart and respiration rates, lowered motor coordination, unconsciousness, and a coma-like sleep. There's also a blackout period that lasts between four and eight hours, and, not surprisingly, these drugs can be fatal.
"I couldn't see straight when I looked in the mirror," recalls C., 32, from outside Chicago. She was raped 10 years ago in New York City, by a man she met on the Internet and invited to accompany her to a wedding. She hasn't set foot in New York since that trip. "I was seeing things in black and white - like tunnel vision. I remember feeling a lot of dread, but not being able to do anything, to articulate anything, or to ask anyone for help."
If a woman gets to the hospital soon enough after waking up and realizing what has happened, she can undergo a toxicology exam - which tests both blood and urine, and can be administered alongside forensic rape kits (which collect evidence such as DNA) - to test for various toxins.
In the Boston area, medical advocates can be summoned when a rape victim goes to a hospital, or calls BARCC's 24-hour hotline. The advocate is there to ensure that the victim, who is likely distressed, is aware of and has access to all the resources she requires, such as emotional support, emergency contraception, or STD testing. The advocate also notes what kind of treatment the survivor requests.
This data, collected by BARCC rape-crisis counselors, shows that last year 68 women requested a toxicology report after being raped, indicating that they believed drugs may have played a role in their assault.
Of the women who made the request, "there has been little use of alcohol," says Lucia Zuniga, director of the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) program, which has sexual-assault medical experts on call to respond to rape cases at local hospitals. (SANE nurses collect detailed information that can be used later as evidence if a woman decides to press charges.) "But the victim has a period of unresponsiveness, unconsciousness, or amnesia," Zuniga says. "They know something is different."
Still, not one of those 68 toxicology reports turned up any GHB or Rohypnol, says Zuniga. There were, however, traces of toxins that could be used as date-rape drugs, but are not commonly associated with the slickness of the crime, such as Ketamine (otherwise known as "K," a horse tranquilizer that acts as a sedative), Benadryl (high doses of this allergy drug can induce serious drowsiness), and copious amounts of alcohol. ("Alcohol is the number-one agent used in these settings to create sedation," she says, and the number-one substance that comes back on toxicology reports.) It's impossible to say whether any other drugs were present.
Indeed, more often than not date-rape victims blame themselves for partying too hard. "You weren't raped," M. used to tell herself. And though she can remember having only a few sips of that Corona, she'd think, "You probably drank more than you thought you did."
Hard to detect
Date-rape victims rarely press charges. None of the women I spoke with for this article reported their cases to the police. (Only 40 percent of rapes nationwide are reported, according to the National Bureau of Crime Statistics. Of those reported, only 50 percent lead to an arrest. And after that "it's very difficult to prosecute a case that is acquaintance rape," says BARCC director Gina Scaramella.)
Much like the rapes themselves, the victims' reasons for not reporting the crimes are nearly identical.
"If you're drugged, you already feel like the world doesn't believe you," says M., who harbored her secret not only from the authorities, but from her friends and family for more than a month before finally telling a friend the bits and pieces she remembers. "You can't even tell a coherent story."
"There just wasn't enough there," says P. of her decision not to press her case, despite a hospital drug test that showed trace amounts of GHB in her blood. "I didn't feel that it would be at all empowering for me to go through all that and then have nothing happen."
The nature of a date-rape crime (in that the perpetrator is often known to the victim) "makes it feel less valid to be called sexual assault," says Chicago native C., a management consultant. "People think of some woman walking up to her car and some madman walking up from behind." It took three years for C., whose family hasn't been very supportive, to find a counselor who simply let C. tell her story - and who believed her.
It seems that haziness haunts the entire experience. The he-said, she-said aspect of rape cases is only heightened when there are drugs involved. Plus, the toxicology tests that can sometimes turn up Rohypnol are the same ones that will show if a woman snorted cocaine or smoked pot earlier in the evening - facts that could easily be used against her.
Successful prosecutions of date-rape cases are "highly unusual," says Wendy Murphy, a Boston lawyer who teaches at the New England School of Law, "because the prosecutors are afraid of losing. They know these cases can be difficult because of juror prejudice, among other things."
Not much has changed, then, since US Department of Justice attorneys Nora Fitzgerald and K. Jack Riley wrote this in a 2000 report on date-rape drugs: "No one really knows how common drug-facilitated rape is because today's research tools do not offer a means of measuring the number of incidents."
Not knowing can be the hardest part.
"It took a long time to convince myself that it wasn't my fault," says P., who now works in public relations at a Pennsylvania university. P. says she has a photographic memory, but all she can recall from that night in 2000, when she was a freshman in college, is a still-unidentifiable image of revolving doors. "Not being able to remember really bothered me for long time."
Turning the tide
The numbers may not be as chilling as they are cautionary, local experts say. Representatives from BARCC, SANE, and Jane Doe, Inc., which fights sexual and domestic violence in Massachusetts, say that the area's spike in toxicology requests indicates a heightened awareness, both on the part of victims and medical professionals - but not necessarily a jump in drugging.
Higher numbers could also be chalked up to a relatively new state protocol, crafted by the Executive Office of Public Safety and the SANE program, with assistance from BARCC, which allows women to obtain the results of their toxicology tests anonymously. Previously, toxicology exams were administered only to those women who planned to report their attack to the police.
But it's clear that date-rape drugs are still being used.
Elizabeth Cohen and the Lowell Rape Crisis Center are trying to convince bar and club owners in their area to use napkins and coasters that have date-rape drug information on one side, and crisis-hotline phone numbers on the other.
In December, members of MIT's Safe Campus Initiative distributed the Drink Detective on campus. The packet, small enough to slip into a back pocket, contains a tiny pipette and a small piece of cardboard, on which are mounted three pieces of litmus paper.
Dribble your drink on the papers, and they'll change colors if it has any traces of GHB, Rohypnol, or Ketamine.
It's impossible to know how many women will whip out their amateur chemistry kits at the bar, but fraternities and sororities, as well as women's centers at MIT, Harvard, and BU are encouraging their administrations to distribute Drink Detectives campus-wide, at orientations, in dorms, and at health and student centers.
These days, M. has a boyfriend, a phoenix tattoo, and the desire to help other rape victims through pro-bono legal work. Through public speaking and advocacy involvement, she has come to terms with the event of that summer, five years ago.
"It's rare that I get re-traumatized in the sense of being there," she says. "But I fear walking around corners. I fear being in my house at night. It's not fear of being drugged and raped.... I'm not afraid of men. I'm afraid of what makes me afraid of certain men. That's in my stomach instead of my brain."
M., like the other two women, also no longer enjoys being at crowded bars or places where she doesn't know who will be in her physical space. "I don't think that women should have any extra burden to watch what they do just because they're women."
E-mail the author:
Deirdre Fulton: dfulton@phx.com.
This article originally appeared in the Boston Phoenix