sophalicious

April is recognised as sexual assault awareness month. A month dedicated to spreading awareness, challenging myths, advocating and supporting victims and facing the realities of sexual violence.
I wanted to write about this for two reasons. One, what about every other month? And two, can we stomach the realities of sexual violence, or are we only willing to acknowledge what is easy?

I won’t do any injustice to any victims, or to the cause itself, by rattling off statistics of reported sexual assault. Of a carefully produced percentage of women or men who have reported to be victims of any sexual crime.
One of the realities we decidedly cannot stomach is the amount of sexual assault that goes unreported. The sheer volume of victims that exist, unheard and unrecognised, due to their own decision to not report the crime at all.
As I have touched upon in previous writings of mine, not every victim behaves the same. The way we would expect, if you will. And while it would be expected that someone who has been raped, for example, to report it, this is not always the case. And truly, it is so easy for people to say that it is the acceptable thing to do. But let’s think about the justice system for a moment.

Many of you may remember a case within the Irish justice system, in which a girl’s underwear was held for the entire court to see. In which it was argued that because her underwear was red, it simply must mean that she wanted to have sex that night.
She was 17 years old.
And she was further victimised by the system designed, as we naively believe, to protect her. The system designed to bring her justice. And so how, with this in mind, can we expect victims to report cases of sexual assault when they have been shown so blatantly that the system will fail them at almost every turn?
If we are going to challenge myths as a part of spreading awareness, a myth we have to be willing to challenge is that reporting the crime is always the best thing for a victim to do. The fact of the matter is that so long as we are on the outside looking in, we do not get to make demands of victims at all.

Do I believe that we should blindly believe everyone who claims to have been raped or assaulted?
No, because another sad reality is that sometimes people lie about these things. For what gain or for what purpose is dependant on the person, but it is something that happens. However rare it may be, we cannot ignore that fact either.
However, how one chooses to deal with their assault is their business and theirs alone. It is a long mental battle, trying to decide whether to bring your case to the courts and to the guards or not. It is not a decision that comes easily. We only expect ease within the decision making because we stand afar, lucky enough to not have to have that decision ourselves. Lucky enough that we have not gone through what they have. And it hurts absolutely nobody to simply keep our opinions on the matter to ourselves, as opposed to brazenly shaming victims just to get a few laughs or to stir the pot, as they say.

I believe, however, that part of this has come from the realities we choose to ignore. Rape, for many people, is a crime that only happens at night in a dark alley when someone is drunk and vulnerable. It involves a lot of screaming, crying, begging for help and then eventually going to the police.
Rape is everywhere.
It’s in relationships. Where you fall asleep at your boyfriend’s house and wake up to him on top of you. It’s in parties, where drinks are being poured into young girl’s mouths with the hopes of taking her upstairs knowing that the other guy is sober. It’s in schools, where young boys are living out their fantasies of sleeping with their older female teacher. The list goes on and on and on.
It does not always have to be horrific for it to be rape. It does not always involve fighting for your life. Sometimes, it can be as simple as telling someone you do not want to sleep with them just for them to turn you over and do it anyway. Sometimes it can leave you wondering if you can even say you got raped, because you were so young or because maybe you weren’t clear enough.

Perhaps I sound like I’m rambling.
The point that I’m making is that we have boxed rape and assault into horrific dynamics in an attempt to tell ourselves that it is not as common as it actually is. It is so much more complex than what we have made it.
I do not say this to in any way imply that rape is not horrific to experience, regardless of how it takes place. To imply as such would be an injustice and an insult to any rape victim. When I say horrific dynamics, I am referring to the horror movie-like portrayal we typically see within any media piece touching upon the topic. As horrific as the experience will always be for the victim, it does not always have to take place within a dark alley fighting for your life.

I think we have done this, though, because it is easier than acknowledging the various complexities that rape carries. And when we do try and acknowledge the complexities and various situations that rape occurs, we throw our hands up and decide consent has become a complexity within itself, and “everything is rape these days!”

Well, allow me to make it easier for you.
Where a person is unable to consent, whether it be because of significant power imbalances, age differences, sobriety differences, or simply saying no, it is rape. Where it is not a clear and conscious yes, it is a no. Where a yes is coerced out of guilt, it is a no. Where it is coerced out of fear, it is a no.
Does this help?

