One of the most moving and healing experiences I have had was to sit in a room with counsellors and other victim-survivors of rape. The first time I did this was part of a group therapy process in a group comprised of women with no obvious link other than having survived sexual assault. The second time was different, and more potent. It came at the end of the legal process when serial rapist Brett Major was convicted and sentenced and jailed. I sat in a group of other victim-survivors of his crimes.
Part of the legal process had been to parade us one by one in front of a police line-up at Holden Hill Police Station. I’ve written of this experience before. Unlike the depiction of such events in television crime dramas there was no physical barrier between each of us and our rapist. We were accompanied by exclusively male police officers, which still seems extraordinarily premeditated and insensitive. The third point to make is that we were each instructed not to speak of our experiences of rape to one another (lest our conversation somehow sully the legal process).
Our enforced silence shaped the way we were able to behave. It was obvious that we were in a boy’s club and that the determination of guilt or innocence was only going to be made tangentially according to our individual responses to the process. The possibility that we might, despite the apparent invasion of our fragile privacy, be able to identify the man who had attacked us was offered grudgingly to us. We were being accorded some kind of privilege to get this opportunity at all.
It’s not unusual for victim-survivors of rape and sexual assault to report feeling violated repeatedly by enduring police and judicial processes. Indeed the idea that we might feel uncomfortable, and that our privacy might be invaded is used to keep us silent.
"What I really want to encourage people to remember is that even though this issue is a heavy topic, and therefore it's very difficult to talk about, it's never going to be as difficult as the abuse itself." Grace Tame
Major’s confession played an enormous mitigating role in his sentencing, which was light even by the pathetic standards of Law. 12 years for 12 crimes. His confession was hunted out of him by his interactions with women. I’m not the only one to figure out that a confession would never have been forthcoming, had women’s voices, raised repeatedly despite the sanctioned silence not been heeded.
When it came to us sitting in a room together with the right and freedom to speak, we all had a great deal to say. Not all of Brett Major’s targets were in the room – some had declined the opportunity and others had never been found to be invited. I didn’t recognize any of my fellow victim-survivors from encountering them at Holden Hill Police Station.
I wonder whether we would have had anything to say to Brett Major, given the opportunity?
I wonder about invading the precious privacy of the “male staffer” who has allegedly assaulted several women who were working at Parliament House?
When rape culture and the boy’s club works so hard to silence and isolate victim-survivors by pretending to protect our privacy and our fragile state, it is our collective strength that inspires fear into men. We want to turn the world upside down, shake it up and put the pieces back together in a way that will be better for all of us. It doesn’t mean we want to shake up the world and victimize men in return for being victimized by men and rape culture.
I know that the strident assertions that Linda Reynolds CSC is a wrongdoer and needs to be punished for maintaining the boy’s club provides convenient distraction from the central issue. Linda Reynolds is not THE rapist.
Who’s to say she doesn’t feel just as threatened as the “young staffers”, by the “male staffer rapist”?
Who’s to say she doesn’t feel that her position as a minority woman in Parliament is just as threatened by being forced to either confront rape culture, thereby stepping away from any protection she has as a grudgingly accepted politician, or to sanction rape culture through her continued silence?
Women need to support other women to tackle rape culture. Speaking up unsupported leads to ridicule and abuse. It takes guts to take on rape culture. Women who are victim-survivors of rape had very little left to lose. The only shreds of dignity and privacy left are those conferred upon us by the sanctioned silences of others, and they are torn away repeatedly when our voices are ignored, belittled and silenced.
It is hard to be public and loud about being raped. People don’t know what to say. They feel impacted, embarrassed, ashamed, afraid. I will never forget the women’s meeting of my Peace Group, which was convened at least partly in support of my experience. No one knew what to say to me. No one could even make eye contact with me. These were politicized women. We sat in semi-darkness, the gloom of our impotence settling heavily on our shoulders, weighted down by our collective lack of power. I wasn’t raped by anyone in the Peace Group. Brett Major was a stranger to us all. But by the same token, any one of those women could have fallen prey to his attacks.
Nothing I am writing today is new or original. The strength of women’s collective voices is legendary. Every generation finds ourselves repeatedly thrown up and over the wall of sanctioned rape culture, landing with wails of outrage, turned on suddenly to the intersectionality of hierarchies we never imagined ourselves implicitly helping to enforce. Hierarchies where certain women find it easier to be heard, and others are more likely to be punished for speaking up; where women are pitted against one another, according to our culture and skin and education; where the bitterness expressed by one group of oppressed women silences a more privileged group of women because the shame that we experience when we realise that our lot is so much better than that of so many others.
How dare we wail and complain about something so banal and so unpleasant? It's easier to look away.
What right have we to raise our voices about being abused when we are so privileged?
And so we maintain the silence, extending a tacit offer to speak, to those who start from a place of no status to speak from. That’s how all of us work together to maintain rape culture. We punish one another for it.
By violating our bodies, rapists expose us in a shameful and painful way. Once you have been exposed like that, it’s hard to feel like it’s possible to cover up again. The wounds feel like they will never heal, and this must be obvious to everyone around us. We wonder why others remain so silent in the face of our wounds.
We are attuned to our socially-conditioned need to take care of the feelings of other people, even at the cost of ourselves. We are skinned-alive sensitized to an outside world that openly wants us to disappear. Surviving and healing means we relearn how to conform to society’s standards and conventions. We hide our pain turn our rage inwards, in self-loathing and shame.
Those around us seem so ashamed of our naked shame, our blood and our ruin, they sanction our silence while saying they are offering us the respect to heal our wounds. It's a lie. They speak of us using our first names, as though our exposure has reduced us from being adult women, to not quite women at all, certainly not the kind of women with last names, connections, careers, vocations. We are women who need to be shoved under the bed and forgotten. We need to be gagged for our own collective good.
That’s not the way to deal with our pain.
So well done, Grace Tame, Brittany Higgins and all the other women who are speaking out. I support you. Please don’t be chased back out of the light. Allow me to help dismantle rape culture and be part of remaking the world.
Dismantling rape culture is part of an ongoing, collective effort which works in fits and starts. We must remind one another of our individual value. We must remember to actively support one another in pointing our collective fingers at those who silence us.
