Bleeding
© Melina Magdalena (2006)
Once upon a time, it was unthinkable for someone to survive rape. Of course, women survived, but it was kept a shameful, silent secret. A woman who was known to have been raped, was automatically labelled “victim” and treated as a worthless used up slag who would have been better off dead.
Rape is considered to be one of the worst things that can be done to a person. In our legal systems, to be charged with the offence of rape is supposed to be equivalent to being charged with murder. Like murder, the crime of rape has suffered from linguistic filtering and legal permutations so that circumstances can be twisted to diminish the legal seriousness of whatever act is alleged to have taken place between a perpetrator and a victim.
One of the things that really got to me when the man who raped me was being fed through the legal machine, was the way in which my experience was assumed by the Court to be known and understood. In my Victim Impact Statement, I wrote at length about the many ways in which being raped had affected my life and impacted on my ability to function as a woman and a mother.
By this time, I myself had already been fed once through the legal machinery when I applied for Victim’s Compensation a year or two before. The police had no idea who had broken into my home and raped me, and as there seemed to be little possibility the man would ever be brought to any kind of justice, I applied for compensation and was eventually awarded a small sum of money which improved my opportunities and quality of life. It enabled me, for example, to purchase a second-hand computer and printer, to get my driver’s license and a car. These are things I may never have attained as a single mother on a pension. They enabled me to pursue my studies and my writing, and gradually, to become less home-bound.
As part of my application for Victims of Crime compensation, I experienced a baffling interview with a legally-appointed psychologist. Baffling, because she judged that the impact on me of having a strange man break into my home in the middle of the night and threaten to kill me and my children unless I allowed him to rape me was minimal, since this occurred just a few months after I had fled my marriage, while I was still also having to cope with the legal ramifications of custody battles and the Family Court, not to mention the Magistrate’s Court, which I had to attend when my ex-husband opposed the imposition of a Summary Protection Order against him, nor the stresses of bringing up two very small children alone, with no income support save the pension.
I am so glad that this is all behind me now, thirteen years later.
However, I remain bemused by my memories of this interview, years of counselling sessions, and the construction of my Victim Impact Statement. In particular, the physical aftermath of being raped is something I still feel is ignored and is widely misunderstood.
This is not the first time that I’ve tried to write about this, and I think I understand where part of the difficulty lies for me. While following media reports of the inquest into the death of Dianne Brimble aboard a cruise ship in 2002, I’ve talked to a number of survivors abut why the men who filmed each other raping her as she died of a drug overdose of the date rape drug ‘fantasy’ were never charged with rape. Their cabins were cleared of all evidence before the police could board the ship and commence their investigations. The video footage and violated body of Dianne Brimble are all that remain as evidence of what happened to her. This doesn’t seem to have provided sufficient evidence of wrongdoing.
Today when I logged into my email, I saw articles on the web about the reduction in the sentences that some gang-rapists in Sydney had received*. I looked at the article and my eye was caught by one particular line “In sentencing the men in 2004, Justice Michael Finnane said the victim had the worst injuries he had seen in his 35-year legal career - requiring surgery to her genitalia after the attack.”
There was a section in the Victim Impact Statement form which asked me to describe the pain and physical injuries that I had suffered as a result of the crime. I distinctly recall feeling inhibited about what “physical injury” meant in my case. I was still in the process then, of getting angry about the many times I had felt coerced during my marriage, into having sexual intercourse when I really didn’t want to. With my limited and traumatic range of sexual experience, my confusion is understandable.
Like many people, I suppose I had felt as though rape perhaps wasn’t as bad if it only involved penile penetration of the vagina, as it has whenever I had been raped. Since that is the same as sexual intercourse, had I any right to claim that I had been physically injured through this act? And what of pain? Had it hurt at the time? I made myself numb, believing I was about to be killed. There are areas on my breasts that are still ice cold, parts of my body that I cannot bear to have touched, where that rapist touched them.
I found out later that some of the women who were also raped by the man who raped me, had suffered greater physical insult to their genitalia and other parts of their bodies. My understanding however, of the effect of sexual assault, is that the emotional effects and trauma that is induced can be of as great severity whether the actual assault consists of physical penetrations, mutilations, verbal harassment and anything in between.
The only kind of thing I felt justified in writing in my Victim Impact Statement was the bruising I had suffered on various parts of my body that was photographed as evidence of the attack on me, and my fear that I had contracted a sexually transmitted disease from the man who raped me.
Thirteen years after being raped, I can tell you with confidence that the physical trauma continues and has not improved. Furthermore, the trauma is not recognized as such by the medical establishment, and there is no treatment for it. Whenever I raise my physical problems with doctors, I am told that my experiences lie within the range of normal. There is nothing for me to be concerned about. Perhaps I am unlucky, but it’s just something I have to live with unless I want to have a hysterectomy. (Not bloody likely.)
I once presented my doctor with a list of physical symptoms which I wanted to address with her. She asked me whether I thought I might be depressed. (She wasn’t the first, and probably won’t be the last to take refuge in the panacea of the antidepressant.) I go to see a different doctor now, but she has not been able to help, either. I allow her to invade my body every two-and-a-half years and give me the required pap smear, and I get her to monitor my iron and thyroxin levels.
