You have to be able to talk for someone to hear you. You have to be able to speak the same language for someone to understand you. You have to be able to express yourself if you want someone to be able to empathise or sympathise with you. But what if you can’t talk? What if you don’t have the words or the language to speak? Worse, what if people don’t want to hear you?
Often when soldiers return from war they suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) because they are simply unable to process the events that they have been involved in and things that they have seen. We expect them to return and be the people they were when they left. We expect that they will be able to go about their lives as normal, doing daily mundane tasks and experiencing life as it was when they left. This is not always possible. For some this means that they express these horrors outwardly by becoming violent, alcoholic, abusive or angry. Others retreat internally and become depressed, or return to war because it becomes the only place where other people understand what they are going through without them having to talk about it. If we have not been there, we cannot understand. We can only sympathise.
The majority of soldiers are men, despite the potential for women to join the army. Allowing men to go to war is breaking a generation of men.
A similar type of PTSD affects rape survivors. It is called rape trauma syndrome, and like the effects of war, it has a powerful impact on the survivor. Most survivors exhibit some of the psychosocial, physical and behavioural symptoms. These can include shock, tension headaches, depression, flashbacks, eating and sleep disturbances, loss of memory and confusion. That is on top of the risk of becoming pregnant or contracting HIV or other STIs.
The symptoms of RTS are compounded by the process of reporting a rape. Rape survivors are still regarded with suspicion by many police officers, judges and prosecutors. They are not supported by the criminal justice system, and even sometimes by their family, friends and community. The stigma surrounding rape survivors traps them in a cloud of silence. Counselling services like those offered by many NGOS allow survivors to try and speak about their experiences. Once again, we cannot ever fully understand. We were not there. We can only sympathise.
Although men are also raped, the majority of rape survivors are women. The prevalence of rape and sexual violence in South Africa is a war against women. We are breaking a generation of women by allowing rape to continue.
It is impossible for somebody else to live our experiences. We are the only ones who are inside of our bodies, interacting with the world. There are no machines that can read our thoughts or sense our pain or pleasure. That is something that makes us interesting, but it has important effects. It means that if we can’t communicate our pain or pleasure, then it remains within us, and is not shared.
We live in a world where men and women are being broken every day. It is important then for us to consider how to rebuild these men and women, and how to rebuild the society that they live in. It is important to become involved in community and local initiatives that break the silence around the horrors of war and the trauma of rape. It is important to stop pretending that everything is OK, and to recognise that there is a problem.
It is time to break the silence, and stop the violence. Doing nothing is no longer an option.
Thank you for putting it so clearly.
Being heard, truly heard, is the most powerful therapy. Yet for too many survivors this is seen as either self-indulgent or weak (particularly for men)and for many others, hearing about trauma makes us humans(including close friends and family) generally feel uncomfortable, so we avoid it.
I truly hope your words allow more than one survivor to start the recovery process.
Absolutely! But until it starts happening to more men, rape will continue to be an unimportant issue. Sadly, women are still not considered as important as men, even in this day and age.
Truth, whilst I agree that women’s needs are rarely considered to be as important as men’s, I do not think we should wait until ‘more men get raped’. I don’t think that that would be an ideal situation, and I don’t think it would solve anything. I think that it is incredibly difficult for men who are raped to come forward because of the already existing restrictions of masculinity, and that there are many more male rape survivors than we know of.
I think, like HIV, the fear of really putting dealing with rape on the agenda comes from the fear of the sheer scale of the problem that has been created by not having dealt with the issue sooner.
Well said Jen! To compound the issue, our criminal justice system is regrettably very flawed. Even just having a separate room in a police station for a victim of rape to go and tell his/her story to an officer is few and far between. Dockets go missing, as u mentioned, many judges are male, and finally, according to a publication by L Vetten on the TLAC site of a sample of over 2000 rape victims in Gauteng, only 4.1% resulted in a conviction. Now is that justice?
Not only our criminal justice system needs to work effectively, but fellow citizens need to protect, or at the very least call for the government to set in motion protective processes for those who are most vulnerable in society, and because of our past, many women and children are at the top of it. This has been iterated in many concourt judgments. We need to take a pro-active stance and stand together.
Weeks before being gang-raped, a policeman told me that if his wife claimed she’d been raped he’d “want to see the knife wounds to prove it.” My rape was a male-bonding-activity, like the legal rape of survivors by our “justice” system, whose attitude to rape is (still) medieval. I’m astonished by some people’s shock when I mention my rape. It’s taboo. People discuss their exposure to crime and violence, why shouldn’t we talk about this? Why react with distaste, not that I was raped, but that I’d mention it? Being open about my experience helped my healing; like airing a wound. Also, not taking it personally – it’s not a reflection on me, but on them. They are f*cked in the head.
It’s curious – every male rapist (physical/legal/journo) is a woman’s son. Do they grow up watching women being trashed by their partners, thinking it’s “normal”? In their formative years, they’re largely in the care of women (Mothers/Sisters/Aunties/Nannies/Grannies/Teachers); who do WHAT that nurtures the rapist in them?
I don’t believe women create rapists anymore than that wearing a kanga is an invitation to sex. Most men will stop if I say no. Why do some find sex with an unwilling partner attractive? Why is force a bigger turn-on than trust? What makes self-gratification (or male bonding) more important than tenderness? It’s not just about power.
Absolutely spot on. I think being heard, and being truly understood is what we live for. It would be a terribly lonely and isolated life if we didn’t have that. Which makes it all the more sad that rape survivors too often don’t get the space and support to be heard, understood and cared for.
When I told my story to a friend (then a psychology intern), about two years after the rape happened, he said he didn’t believe me. Why? “Because you don’t seem upset.”
I didn’t speak of it again, to anyone, for years.
Jen, what do you call men like me who are so dissapointed, angry, sad and broken by this issue of the rape of women, such that they have decided to abstain from sex until every human being starts truly ‘enjoying’ sex?
You see every time I hear about the mass rape in the DRC for example, I feel so guilty as if I’m the one who did it. The question I ask myself everytime is, but why do we men do this? The more I ask myself this question the more I break down. Thus, I have committed myself to celibacy until human beings redefine sex and it becomes a mutual blessing for all humanity. To me enjoying sex is the same as feeding yourself until your belly almost bursts yet a starving child is staring at you. How can I enjoy sex when a poor innocent girl in the DRC is now unable to walk because of the damage done to her genitals by some unfeeling troglodytes!!!!!!
Thank you for the very clear articulation of rape and war. I think sadly we live in a world where majority of people are living with brokenness due to so many factors including those identified by you in your article. I believe it is no longer an option for us as individual to neglect personal and spiritual growth for ourselves and assisting others to do the same.
People do the things they do based on what they know. A truly empowered person will not harm another individual. The question we need to ask then are; “Are all the initiatives that try to assist victims or rape and raise awareness of the plight of survivors, having the intended and desired effect? Are we doing the right thing to eradicate the brokenness caused by individuals and in the case of war by the system to rape survivors, war veterans and communities affected by war?
The use of war to explain the plight of rape survivors is very interesting because war is also often where women are violated most by rape. This is a clear demonstration of the fact that broken individuals will continue to create more brokenness in the world.
We need to live our lives in a way where we do not create brokenness of any person because that only perpetuates what we are trying so hard to prevent.
whenwe stand against abuse of women and children we need to know that our stand will help to heal the brokeness.