Playboy
By Jeena Sharma
January 22, 2018
In 2018, Safe Horizon’s Eri Kim spoke to Playboy about allegations about sexual misconduct.
“We elevate people in the media and believe that there’s something virtuous about them—it could be that they’re popular, good-looking, or successful. We believe that that virtue will make them incapable of rape or a crime like this. But that’s not true. It’s a disguise,” says Eri Kim, senior clinical director at Safe Horizon. “We believe that that virtue and rape are mutually exclusive when they’re not. [Both] things can be true in one person.”
Sex is defined by feelings of attraction, intimacy, affection, and satisfaction. Rape, on the other hand, induces fear, trauma, pain, and shock. They could not be more mutually exclusive.
“We live in a societal bubble where we all get the same messages. But the [sexual violence] survivors that we work with have told us over and over that their body and their brains can actually tell the difference. They don’t become traumatized if they’ve had consensual sex. Their systems recognized it as something else. It was violence, plain and simple,” says Kim.