WHEN the MP Michelle Thomson stood before the House of Commons last week and told how, aged 14, she was raped by a man she knew, both Parliament and the media applauded. And rightly so. As Thomson pointed out, “there is still a taboo about sharing this kind of information”. Her aim was “to help people understand one element of violence against women”. What came over most strongly was the shame and self-blame she had felt, as well as her difficulty as a teenager who “didn’t really know what rape was”, in grasping what had happened to her.
“I didn’t tell my mother,” Thomson recalled. “I didn’t tell my father. I didn’t tell my friends. I didn’t tell the police. I bottled it all up inside me … I was very shamed. I was ashamed that I had allowed this to happen to me.”
Thomson’s story touched on issues that persist around rape. We live, after all, in a culture which has not yet resolved its tendency to blame victims.
She is not the only woman in recent weeks to have shared with the world the impact of her own experience of rape or sexual assault. There have been many brave others, all motivated by different, yet related, triggers.
Thomson stepped forward for political reasons, as part of a Commons debate on the UN International Day For The Elimination Of Violence Against Women. But there has also been Sky presenter Charlie Webster, responding to the recent scandal around sexual abuse in football by opening up about the sexual assault she experienced at the hands of an athletics coach.
In the US, Westworld actor Evan Rachel Wood revealed that she had been raped twice. The prompt for her testimony was, in part, the climate around the election of Donald Trump as president. In a letter, she stated:“I don’t believe we live in a time where people can stay silent any longer. Not given the state our world is in with its blatant bigotry and sexism.” This is the fear right now – that there’s a growing climate in America, and more widely, of laughing off and belittling sexual assaults on women.
At the same time, rape is consumed as entertainment, a frequent plot device in television series – as American producer Jeremy Slater pointed out when he observed that around 20 per cent of the scripts he receives feature rape scenes. Last week, Strictly Come Dancing judge Craig Revel Horwood spoke of Game Of Thrones with the declaration: “I liked all the sex scenes and the rape and I liked the cleavers through the skulls.”
Meanwhile, for anyone who is under the misconception that women now find it easy to report rape, survey after survey shows the opposite.
A Mumsnet study from 2012, for instance, found that 29 per cent of survivors had not even talked about their rape with friends or family.
A 2014-15 report by the Scottish Crime and Justice Survey found that just 16.8 per cent of people who said they had experienced forced sexual intercourse had reported the incident to the police. The most common reason given for not reporting was fear that it would make matters worse.
A new website, whyididnt.co.uk, was recently set up to encourage survivors to publish the reasons why they didn’t report their rape or sexual assault. It is illuminating. Frequently they reveal the struggle to frame this shocking and traumatising experience, or even apply the word “rape” to it.
“I thought it was my fault and blamed myself,” is the frequent refrain. One woman says: “I used to have a lot of one-night stands and wrote it off as a bad one.” Another describes it as easier to “write it off as sex I didn’t want to have”.
These reports are also testimony to how little attitudes have changed. The experiences span decades, but if dates were erased, often it would be hard to tell when they had happened.
One survivor recalls that, at 17, after a night out drinking, she went back to someone’s house, had sex, passed out and came to, to find a different person on top of her. “I didn’t report because, at the time, and for years afterwards, it didn’t occur to me that what had happened constituted rape,” she wrote.
Further reflecting, she added: “Although the rapist and his friend weren’t high-profile sportsmen or celebrities, they had status in that small community … they had ‘public opinion’ on their side.” The story sounds like it could have happened today, but it took place 32 years ago.
We should applaud such testimonies. They are not just brave, they are important. Whether high-profile or anonymous, they remind us what rape really is, in all its forms.
They should be read by both men and women – so we can all understand what whole-hearted consent really means, and we can learn to ditch the blame when listening to the survivors of sexual assault.
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