I Didn’t Know What Happened to Me Was Rape—How Religion Warped My Understanding of Consent

Editor's Note: This article contains personal accounts of rape, sexual assault and coercion. If you or someone you know has been affected by any of the issues raised in this story, you can contact Rape Crisis England & Wales for free, confidential support. Its 24/7 Rape and Sexual Abuse Support Line is available on 0808 500 2222, and support is also available via online chat.

After I was raped, I cried intensely in the shower. I didn’t fully grasp what had happened to me, but I knew something felt off. I remember an immense wave of sadness, but I wouldn’t have described what happened as a violation of my body. Uncomfortable, yes. Rape? Impossible. I was more concerned that I’d committed a sin.

I was 19 and a virgin. Although I’d engaged in other sexual activities, I hadn’t had full intercourse. I understood what penetrative sex was, but I always hoped to wait until marriage, having grown up in a church that emphasised the importance of remaining ‘pure’.

I’d visited my friend—who I was previously dating—at his house. We spent the evening drinking and listening to music with a few of his friends. As the night progressed, we started kissing, and he kept telling me that we would have sex, as though it was a fact. I kept saying no; I didn’t want to.

Despite trying to hold my ground, he kept pushing me further than I was comfortable with. I was so ill-educated about the mechanics of sex that I wasn’t even sure how far we had really gone. My body was just frozen. It didn’t feel like I’d had sex, but I was confused because I knew I had been penetrated, but I didn’t know what counted as sex.

When I called my abuser the next day to ask him if we’d had sex, he said, “No, I know what sex is, and it wasn’t that.” It confirmed something was off, but I still couldn’t name it. The call left me with more questions that he didn’t seem to have the answers to.

I carried on with my first year of university, pushing the experience to the back of my mind. It wasn’t until a year later, during a conversation with my housemate about our sexual experiences, that I mentioned what had happened.

“That doesn’t sound consensual, Habiba,” she said. I panicked. She believed I’d been raped. Suddenly, the feelings I’d buried began to make sense: the pressure, the numbness, the overwhelming sadness afterwards. For a year, I hadn’t had the language to understand what had happened to me.

Growing up, sex was something I was taught to avoid, rather than understand. Beyond school lessons, there was little discussion of how it worked. At church, I remember watching videos about the consequences of sex outside marriage. The emphasis was always on sin, never consent.

I’d been told to “flee from sin” and believed that remaining “pure” until marriage would somehow protect me from sexual violence. It never occurred to me that someone I had feelings for could violate me, particularly a fellow Christian.

We even went to church the morning after the assault. How could I have been abused a few hours prior? A man of God wouldn’t do that to me, surely?

I’d been taught the rules around sex, but not how to recognise when my boundaries had been crossed.

It’s a distinction clinical sexologist and psychotherapist Lulu Sunnucks recognises. She explains that abstinence-focused messaging can present sex as either pure or ruinous, leaving little room for the complexities of consent, coercion and sexual autonomy.

“This can leave women feeling pressured, powerless or unable to assert their boundaries, sometimes going along with sexual activity to avoid conflict rather than because they genuinely want to participate,” she adds.

When I thought of rape, I thought it was something that happened to women in dark alleyways at night. My understanding mainly came from news stories. Whenever rape was mentioned in the media when I was a teenager, the perpetrator always seemed to be a stranger, usually an older man. This meant I struggled to recognise my own experience as rape; I couldn’t make sense of being abused by someone I knew.

Sunnucks explains that the cultural and media portrayal of rape and sexual assault is a comforting myth, as it “keeps danger ‘out there’ with an obviously different kind of man.” However, for female victims, the perpetrator (where known) is most likely to be an intimate partner (48%), according to The Office of National Statistics.

When I began speaking publicly about the relationship between religion and consent, I discovered how many women had struggled with similar questions. After putting a callout on social media, my inbox filled with responses.

Among them was *Christina, who moved to Scotland from Nigeria last year. Christina grew up in what she described as a cult, where discussions about sex focused almost exclusively on staying “pure” to avoid suffering punishments from God or her community.

“There was a lot of emphasis on purity and not having a baby outside of wedlock,” she recalls, adding that single mothers and children born outside marriage were ostracised in her community. “The social cost of sex was drilled into me.”

When Christina was 15, she was sexually assaulted by her step-brother. Her older cousin scorned Christina for spending so much time alone with a boy. When Christina told her cousin what was happening, the cousin told Christina’s mother.

