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Im not in any way insisting that people should be forced to sit down and discuss their experiences. Thats not what I meant. You cant just forget about it though. You cant make it go away. It happened and you have to deal with it at some level or it will eat you alive.
The point I was trying to make I suppose is that the fact people DO say nothing and hope it will go away eventually plays right into a rapists hands. It is a mistake I think, to believe that rape is about the sex. The sex in this case is a weapon being misused on the victim, to create fear, submission and gives control of the situation to the rapist.
From that point on, you can either allow that experience to have an effect on the rest of your life, or you can actively take control back yourself and deal with it and quite successfully move on from it, with lessened ill effects.
Maybe I should share a little more of my own experience in order for people to understand where I am coming from here. I shant be using any detail of a graphic explicit or violent nature, this is a family board.
***Please be aware that by reading on below this point you will be hearing about my response to and recovery from an aggressive attack. Do not read on if this will cause you any distress. It is causing me none to share it with you.***
If the moderators feel ANY of this is inappropriate, please feel free to delete as much of this as you like. I wont be upset or offended.
I was out at a nightclub with some friends, and we had become separated. I was wandering around, looking for them, and decided to go to the bar as it was a fairly central place to locate me if they went looking. While I was waiting a man came to the bar, and struck up a conversation with me. At the time, I had recently just come back from having met my father for the first time at 21, he was scottish but had left when I was 10 months old, remarried shortly thereafter and moved to Sweden. The man who spoke to me at the bar had more than a passing resemblance to him, he too was a scotsman, from Glasgow, he told me, and he was about the same height and build as my dad, even the same hair colour and style, just a fair bit younger.
We chatted a bit whilst I looked around for my friends, and when the end of the night came and I hadnt found either of them, I decided to go to the taxi rank and go home. I said goodbye to him, and left the club. As I walked out, someone stopped me, and said "You dont want to get yourself involved with him..." and as I had left him behind already, I thanked the person for their concern and went to the taxi rank.
What I didnt realise was that he had followed me, or that he then followed me home in another cab. I had lost my front door key and so had to go round the back of my house to get in, and it was in the back garden that it happened.
Initially I was gripped by a blinding panic, I recognised what was happening but felt very scared and powerless, despite my height and size, and that eventually made me switch off altogether emotionally. At one point, and for quite some time, I found myself watching it happen from across the garden, as though it was happening to someone else and I was viewing it from a distance. I suppose you would call it some sort of out of body experience, but I would guess it was just my way of handling the overload of emotion and fear I was experiencing at being so vulnerable and so emotionally retreated.
At some point, I realised that was what was happening and that if I were to survive this, I needed to do something to take the control back, and I kind of snapped back into place and found some superhuman strength to fight back and got him away from me. I then stood up, straightened myself up, and told him to stay away from me, that I was going inside, I would call him a taxi, and he should get away from me and never come back because what he had done was rape.
Dont ask me why I called him a taxi. I just wanted to get him out of there. I got inside, locked the door, phoned the cab, watched him wandering outside waiting for it, get in it and leave, and then I finally relaxed because I knew it was over.
I was living with my mum at the time, and I was very concious of the fact that she would probably blame me in some way so I didnt want to wake her up. Logical thought told me to call the Samaritans, so thats what I did.
My luck did not improve there. That night, my local branch of the Samaritans happened to be being staffed by an intolerant mule of a woman, who proceeded to quiz me about what I had been wearing, whether I had encouraged him, and then said it was most likely my fault because I had been wearing a short skirt and had spoken to him. I was so horrified by this, I thanked her for precisely nothing and hung up.
I then followed the next logical thought in the process, which was "I am dirty, I feel vile, I must get clean" and went for a shower. I then phoned the taxi office to see if I could find out where he had been dropped off, after all, he was stupid enough to wait for the taxi, he could have been stupid enough to get dropped off at home, but he hadn't, they told me he had got out near a pub in a neighbouring town, so with that line closed, I went to bed and tried to sleep.
The next morning I already had a doctors appointment on an unrelated matter, but I ended up spilling the beans about what happened and the doctor took a look at me, examined the bruises, and then asked me how I wanted to proceed. She said that rape cases were notoriously difficult to prove, that I had two options, one was to report it to the police, (which as I had washed away DNA and only had some bruises for evidence would make things much harder to prove) and the other was to get some counselling and take steps to move on with my life. She said that in some cases, going to court over a rape could be almost as damaging to a person as the rape itself, because of the fact that you have to relive your experience in some depth in a public arena, which can be quite humiliating.
At 21, faced with those choices, I chose plan B. I got some very ineffective counselling, spent some time agonising about why this would have happened to me, experienced some fairly nasty flashbacks and thought I would never be able to have a happy relationship because I was damaged goods.
It took me some 8 weeks to tell my mother. I never told her where it happened because that was her home and whilst I wasnt planning to stay there forever, she was, and I didnt want it tarnishing for her. When I did eventually get the courage up to tell her that actually I hadnt been off sick from work with depression directly, but that it was because I had been raped, she looked at me, said "Oh well!" shrugged and never mentioned it again.
I felt very alone. I felt like I had brought it upon myself, and I started to believe the samaritans lady, because after all, if you cant trust a samaritan and your GP, who can you trust?
A few weeks later, a friend of my mothers who had often been a good support to me as a teenager, noticed that I wasnt doing so well and pushed me to tell her what was wrong. I explained what had happened and she was very matter of fact about it. She said that it was very easy in those circumstances to take it personally and let it have an effect on you, but that the situation was not so much about me, but about control over a vulnerable person. I could have been anyone that night, I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and have something taken out of my control for a while because of that.
Finally I felt acknowledged, and she was absolutely right. Im not a beauty and Im 6ft and at the time weighed quite a lot. I probably appealed to him as a victim because of that partially, controlling someone who could theoretically flatten you is probably quite the challenge for the experienced attacker. Knocking me off guard and frightening me put me in a weakened state, but I had found the strength inside me to come back from that and escape it. What Im trying to say I suppose is that if you think theres a stereotypical sort of rape victim, there is not. Its nothing to do with your level of attractiveness or otherwise. Its to do with your level of vulnerability at the time.
From that point on, I turned a corner. Realising that it was less to do with me and more to do with his need to be in control made sense of the situation and depersonalised it hugely. It made it much easier to understand. I dont sympathise with him, he was a mean and vile man who took advantage and abused me. But for myself, I needed to make sense of the situation so I could begin to move on from it, and it was at that stage that I began to be really open with others. I wouldnt just prompt the information, Im not militant about it or anything, but I never shy away from being open about it if questioned because survivors of a rape need to know that you can get past it and you can recover from it and you can stop it having any long term effect on the rest of your life.
I would not wish it on anyone else, but if it has happened to you, or someone that you know, then never be afraid that it was your fault or that you had anything to be ashamed of, or that you did anything to cause it to happen. You didnt. Sharing how you feel with someone that you trust to support you is a vital and important way to help make the situation more bearable for yourself and to put it to rest.
I do apologise if this was an inappropriate post. If it helps someone somewhere, then Im glad.
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Man, I've seriously gorn orf De Pete
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