My best friend

My (17M) friend (17F) was 14 years old when she was raped for the first time. She was drugged so she doesn’t clearly remember the identity of the person who raped her. After that she started hooking up with people, (strangers too) in what I think was an effort to view sex as enjoyable and wash away the bad experience. She went to more parties, hooked up with people, did drugs: anything to distract herself from the memory.

Then at another party when she was 15 she was raped again. She kept spiraling further down, had sex with more people (including legal adults), was recorded by them, did hard drugs etc. I think after the second time she began to question if it was really the rapists’ fault. She became suicidal and started to harm herself and attempted a few times. Later that year she was raped again by someone she knew. I believe this was the moment where she convinced herself that it was her fault. She told me “Oh it was probably because I was wearing something revealing”. “I deserved it, why else would it happen three times”. “Why would they do it if they didn’t love me”?

She was abused as a child so she always tries to make other happy to feel validation and love, so she started dating a lot. Not a single one of her boyfriends took her on a date, they went to her house, had sex, and then left. I wanted to show her that she is more than her body, that she’s an amazing person but she just doesn’t see it, so I took her out a few times and we started dating.

I broke things off because I felt guilty that I wasn’t romantically in love with her, and she was in love with me. I told her I wanted to take a break this summer to get ready for college, so she still thinks I’m into her. She tells me new things about her past everyday that make me lose sleep, and I constantly feel so much hatred toward the people that treated her like this. But I’m the only person in her life that she can talk to. None of her friends talk to her, She has a bad relationship with her parents, and she’s no contact with her older brother.

I sexualize her a little bit which makes me feel really bad, because a part of me associates her being sexualized with her being raped, so sometimes I feel like I’m as bad as her rapists.

She refuses to tell the school counselors, her parents, or get a therapist.

I don’t know what to do.