Victim
Angie made it seem as though she were downplaying the consequences of rape, but in a sense, I knew exactly what she was talking about. It’s not the sex part of rape that is necessarily traumatic, but other things, such as the level of violence, or the level of fear you might feel at the time, or other people’s reactions to what has happened. Or maybe, that you feel you shouldn’t discuss it publicly, so it is pushed to the recesses of your mind, in the same way that guilt is.
When I was 11, I was terrified at the actual time. I was in a situation where someone was saying to me, quite calmly, “I’m going to rape you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” But when you’re a child, you’re scared of lots of things. You’re scared the school bully will catch up with you when you’re walking home from school. When you’re 11, the unpleasantness is in competition with lots of many other unpleasant episodes, and easily forgotten. I went home, and I forgot about it.
I only changed my viewpoint as I was growing up. I think my first seeds of anger was seeing how much TV drama includes rape scenes. To me, it was a kind of indoctrination. The victims were always terrified. The victims never fought back, or escaped, or somehow got the better of their attacker. So I blamed TV because it had “taught” me to be scared because someone had threatened to rape me. Now, if I had said. “You can try, you weasly bastard, but you won’t get me that easy,” I honestly think he would have thought twice, and not done it.
Perhaps I should explain that I knew the individual concerned, and he did try to do it again, and on the second occasion I was less paralysed with fear than on the first. I started to fight back, and kept shouting no very loudly. In the end he wore me down not with threats and terror, but pleadings.You could say I consented the second time, or was seduced, or something. Except in law an 11-year-old technically cannot consent, in this country, anyway. But the point is, he never did it again. I think that’s because I made it more difficult for him.
Okay, so growing angry point number two. When I was about 15, I started reading lots of romance books. At that time Mills and Boon made a great virtue of virginity, and it bothered me that I wasn’t a virgin. More indoctrination. By the time I started seriously dating at 16, 17, 18, I was thinking that my boyfriend would like me less, if he knew I wasn’t a virgin. (I just can’t believe now how naive I was).
Angry point number three exploded in 1982 when a Suffolk judge, the highly not-so-lovely Judge Bertrand Richards (what a wanker!) decided not to jail a man who admitted rape. He said the victim was “guilty of contributory negligence” because she had been hitch-hiking at 2am and had been raped by someone who offered her a lift. It was like this judge was saying all rape victims are guilty of contributory negligence, and since I could have made things more difficult for the guy who raped me, I went beserk. I fired off letters to MPs and ranted and ranted and ranted. My parents just couldn’t figure out why the hell I was so angry and eventually I blurted out to my father what had happened to me. He and I have never spoken of it again.
But, the rape did not destroy my life. It did not really even affect my marriage. Lots of things have affected my marriage, but not the rape. There was a happy ever after. It was no big deal. I wrote in a diary account once, that if my daughter ever got raped, I would try to get across that it would be a shame to let something that happened in the space of 20 minutes (or even an hour. Or even two) affect a whole lifetime. Oh, you think. So, that’s all right then. And so it should have been. Except that when I suffered a work-related injury, my previously good relationship with my immediate superiors disintegrated over a period of several months. I was transferred to “lighter duties”, which in effect meant that I was about as much use as a chocolate teapot. I was in a made-up job. People resented it. Goodwill was ground down. I ended up having shouting matches with my managers. One was blunt. “This desk cannot afford to carry passengers.” Which was true. But there was nothing I could do about that. I wasn’t going to quit work because I was the only wage earner in my household. If they wanted to stop the situation, they were going to have to sack me, and even if they wanted to, the people at the very top didn’t seem to think that was a good idea. The other manager one day, in another heated exchange, said, “We’re being really good to you. If I wanted, I could have you at that desk, keyboarding all night.” And just to emphasise the point, after we rowed about whether I could or couldn’t have a night off, he did. My lighter duties ended without a word.
What, you are asking, has all this to do with rape? Think of the parallels of someone saying “I am going to rape you, and there’s nothing you can do about it” and someone saying, “I will make you do a job where you suffer extremes of physical pain, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” It’s quite simple, you say. You don’t allow yourself to be bullied. You don’t allow it to happen again. But I did. I went to work, I sat down at the desk, I went home every night in absolute, searing agony and I slowly, quietly and utterly lost my sanity. There was for months a knife left in a filing tray at work behind me. The day staff must have borrowed this knife from the kitchens to cut a birthday cake and neglected to return it. And for months, I would sit at my desk, in severe pain, and fantasise about grabbing this knife and slicing it through the tendons in my manager’s arms. I didn’t want to kill him. I just wanted him to experience the extremes of pain that I was suffering. I was terrified of going to work, because I was so sure one day I would actually do it. And I never once returned the knife to the kitchen to remove the temptation, because I really, really, badly wanted to cut him, and I thought if I succumbed to the temptation, then I would actually feel pretty good about it. One day, I arrived at work, and the knife had gone. I was accutely disappointed, because I felt the chance was lost. It took me about five years to stop being mentally unwell, and my recovery only began when both managers got new jobs and left the company.
I read an article which pointed out that rape victims are often attacked on subsequent occasions. It suggested that there was something about rape victims that “invited” attacks. So I blamed myself for everything that had happened and fell into a well of self hatred. I spent nearly every day of that five years struggling with the desire not to commit suicide. Hours and hours I sat, thinking “do it. For God’s sake, just do it.” and I couldn’t. I didn’t even attempt it, because I kept answering myself, “think of the children. think of the children.” and the warring factions in my brain argued all day, every day, so that they almost assumed individual identities, and the real me hated both of them.
Well. I can see I really have turned this into an epic. Sorry. But the serious point I was trying to make is that you can recover from rape, but it leaves you susceptible to other triggers. My last anger point is that it made me look hard at the relationship I have with my mother. All through my childhood, my mother had health problems, but she carried on working. She was a martyr, she had no patience with anything. “What’s the matter with you now?” she would ask, when I was very, very tiny. “Stop whining!”
Again, I should explain, there had been a build-up to this rape. There had been small, but repeated incidences of inappropriate touching, and requests that should not have been made. And I had carried out a series of seemingly bizarre ways to avoid contact with this person, which included me skipping school. Just me. Not playing truant with pals, or anything, but just quietly slipping away on my own. I was always faking illnesses and being found out. I was always pretending to be a little baby, and talked repeatedly in baby talk. I did it so much, everyone would get furious with me. And I began cutting myself on purpose with little stones, including around my vagina. I can’t think of a clearer indication to a parent that there must be something wrong with your child than this, but my mother, a primary school teacher, with some expertise in child psychology, remained unaware. And even if I had made her aware - and here’s the rub - I’m not so sure she would have taken steps to deal with the situation. I’m not suggesting she’s a sadist, but that she would never have taken on board the seriousness of what was happening, because she wouldn’t have wanted to.
One last point. I would never, ever, accuse anyone who has committed suicide of being selfish. I have heard coroners privately talk that way. And I apologise to you, Suzzie, because I know this issue is difficult for you. But it’s just like dying of an illness, nothing less, and nothing more, and no inditement on anyone else. Would you feel to blame if someone you loved died of cancer? No. This is no different. I can say this with absolute confidence, because I knew how ill I really was. It is hard to imagine a greater hell.