While Christina hadn’t learned about consent, she did understand that she was assaulted, as she’d begun developing her own understanding through media and books. “At that age, I was reading a lot of romance books on Wattpad. I’d come into school, and my friends and I would talk about the books and discuss them. That helped me form progressive ideals on my own.”

Although Christina understood what had happened to her, her mother and community shamed her. She was labelled “impure” and accused of trying to ruin the lives of young men in the community. “It was a very odd time because I went from victim to Jezebel who secretly enjoyed being assaulted,” she remembers.

While Christina was able to understand what had happened to her, many other women struggle to understand their own experiences due to a lack of sexual education.

OJ, who uses they/them pronouns, grew up in a strict Christian household in Nigeria as the child of a pastor. Although they began questioning religious teachings as a teenager, the expectations surrounding sex stayed with them.

“My hope and prayer was that I would meet my husband and fall in love and then have sex. That is how I grew up,” they explain.

OJ says they were coerced into sex, but remained in denial about the incident. “I wanted to believe I was in control of my body. I know a lot of this comes from internalised shame and ideas from purity culture.”

OJ explains that although they were taught “no means no”, being raised in this way meant that they shamed themselves for even being alone with a boy. “Of course I struggled to accept that when I was assaulted because in my head, I chose to go there and put myself in the position to have sex.”

These conversations aren’t confined to Christianity. Shelly Dar, a British Muslim therapist, has encountered similar gaps in understanding among women she’s worked with.

“Young women may be taught the importance of abstinence and protecting their reputation, but not necessarily given the same guidance about consent, sexual wellbeing, healthy relationships or their right to establish boundaries,” she explains.

Dar believes that when sex becomes a taboo, shame can become a barrier not only to sexual wellbeing, but also safeguarding. She says that when some Muslim women have described experiences to her as uncomfortable or fearful, they’ve lacked the framework to identify those experiences as coercive.

I once thought that after you consented to one act, you had consented to the whole experience. Sunnucks says this is a common misconception. “Most of us learned sex as a linear script, and it feels like an escalator that goes from kissing to touching to penetration, where you can’t step off once you’re on.”

“I think culture/family/religion/media teach us these scripts, and the dominant one is heteronormative and penetration-centred with the man as initiator (active agent) and the woman as gatekeeper (passive recipient),” she adds.

No wonder then that 49% of people said they were unsure or did not know what consent means, according to a survey published by End of Violence Against Women in 2024.

Another reason I struggled to recognise what happened as rape was that it wasn’t physically violent. Sunnucks explains that disregarding consent does not have to take place in a violent setting, which is something I didn’t understand.

“Biologically, freeze, and fawn are two of the body’s most common threat responses, so many survivors (male and female) don’t fight; they try to appease, then measure themselves against a script that demands [what] they did or should have done,” Sunnucks says.

Even after I’d processed my assault, I still believed it was my fault. My whole life I had been told to run away from sexual sin, so I blamed myself for being in a position where someone could violate me. Plus, I thought speaking out would put shame upon me. I was more concerned with people knowing that I had been intimate with a man than acknowledging that I had been raped.

Dar says shame can prevent women from recognising or disclosing sexual violence. “For some women, particularly those raised in environments where sex is heavily stigmatised, the burden of shame can become almost as isolating as the assault itself.”

Religion can be a source of solace, though. Prayer and speaking to other women with similar experiences have provided comfort for me. Dar points to a growing movement of Muslim women, therapists and faith-informed educators making way for more open conversations about sexuality, consent and relationships.

“They’re creating spaces where women can explore sexuality, consent, relationships, and faith in ways that are culturally sensitive, empowering, and informed. The story is growing positively, and women are reclaiming knowledge, agency, and voice.”

I still wonder whether things might have been different if I’d understood what happened sooner. Perhaps I would have reported him. Perhaps I’d have a better relationship with my body today.

Dar says many women blame themselves for not recognising abuse sooner. “But recognising sexual violence requires knowledge and understanding. Responsibility belongs entirely to the person who committed the abuse, not the person who lacked the information needed to identify it.”

I have forgiven myself for not having the education I needed. I couldn’t stop what happened; that person wanted to take advantage of me. I am focused on restoring the relationship I have with myself, my religion and my body. I don’t blame God for what happened, but I do have resentment toward the religious institutions and elders for not equipping me for the world of sex.

It’s not been an easy journey, but I’m learning to give myself grace and take it one day at a time.