VANCOUVER – TV host and well-known B.C. Realtor, Sarah Daniels, says she was unfortunately not too surprised to learn many victims of sexual assault in Canada do not report the attacks to police.
An Ipsos poll for Global News found that while 30 per cent of those surveyed said they’d experienced sexual assault in their lifetimes, fewer than one in five (about 18 per cent) of those had told police.
On Monday, Daniels took to her Facebook page to post about an experience she had about 25 years ago.
So. I was “date raped” about 25 years ago. And I hate that I put that in quotations. But at the time we didn’t even know that was something that could happen. It was a friend of a friend. I went out for dinner, was walked to the door. And the date wouldn’t leave. And I thought it was my fault. I cried for days and I didn’t know why – because all the way back then, this type of sexual assault was not discussed and therefore didn’t exist.
Daniels appeared on Global News’ BC1 show Unfiltered, with Jill Krop, to talk about her experience in the hopes it will inspire women to come forward and report an assault.
“When somebody says no, that should be all you really ever have to say,” says Daniels. “There shouldn’t be any other discussion. There shouldn’t be the cajoling or the ‘no, you don’t really mean no’. We’d been out for dinner, yes I had a couple of drinks, you know what, so what? I was 24 years old, coming up to 25 years old, you can go out and have a couple of drinks and go out on a date and you should be able to assume at the end of the evening that just because you agree to have a couple of drinks and you let somebody come into your house, that you’re not obligated to have sex against your will.”
Daniels says on Facebook she has had a very good response to telling her story.
Thanks everyone for all your comments and kind words. If it just gets one person to come forward, then it’s worth it. If it has happened to you – please remember that it is NOT your fault.
She says she did not report the attack the time because the idea that someone could attack her and it wasn’t in a dark alley or at knifepoint, for example, was foreign to her.
“I felt really violated, but I couldn’t put my finger on why,” she says.
Daniels says she saw the person who had assaulted her three years later and confronted him. “I said ‘you know what, you sexually assaulted me, you raped me’, and the look on his face was, because you know I’m sure in his mind, he didn’t.”
“I said basically ‘you’re a rapist, and have a great day’.”
She says it is important to talk about it, even years later, because these events are still happening.
“I’ve gotten a lot of people reach out to me personally and say ‘this happened to me too’,” says Daniels. “A lot of women who are older than me, in particular.”
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