Additionally, where we box it into dynamics that are somehow more comprehensible for us, we also have decided to use rape as an everyday word. It is almost losing weight, losing meaning, because we have decided that the word rape is somehow fitting for the most mundane. We toss it around without a care as to who could be listening, who could be hearing you describe getting given out to as “getting raped”.
Because, regardless of the situation, rape is horrific. It may not have to occur in a necessarily horrific way for it to haunt you for the rest of your life. It is not nearly the same as getting given out to for being an idiot, I promise you that.
If April is dedicated to challenging myths surrounding sexual assault, it should also include challenging the language we use within our day-to-day. It should challenge the casual usage of the word “rape” anytime we are describing a minor inconvenience. If we are unwilling to do that, how can we expect change at all?

We also have to be willing to acknowledge that it is, in fact, not all men. Not all men are rapists, but every woman knows a man. Some may have been unfortunate enough to experience it themselves.
And I make this point because we are also willing to throw an entire gender under the bus in the name of advocacy, where it actually does more harm than good. There are good men out there. There are men that have been raped themselves, whether it be by other men or women, and what would that make them? What good does it do for any male victim of assault to be told that all men are rapists and abusers? We cannot be so willing to ignore male victims to fulfil a man-hating agenda. The rise of misandry is only doing the same damage to the good men that misogyny has been doing to women for decades, and it is not productive for the advocacy we claim to fight for. For the awareness we claim to fight for.

I have considered touching upon my own experience with sexual violence. And while I will not divulge the details, I believe it is important for me to acknowledge my own victimisation. I do not expect, nor do I want, sympathy. In acknowledging this, however, I am able to provide a perspective into the aftermath of sexual violence that you may not be able to simply read about if you were to look it up.
And I hope in doing so I can do the month some justice, and spread some raw awareness as to the realities of sexual violence that do not get nearly enough attention.

I have personally felt it deep within my skin. The touch on my legs, the shame that quickly follows, the urge to rip into my skin with my nails. I spent a lot of time being, in hindsight, needlessly afraid and looking over my shoulder. I struggled with sex for a long time and forming healthy relationships. I found myself becoming closed up, afraid of vulnerability in any form it could come in. I would smoke weed just to end up lying on the floor reliving every minute of it. I replay conversations in my head, wondering if maybe I have spent years overreacting and wondering if I remembered things wrong. I have questioned my recollection of events more times than I can count. I go between trying to make jokes about it to refusing to talk about it or talking about it too much. I have spent a lot of time feeling fundamentally broken. I have harboured so much rage with nowhere to put it, and so it sits within a dusty box in the corner of my mind. I have so much sadness with nowhere to place it, and so I swallow it down with every meal I eat and hope the cigarettes I smoke will eventually burn it out.

I am not saying my experience is the default. That my reactions are what to expect of a victim. I have touched on this within another piece of mine – The Perfect Victim. The experience differs from person to person.
Whether the experience and aftermath looks like mine or entirely different, it is just as valid a reaction. It is just as valid an experience.
I was lucky enough to be able to heal over time. I am not healed fully. I fear I never will be. However, I am lucky enough that I chose to carry on, regardless of how much I didn’t want to. I will never say I am grateful for what I have endured, but I am grateful to be out on the other side.
Not every victim has been so lucky.

So, what do I hope to gain by writing all of this?
Well, this was my own way of spreading awareness in a way I believe would do other victims justice. In a way that would prevent further sugar-coating of the issue and allow us to truly open our eyes to the realities and to what we may be doing wrong, even if our only wrongdoing is blindly believing manufactured misconceptions.
While I do not hope to gain anything necessarily, I do hope this post has served the purpose. I hope, to whoever’s reading this, that we get to walk away a bit more aware as to what sexual violence really entails. That we have gained an insight as to why it is so hard for victims to report sexual violence endured, and how our own language and behaviour surrounding the issue may be playing a part into that. I hope we can adjust the way we talk and our opinions surrounding victims that do not behave the way we have decided they should. I hope that we become more open to conversations about the issue, as opposed to closing our eyes and our ears and living in ignorance.
Refusal to talk about rape, to pretend it simply does not happen or to talk about it like it is shameful is only reinforcing the shame that many victims, including myself, already carry on a day to day basis. And we deserve better than to feel ashamed of talking about our experiences, especially when it may help others who cannot speak as openly and freely.

And as always, I hope we learn to be kind. To be gentle to those who have been victimised. To those who need it. I hope we are kinder and more cautious of the words we use within our day to day. I hope we can learn what we have been taught since we were kids – if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say it at all.