Robbers and Rapists
© Melina Magdalena, 2007
My son was robbed yesterday on his way to work.
I think about how Hebrew words are formed from a discrete number of root-words which are made up of three consonants. Words that relate to one another can be traced back to their roots, despite the grammatical transformations they have undergone in order to form new ways of expressing new things.
It was broad daylight, on a suburban street near the shopping centre, and there were other people around. Cars were probably driving past. My son appealed to one passer by for assistance, but was ignored or not noticed.
I think of the root word R-B-D, in which the middle consonant ‘B’ could be further softened to ‘M’, or hardened to ‘P’. In this context, ‘robbed’ could so easily be related to ‘raped’. I think about other words in English with the same group of consonants – ‘rapped’, ‘rammed’, ‘ribbed’, ‘ripped’, ‘rubbed’… do they not share a similar context of something being removed, or restored?
I’m not going to research the etymology of these English words, to find their source. It’s just a distraction technique. I’m clearly very distressed by what has happened.
The sequence of events is clear in my son’s mind. He was walking to work when his way was barred by two men walking towards him. He had politely stepped to the gravel part of the footpath, but they moved across and deliberately blocked his way. The men were carrying shopping bags and drinking beer, having just purchased this at the local bottleshop. The main culprit, bigger and tougher than my son, demanded that he give them his wallet. He told them he didn’t have a wallet on him, so the man demanded his phone. He said he doesn’t have a phone, which is true. The man asked what was in his pocket? My son pulled out his tie, which he wears for work. The man pointed to his other pocket and asked my son whether he wanted to be punched in the face, or whether he would show him what was in his pocket. My son said he didn’t have anything in his other pocket. The man threatened violence again. My son pulled out his i-pod; the man snatched it and with his sidekick, proceeded up the street, with my son close on their heels.
Robbed or raped – for the person who experiences these violations, the degree to which these differ is irrelevant. I know that saying this causes a controversy. How can I compare what it is like to be raped, with what it is like to be robbed? For many victims, a significant yet intangible loss is experienced, while the injury and violation, which are unapparent to outsiders, are often minimised and disregarded. It’s why the journeys of recovery from such violations are so similar.
I can see the effects in my son already – the self-castigation, the obsessive replaying of events, the assumption that had he done the slightest thing differently, the result would have been drastically; fantastically other than it was. My son seems to think this was all his fault.
I brought him up to believe that violence is not the answer to problems. (Wasn’t that a stupid thing to do?) My son follows the pair of them up the street, talking, cajoling, pleading, reasoning.
“Why’d you take it, man? What did I ever do to you? I’ve got nothing. Give it back! It’s mine! You had no right to take it!”
The man throws clumsy words back at him. He is looking for a fight. He can sense my son won’t attack him, not when there are two people to contend with; not when my son is dressed for work, in his white shirt and black trousers; not when my son is obviously not a fighter. He says something about whiteys having taken his land, so now he’s taking something back.
“I don’t want to fight you, just give it back!”
The man’s companion is embarrassed, tries to convince his friend to give it back to my son. It’s clear to me that my son’s strategy has almost worked.
My son doesn’t see this. All he sees is his failure to respond in kind; his failure to fight; his weakness; the loss of his i-pod – his treasure that was his ticket to engaging with his peers on his own terms; he never wanted a mobile phone anyway.
Didn’t I try to reason with my rapist? Didn’t I tell him I would call the police? Didn’t I tell him that my babies needed me? Didn’t I struggle against his touch? It got me nowhere. He threatened to hurt my babies next, if the noise I was making woke them up. He threatened to pull the phone out of the wall. He told me that if I rang the police, he would come back and kill me.
The humiliation is what sticks in his throat. My son will not accept comfort. He will not accept a hug. He is angry with himself. He comes home and throws things around, puts dents in the walls and the door. He verbally abuses me for asking questions, for showing concern. He is beyond human. He deserves no compassion. He is angry with the world. He doesn’t want to be here anymore. He believes he is a weakling. He thinks these men should be punished for what they have done to him. He thinks the police are not doing their job. He thinks he will never get his i-pod back. He thinks this is the worst thing that has ever happened to him.
Robbed and raped. After he raped me, he wanted me to pay his taxi fare so he could leave the area and avoid being caught. I had very little money, but I was angry, outraged, terrified and I wanted him gone, as well. Out of my life. I told him where to find my purse. He took the money and left. Little did I know how long his foul presence would linger, staining our lives forever.
The police come. They searched, but failed to find the men in the vicinity. They take a statement, are gentle and sympathetic towards my son, in their gruff, interrogative policemannish way. I appreciate this. They deem the crime a robbery, and not just a theft. I ask about this distinction. A robbery contains the element of violence or threatened violence, whereas a theft involves only the appropriation of property. I think this is important. My son maintains he was not threatened. He tells the police that the men were not armed. He says they didn’t frighten him. The police have heard his story. They see how he is; they watch his body language. They know better than to take his word for what it is.
To appear to have done whatever one could do to defend oneself is necessary in a culture where victims are generally blamed. No one is blaming my son for being robbed, but he feels acutely that he is to blame, because he is the only person in the situation who could have changed the outcome. This is interesting to me, because of my perception that I was blamed for being raped. The police asked me what I had worn to bed; people asked me whether I had checked to see that the windows were locked; my grandmother questioned my state of mind on the night in question… as though any of these factors or these factors combined, had somehow brought about the events as they occurred.
My son wanted so badly to not have to tell the police that the man who had stolen his i-pod was Aboriginal. I also brought him up to believe that racism is wrong. But that side of the evidence emerged as he told the story.
