The notion of rape was…strangers who just jump out on you, so I couldn’t find a definition for it either, as it didn’t seem to fit those categories as I didn’t fight, run and scream – I just shut myself off from it so I couldn’t experience it. My perpetrator chose the quiet sibling, who wasn’t going to raise the alarm who wouldn’t even recognise that she’s been raped until they were in their early 60’s, because I couldn’t find a category to put it in….what had happened to me. It’s actually something that’s contrived, takes place behind closed doors. “The actual experience of rape is very different to what you expect – it’s not your man in the street, the stranger.
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These are their combined experiences, feelings, and knowledge – their Voices. To understand more about rape from a female victim’s perspective, and to shed further light on the nature of the hidden personal consequences I met with 7 different women from Derbyshire, on 3 occasions in a safe environment facilitated by SV2 ( Supporting Victims of Sexual Violence). Our condemnation of rapists is unanimous, but our ambiguity, equivocation and tacit shaming of rape victims leading to isolation, secrecy, and the internalisation of psychological trauma is totally reprehensible and one which we all need to reflect upon. One of the biggest barriers to recovery from rape is – the rest of us. And for the victim, life will never be the same again – the trauma having caused a seismic rupture in their most fundamental beliefs about the world in which they live, and their safety within it. That is the reality that bursts our safe, delusional bubble. The corrupt pleasure of his conquest of a woman or child is through the very act of penetration with his penis – the rape. In reality the rapist has planned, coerced, manipulated, exploited a vulnerability, or deliberately engineered a scenario which appeals to his deceitful predatory nature – to overpower, control and destroy his victim. We need to deceive ourselves that the judgement of the perpetrator was temporarily clouded by – “the way she dressed”, “the flirty behaviour”, “too much drink”, “I thought she said yes”, “she didn’t say no”, “but he’s a nice guy”….and so on.
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It is always looking for “justifications” that explain the awful truth.
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The rape “delusion” is the way we sanitise its pernicious reality and simplify it to create an orthodox illusion which appeals to what we can just about accommodate within our personal world view about ourselves, and our society. The psychological impacts of rape, and society’s attitude towards the crime, create a damaging lifelong legacy for the tens of thousands of women who have to remain silent about their experience, who are isolated from society – all because of the rape “delusion”. Rape has no connection with mutual, caring, sexual relations, however tenuous, it’s about power, control, domination, and a lack of respect for the dignity and rights of another human being. The sight of any woman in supposedly “provocative” circumstances does not have the potential of converting any man into a rapist.
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When we rationalise to some level of normality the rape of women as being, somehow different, that there are grey areas, that ordinary men can spontaneously lose all form of moral consciousness and violate someone sexually in a moment of uncontrolled lust-fuelled madness, then it is an indictment not only about our attitude towards women in society but also a shockingly offensive and naive view of “mainstream” male sexuality. If there is one thing that tells us something perverse and disturbing about our society it is the fact that we even countenance the notion that a woman might be responsible for being raped.