Drying the tears

A year ago a young physiotherapy intern, Jyoti Singh Pandey, was brutally raped and sexually abused with an iron bar by six men in Delhi, India. My heart went with Jyoti when I read her story. Part of it is still with her. Most people could never imagine the horror she went through, the feeling of abject helplessness, the pain, the despair. People could feel empathy, but they couldn’t experience the feeling.

I could. I’d been there. The difference? I’m alive to remember my own story.

I never knew Jyoti and yet I felt like I knew a part of her very, very well. A year ago the soulless rape and murder of this young woman who had a lifetime ahead of her stirred memories I had tried so hard, unsuccessfully, to deal with. In the year since her death I have experienced a huge range of highs and lows as one thing after another seemed to want to grind me down. I have shed more tears than I thought possible, I have at times felt like I was going a little insane. Until I realised – I actually am a little insane.

How can you go through an experience like mine and not suffer PTSD in one form or another? All the years of people thinking I was a strong woman, only to now, 40 years on from that event, be feeling like a small child who needs her mother’s hugs.

When I wrote my website I was finally confronting memories and emotions I had closeted for 40 years.  Every time before I write now I choose a CD and listen for a while before I start writing. What I choose sets the mood for my writing, regardless of what the music actually is. Sometimes it could be a serious Tori Amos, sometimes a light orchestral. Today it was Dario G’s “Sunchyme”. I didn’t want anything too serious, and yet the tears started even before I started to type. Maybe it’s just the act of sitting down and knowing that I am going to revisit something so wicked that sets me off.

There are hundreds of thousands of women and girls like Jyoti and me all over the world. Some who won’t survive the brutalization inflicted on them, and others who survive and have to live with it. Some find an acceptance, some bury the memories. That was me, for the first 20 years. But you simply have no way of knowing what, if anything, can trigger a memory, and that was my undoing. And the longer I didn’t deal with it, the worse the triggers became until now my responses to a trigger can range from withdrawal and tears to fighting back – loud and angry.  The trigger is not necessarily the actual action of rape, but could be a smell, a colour, a word, a sound. It’s confronting for those who don’t know where I am coming from and why, to say something that they may have in all innocence not realised was not “safe” and to be faced with a hellcat tearing them down. Or to wonder where the sudden gush of tears came from. Or to watch my retreating back as I suddenly have to leave the room, no explanation.

I have been to counselling off and on for a number of years now, but the reports of what happened to Jyoti on top of other situations in my life finally overcame my carefully erected barriers and it all fell apart a year ago.

These days I cope by staying as busy as I can.  I get involved easily, but I also get un-involved easily if I recognise that a situation or cause is not right for me.

I know, this morning, that there was another second feeling of inadequacy that triggered the tears. It had absolutely nothing to do with rape or sexual abuse or Jyoti. It had everything to do with me feeling that I had let down my very best friend, my Johnson bulldog Jordan. I discovered some flecks of blood by her bedding, and checked her to see where it had come from. She has an infection in her ear which must have been giving her hell, and I hadn’t noticed it. I am ashamed that I missed something like that in my beautiful girl when I owe her – quite literally - my life. It was Jordan I thought about a year ago when I sat on my bed with a packet of sleeping tablets, at my lowest point ever, and just wanted the pain to go away. I thought about who would look after my two babies – Jordan and her kennel-brother Bundy, an English bull terrier. They are both senior dogs, both rescue dogs, and Jordan has been with me for 6 years – she’s now 11. I couldn’t leave her like that. She saved my life. I owe her so very much. And yet I had failed her.

So this morning the tears came from thoughts of Jyoti, my own survival, and my beautiful best friends. As I finish writing this the tears have stopped and Dario G is singing “the sun machine is coming down and we’re gonna have a party”. Perhaps I won’t have a party, but today I think I will take my best friends to the beach, buy some flowers, and leave them along the beach walk in memory of Jyoti. And perhaps also as a simple way of acknowledging that I am still working through the grief about what my life could have, should have been, but for the action of the men who took my freedom and self-respect all those years ago.

Such a long way still to go...

December 20, 1993 - UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women is adopted. Why, after 20 years, do we still have so far to go? It seems almost every day new stories of violence against women and girls are reported in one medium or another. I follow pages on Facebook which show the emotional depths that family and friends reach when their loved ones are injured - or worse. 

In November 2011 17-year-old Rehtaeh was raped at a party, suffered the enormous pain and indignity of pictures of her abuse illegally spread online, and tried to cope with the consequent bullying. In April this year she committed suicide. Rehtaeh's mother, Leah, started a Facebook page in her memory. It's often so sad to read the heartache that Leah faces daily.

In April 2011 Lori was a victim of a severe domestic violence attack. Lori was punched and repeatedly kicked in the face and ribs. She has spent much of the last two years in and out of hospital having surgery after surgery to reconstruct her broken body. She and her sister, Kristine, started a Facebook page and a business, Peace, Love, & Purple to continue to increase awareness of the purple ribbon causes against domestic violence. 

In the news we're told that serial sex attacker Adrian Bayley, a recidivist violent sexual offender, has been jailed for at least 35 years for the brutal rape and murder of ABC staffer Jill Meagher on a Melbourne street in September last year. Bayley should never have been on that street - he was already known in the court system for violent sexual attacks.

A year ago Delhi student Jyoti Singh Pandey was raped and brutalised by 5 men and later died of her injuries.  It took an international outcry before the Indian justice system acted to bring the perpetrators to justice.

In November this year a parliamentary committee in Britain was told that police are failing to investigate some of the most serious crimes, including rapes and sexual abuse of children, in an attempt to massage official statistics.

It's getting harder to be a woman in an Arab country - in Yemen, Morooj Alwazir, co-founder of SupportYemen, says: "It is a struggle to even be part of society, it is a struggle to speak your mind, to feel safe in your own neighbourhood, your only safe space is your bedroom." The UN estimates that 5,000 women are killed each year for "dishonoring" their families. About two-thirds of all murders in Palestinian territories are "honor-killings".

Google "rape culture" and you get, on the first page, admonitions not to "exaggerate" rape culture at one end of the spectrum, and, at the other, a FORCE blog which notes that "mainstream media outlets like Playboy are still promoting an undergrad life-style that treats college-aged women like commodities." Rape culture definitely exists - it is not a figment of our imagination.

So why, after 20 years, do we still have so far to go?

Perhaps the answer can be found in some of the dreaded MRA websites.  According to these poor blokes, feminism is threatening their very manhood.  Some of the ridiculous comments these blokey blokes like to spout are captured very nicely by David Futrelle, writing as ManBoobz. Futrelle says he is "opposed to the so-called Men’s Rights Movement, a reactionary movement driven largely by misogyny and hatred of feminism." But is feminism really the issue here? Or is the issue the fact that parents – men and women - don’t educate their male children not to rape, not to be violent to women and girls, not to laugh at sexist jokes, not to cat-call at women and girls on the street?

Feminism is a red herring, used by MRAs to justify their dreadful treatment of women and girls.

Until the problem is addressed at the very core – from the moment of birth of a boy child - rape culture will continue to exist, aided by lack of education, religion (all denominations) and politics. We can but hope that it won't take another 20 years before we start to see some progress.