Eventually, the man was tired of being followed. He asked my son why he was still following him, when he’d thrown the i-pod in the bushes way back there. He opened the shopping bags for my son to inspect. He showed my son that he had no pockets, and my son gave up. He was already late for work. He went back, looked in the bushes, found nothing, and ran home to call the police to report that he had been robbed.
Mitigating circumstances – this bully expressed the belief that because he is Aboriginal and because my son is white, he had the right to steal from him and to threaten him. Such thinking is common amongst criminals, who will find the flimsiest of excuses to explain why they choose to behave the way they behave. Robbers and rapists always have reasons for robbing and raping. But don’t the rest of us have reasons just as valid, for not robbing and not raping? It’s not just that we’re not so inclined – if you listen to their excuses, you might be forgiven for believing that every dispossessed, abused person in the world has the perfect right to act out by violating the rights of others.
My son has lost far more than just his i-pod. He’s lost his day’s pay, and he’s lost his self-respect. He has become vulnerable in a way he had never considered himself to be. The police say to my son – at least it’s just an i-pod, and you’re not lying broken and bleeding by the side of the road. Neither of which is of any comfort to my son. He would rather be seen to have put up a fight and won, than to have suffered and lost because he was too scared to assault the men who had assaulted him.
The ramifications of a robbery, whether it culminates in theft or rape, are far greater than just the appropriation of property or just the physical assault. The insult lingers and festers. Wounds that lie beneath the surface, barely acknowledged, fail to heal.
My son rants and raves and threatens vengeance. Not upon the Aboriginal man who took his i-pod, tricked him into thinking he had thrown it in a bush, and threatened more than once to punch him in the face if he did not reveal what was in his pocket, but against the man’s sidekick. I gently remind my son that according to his story, the sidekick had tried in his own way, to defend him, and to convince his friend to return the i-pod he had stolen. But my son is adamant that next time he crosses the sidekick’s path, he will throw him against the wall and force him to reveal the whereabouts of the man who robbed him. He says he could take him any day.
I didn’t know the perpetrator of the crime against me. I never knew who raped, and robbed me. All I knew was his voice, his face, his smell and his foul breath. Such generalities could be awarded to almost any man whom I had the misfortune to encounter. I held every man responsible for raping me, and I was not safe anywhere.
My son wants justice. He doesn’t just want his i-pod back – he wants that man to be punished for his crime! But for survivors or robbery and rape, there is no such thing as justice. These things should never have been done to them in the first place. And what is done cannot be undone. Only the consequences can be borne, and lived with.
My rapist went to jail for 12 crimes against women. He had confessed to several more, but the victims in these crimes had not reported to the police, so the police had no way of prosecuting him for them. The judge sentenced him to 10 years jail. The Department of Public Prosecution appealed successfully against her leniency. The rapist appealed against their appeal and won. His victims were not informed of this.
At least I now knew the perpetrator of the crime against me. I didn’t have to hold his crimes against all mankind. Life became easier for me once he was behind bars. I could breathe.
I tell my son the kinds of things that I was told. “You never know how you’re going to react when something like this happens to you” and “what you did made perfect sense in the context in which you did it.” I tell him this was a crime of opportunity, but that doesn’t make him feel any better. After all, this was a crime that happened to him! He is the one who has to bear the consequences (as do those around him, who will continue to be affected by the behaviour he exhibits in his shock and his distress).
My rapist was released last week, on the day before Australia Day, 2007. I got the letter from the Parole Board after the fact. I suppose they did not want me camped outside the gates of the jail to protest or make a scene and draw attention to the injustice that was being perpetrated there. He had been in jail for considerably less than 10 years – a model prisoner, to all intents and purposes.
My son has every right be to be afraid. He should be outraged at the way that he was treated. The tragedy is that my son cannot see that his strategies for getting his property back and saving his skin were valid. They were clever. Just because they did not work, doesn’t mean he is more of a victim than he would have been, had he defended himself physically. His struggle to address his experience of being robbed is what makes him a survivor of this crime, and not just the victim. I hope one day soon, he comes to realize this.
Now that he is out on parole, there is a strong possibility that our paths will cross. The irony is that he will probably not recognize me anyway, having raped me when he was drunk and stoned. I wonder how jail has changed him. I wonder whether he has gained weight, whether he still wears a moustache, whether he still smokes so heavily.
The day he was released, I sat on a bus and noticed a bearded man sitting further down the bus, in a seat that faced the back. It seemed to me that he was watching me through his dark glasses. The passenger who sat behind me was a smoker. I could smell the stench from where I sat. Those creepy feelings started crawling their way over me. I began to feel jumpy, naked, scrutinized, mocked, threatened.
My imagination took over. My rapist was on that bus, enjoying his first taste of freedom. The years of penance behind bars have not worked any magic on his psyche. He hates himself worse than ever. He knows he is hated by those women he attacked. He knows his wife and daughters will never trust him again. What was the point of going through the legal process? It was a waste of 9 years of his life. It did not alleviate the guilt and the pain. His wife was wrong. She should not have convinced him that everything would turn out all right in the end, if he just faced up to his behaviour and took the consequences. And that one – she was such a loudmouthed uppity slut. Complaining at every opportunity about her menstrual cycle, her pain, her suffering since he raped her. She was a single mother, wasn’t she? It was probably the best root she’d had in a long time.
He could seek me out. Parole conditions are worthless, if he chooses to take me with him. His life will never be normal again, so why shouldn’t he go out with a bang?
I wonder how my son will feel the next time he has to walk down the street in our neighbourhood?
I’m not safe. We are none of us safe. Never were, and never will be.
