Are Roofies and Drug Assault a Much Bigger Problem Than We Realize?

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Jordan Kisner has a revelatory piece in NY Magazine (viewable now at Huffington Post) about her experience getting roofied and the uncomfortable truths she came across upon further research of what she calls “drug assault” in New York City. Kisner was out with a friend in Brooklyn when all of a sudden she began losing control of her body and mind. Hours later she recovered in that friend’s apartment. She had been drugged, though fortunately no other serious harm had come to her. No sexual assault. No violence.

The incident was frightening for someone like Kisner who takes care to defend her drinks from sabotage. Someone had manage to drug her anyway, perhaps for no reason other than to simply ruin her night. When Kisner spoke with her friends about her experience, she was shocked to find that quite a few of them had gone through similar ordeals. Yet when she began contacting police departments and hospitals to learn more about the frequency of drug assault cases, it was revealed that no one’s really keeping track of all these statistics. For all we know, there’s a pandemic happening and the only reason the world’s not aware is because these incidents aren’t getting reported:

“People who work with survivors of sexual violence often talk about something called ‘the culture of silence,’ the cycle that emerges when society fails to acknowledge the prevalence of a problem, leading the people affected by that problem to remain silent for fear of being ostracized or ignored, which perpetuates the false impression that there’s no problem at all. We fail to create systems of support because we can’t see the people who need it, and the lack of system ensures we never will. This is, in part, how widespread problems go unnoticed, undocumented, unstudied, and unsolved.”

Give Kisner’s terrific article (linked again below) a read and let us know what you think.