I have been tested for fibroids on numerous occasions. I have the levels of various hormones and minerals in my blood checked over and over again. I took myself to the Women’s and Children’s Hospital one evening, a few years ago, fearing that this time I might really die of blood loss. They sent me home again and told me to buy super-sized sanitary pads. In all these years, only my iron levels have offered proof of consistent stress and depletion. I’ve been blessed with good health, and cursed by the ignorance and apparent apathy of doctors.
The idea of a link between body, mind and spirit is something I’m familiar with. Perhaps the system between these aspects of self is too complex to manage in any useful manner? The body is an amazingly complex network of interdependent systems. It’s obvious to me, that as a result of being raped, something in the systems of my body has been knocked permanently off balance. It doesn’t help to tell myself that I am causing my own symptoms, or that if I chose to think in a different way, the symptoms would necessarily resolve themselves. It doesn’t help to think that if I chose not to label my symptoms as dis-ease, I would therefore no longer suffer them as distressing.
Every three or four weeks, my body launches an all-out assault upon me. I feel as though my insides are fighting to become my outsides. Several days before my period actually begins, I fall into a deep and suicidal depression for a day. This black day affects me no matter what else is going on in my life at the time. It’s only dangerous when life is not going reasonably well. From experience, I know to keep my thoughts to myself. I reassure myself that it will pass, as it always has, so far. On these days, I try not to react to situations that arise with family members, friends or workmates that will later need to be resolved.
My body begins to bloat. The irritation begins, and intensifies over the next forty-eight hours, as I feel I am surrounded by a swarm of angry wasps. I emanate “DON’T TOUCH ME” vibes, and become clumsy, awkward, impatient and reactive. Nothing is simple, nothing works the way it is supposed to and it’s all my fault.
Then like magic, I wake up one morning and I feel fine. I feel like I’ve lost a kilo or two overnight, and my clothes begin to sit right again. During breakfast it dawns on me that this sensation is what heralds the beginning of the bleed. I leave the kitchen and go to the bathroom to check my supplies. If I’m lucky, I will have bought ahead, but all too often, my period (curiously) takes me by surprise. The irregularity is one factor, but perhaps at some subconscious level I still cling to the hope that if I don’t want to have it, it won’t come!
I often experience cramping for a day before the blood appears. It’s the machinery of my body getting into gear. I go to the toilet often, just to see whether the bleeding has begun. Once it has, it is unmistakable. Floods and fury. I can feel my uterus as it contracts and expands like the instinctive organ it is, sucks blood from outside its walls and pumps it out again. For two or three days this goes on, though mercifully, the cramping usually ends twenty-four hours after the bleeding begins. I go through six to ten super-sized sanitary napkins each day, and two or three pairs of underpants. I wake up twice each night to find the pad, my thighs and my sheets saturated with blood, stagger to the bathroom, change the pad and crawl back into bed for a couple more hours.
By the second day of bleeding, I can barely crawl out of bed, though I do. Despite feeling so wretchedly ill and drained, I mother, I housewife, I go to work and I do whatever needs to be done. The thing I dislike most about this bleeding is the clots. They vary in size, and they fall out of me like I imagine dead fetuses would fall out of me if I were miscarrying. Every month I feel as though my body is telling me I’ve wasted its capacity yet again, to nourish and bear a child. I feel like my body is punishing me.
The scientific link that has been established between certain hormones and fertility is not something that has been helpful in my situation. I spent a year on the birth control pill to see whether this might help. All it did was give me an insight into when the bleeding would begin again, every twenty-eight days without fail. I didn’t require birth control, so I went off the pill after a year. I spent a different year on another medication whose function was to prevent my uterus from sucking up the blood outside itself. This did help a little, but I still clotted and flooded and wept. When the pills ran out, there seemed little point in getting the prescription renewed.
Since being raped, the disruption and malfunction of my menstrual cycle has had a severe impact on my quality of life. This impacts on me far more than any sexual ‘dysfunction’ I might otherwise care to report. The fact that I’m not interested in having sex with men does have some link with being raped, but it’s tied in with many other factors than the purely physical, such as my distinct aversion to spending time in the company of men, let alone inviting a man to have access to my private parts.
I’ve never heard another survivor talk about her menstrual cycle as having been affected or impacted as a result of sexual trauma, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that many of us are affected in a similar way. All of us have probably been told that many women suffer from premenstrual syndrome; that it’s unfortunate if we have pain while menstruating, but it’s nothing that anyone can do anything about.
I would like to be able to include this information retrospectively on my Victim Impact Statement. I would like to see the suffering that I continue to endure every few weeks be considered in the sentencing of the man who was convicted of raping me, and who will be released on parole next year. I sometimes joke with people that men suffer from menstrual envy, but deep in my heart I know I’m just projecting my own terror and anguish onto the men I sometimes encounter, who find reasons to give me a hard time. No man in his right mind could envy my menstrual cycle.
* “Gang rapists have their sentence reduced”, Friday March 24 12:30 AEDT ©AAP 2006, viewed online URL http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=87738 [24/3/2006].
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