Rape crisis team says crimes under reported in Utah

PROVO — It was late in the afternoon when a tall, skinny, 19-year-old Utah Valley University student slung her backpack over her shoulders and left her apartment to walk on the Provo River Parkway trail just behind her complex.

She crossed the back lawn, scattered with barbecue pits and a beach volleyball court, and stepped from the grass to the trail's pavement. It was an idyllic setting, the winding path, lined with tall, shady trees that heave in the wind, overlooking a steep bank filled with thick, green bushes that went right down to the water. The trail was usually busy that time of day in June, with joggers passing every few minutes, or mothers pushing strollers.

But there, under the trees, just feet from her apartment building, the girl with dark, almond-shaped eyes stopped. Within seconds, a stranger who approached her, asking for money, had her on the ground, choking her with a shoelace, dragging her toward those thick, green bushes.

Then he raped her, smashed her face in with a cinder block and left her for dead. When she came to, her pants were shoved down, her bra and shirt were shoved up, and her face — broken jaw, teeth knocked out, eye socket shattered — was unrecognizable, but somehow, she crawled to safety.

Her story and subsequent survival are shocking to a community where violence is low and accounts of women being attacked by strangers in broad daylight are rare. But sexual assault isn't unfamiliar to the Utah County Rape Crisis Team, an organization of volunteers who rush to the emergency room in the middle of the night — or whenever they're summoned by the hospital — to give victims support.

Last year, the team helped 316 rape victims and their family members, though the majority of the rapes were never part of a criminal report. Still, with 107 rape cases documented in the Bureau of Criminal Identification's latest Crime in Utah Report, Utah County ranked second in the state for reported rapes last year. The idea that hundreds more rape survivors need help but don't come forward is a chilling motivation for the Rape Crisis Team. They believe they can make a difference, one trauma at a time.

In a quiet, lamp-lit basement of an office building in Orem, a handful of women and a man are gathered for a weekly support group for dealing with the aftermath of rape. The overhead lights are turned off, the curtains on the windows are drawn, and on a bookshelf with a box of tissues and neatly placed crisis videos, there is a book turned on its side that says, "Angels among us."