"You're not like a rape victim"

I remember the Jill Saward interview from the time - she was incredibly brave to talk about it. She was a vicar's daughter who was taken from the company of her father and boyfriend and raped in an upstairs bedroom. She was a 'classic' rape victim she was a virgin when it happened, and raped by robbers who invaded her home. Her boyfriend was hit around the head and then bath salts were poured onto his wounds. She was still harangued for selling her story.

The thing that gets me still on this topic is that there is still a myth about how a 'rape victim' should behave. A rape victim is any woman woman who has been subjected to rape - there is no right or wrong way to deal with it. Yet, according to myth, courts, police etc, there is a way women should act when they've been raped. If they don't subscribe to this particular 'way to behave' they are mistrusted in court. Helena Kennedy has spoken very eloquently of this.

LRD - I think the drunk driving analogy is a really strong one - a couple of days ago there was a thread about drunk women 'making themselves vulnerable to rape' and I was quite, quite frankly, sickened by some of the opinions. Rape myths a-go-go.

cailin - absolutely. I think you are right and of course people should be able to comment when it is not from personal experience.

It is a huge issue and a reminder why women need to be able to talk about these things and have the spaces to talk about them.

Maybe we need t-shirts saying - this is what a rape victim looks like

WRT those statistics Eats - I would imagine if you included rape, serious sexual assault, and "minor" sexual assault (if such a thing exists) the number would be closer to 80 or 90%

In the university town in the states where my mate went to school, stranger rapes were 1 in every 60 rapes admitted anonymously.

I can understand that LRD - but then people comment on all sorts of other experiences that they haven't had themselves. It's just that when it comes to abuse there is reluctance to engage, partly, of course, for fear of saying the wrong thing, but also I think partly because it is something people don't want to talk or think about. Which is understandable to a certain extent. I agree that rape/sexual assault is far more common that people like to admit and that when you're talking a group of women it's pretty much guaranteed that at least one has experienced some sort of incident. But no one talks about it. In that sense it a massive feminist issue because a huge injustice and cruelty that women suffer at the hands, mainly, of men, is hushed up.

Agreed Eats. The guys who abused me as a child were normal stand-up people, I even really liked one of them.

Yes sorry big x post

Sorry, that was a big cross post, but I agree with what else you're saying too.

With lots of this stuff it would be much better if we were able to be more open as a society, wouldn't it?

basil's thing that this man said, that is effectively shutting someone up IMO because what do you say back? 'Um, I am'?

Its either 20 or 25% of women are raped or seriously sexually assaulted - can't remember which. So not rare at all. The stranger type of rape I suspect is rarer

Agreed Cailin. The myth we are fed is that rapists are monsters in some way, rather than the ordinary nice guy everyone gets on with. And that leads to people saying when someone is accused of rape, even when they hardly know the guy - I can't believe he would be a rapist.

I think people sometimes say counseling because they're thinking it's so serious/unusual, they could not possibly have the experience to say the right thing, but then it is actually comforting to know that experiences are not unusal and you'd expect on a site this big to find other people who can empathize. I think with the statistics for rape (and sorry, I wouldn't know them about child abuse but I know it is not as uncommon as some people think), it's a mistake to assume someone who's been raped is completely out of your realm of experience if you have not been raped. You will almost certainly know someone who has had that experience even if they don't say so.

I get what you're saying about paedophiles, Eats, and the same is true of rapists IMO. The guy who raped me was my boyfriend, perfectly nice guy, well liked by a lot of people, we are still in contact due to mutual friends (though I hardly ever see or talk to him, only when I can't avoid it) and I think everyone would struggle to believe he was a rapist. I think it's because of that that I haven't told a single soul what he did in real life because he in no way fits the traditional "rapist" stereotype.

X posted LRD, I didn't think you were saying that at all :)

Yes, hopefully. I'd like to get to the point where, in a personal conversation about childhoods, I would be able to say "I was sexually abused" without the other person going silent and getting totally flustered. I can totally understand why people have such a difficulty with it, but it's not good enough really because it creates a situation where children who are in the midst of abuse can't speak up about it, and where people who have been abused suffer in silence for years and years due to not feeling they can tell anyone about it. All this bollocks about protecting children and "Every Child Matters" is only so much hot air until people are willing to wade in and actually help when it comes down to it.

Really interesting discussion.

I think on MN posters often suggest counselling, when whta they really men, is I haven't got a clue what to say to you, but don't want to ignore you either. So it is partly reaching out and partly silencing i.e. go and talk to a professional and not me.

It annoys me how so many people don't see that the extreme vilification our society has of paedophiles actually makes the victims feel more ashamed - sorry can't explain it very well.

In terms of what a rape victim looks like - as a teenager I absorbed the idea that a rape victim was someone who was vulnerable i.e. the drunk woman, the shy unstreetwise woman alone in a rough part of town, the neglected child that apaedophile homed in on. And this is all about the myth of rapists being strangers, rather than friends, relatives and partners. Of course basic feminism soon made me realise that myth wasn't true. But i still see people posting this myth on MN in various ways.

I agree that rape victims are "supposed" to be totally devastated by the rape and for it to affect their life totally. I think its the myth that rape is the worst thing that could happen to a woman. Not saying it is not awful, but worst things can and do happen. And if you are not devastated then it "means" that the rape wasn't such a big deal after all.

Argh, sorry, as soon as I pressed post I realized that last bit comes across as if I'm saying 'it's your job to sort out a vocabulary and I don't mean that in the least. I mean I hope people will be seeing them, and it'll contribute to a community where more people feel able to say things, like that they are listening.

I've seen that thread in Active Convos a fair few times, if it's the one I think.

I can imagine it would be very lonely. I suppose we've got to the stage now where there's a social vocabulary (on MN anyway) for showing rape survivors you care, and hopefully your threads will help construct that for survivors of abuse too.

Thanks LRD. I do think people mean well, it's just so dispiriting and lonely for a person to open their heart about something so painful and personal only to be met with, basically, a wall of silence. The amount people need to talk about this is pretty obvious from the fact that I started an abuse survivors' thread on the 19th of March and it's now on its 5th part. 4,500 posts in less than three months. What people need to remember is that abuse/rape survivors (of which I am both, unfortunately) aren't a species all of their own, they're just normal people who want to talk about something terrible that happened to them, to try to come to terms with it. All it takes to be there for a survivor is to say "I'm listening."

That is bad, Cailin. I had no idea but I will take care about it now. Thanks for speaking out about it.

I agree BlackOut, but we are a long long way from that IMO. Even people who are quite sympathetic to rape survivors are reluctant to engage with survivors of childhood abuse. That's especially true on MN IMO. Often what happens is someone will start a thread talking about how they're suffering as a result of abuse, and there will be then 10 or so replies along the lines of "Sorry that happened, you should seek counselling..." and that's it. Basically the message is, I'm sorry but I don't know what to say to you and I don't really want to talk about it. It contributes a lot to the feeling that abuse survivors have of being alone and unheard.

Back to Jill Saward for a minute, does anyone else remember the criticisms she faced for publishing her story? It was terrible, as if she was the perpetrator and not the victim of a crime. Some people said she shouldn't profit from it. I wonder if I can find a link, it was in 1990 so pre-internet.

Agree with your point about it being a taboo subject CallinDana

I feel it should be spoken about more often the challenge the myths and put the responsibilty back onto the abuser. The same that has been done with the 'I believe you'

I agree with you LRD, any prevention should focus entirely on the abusers/rapists and anything that focuses on victims should centre around understanding and support.

Btw it works with drunk driving doesn't it? We didn't teach people to wear body armour to protect them from crashing cars - we stigmatized the idea of driving when drunk. And it had a really big effect. So I am not just being idealistic, it's practical.