crime
The horror experienced by rape victims often overshadows the impact rape has on their families, writes Charlene Smith
Imagine this: you are tied up on the marital bed next to your wife while an intruder is masturbating himself in her bent knee, and another is swearing because he is battling to maintain an erection and adequately penetrate her. They then urinate on you both and say they have Aids.
Consider this: you are walking through a park with your girlfriend and your dad. Two men hold you up at gunpoint and take turns in dragging your girlfriend to one side and raping her.
Or your daughter’s fianc says he can’t marry her because she has just been gang-raped by three black intruders and he ”won’t go where blacks have been”.
Or your teenage daughter’s body is found with 40 stab wounds and a slit throat. There is evidence that she was raped repeatedly before she was killed.
In the screeds of data on the rape of women and how to help them cope, almost nothing has been written on the impact of rape on the men in their lives. Yet 80% of relationships fail, usually within six months, after the woman has been raped.
Men who sit together and boast that they would kill any rapist suddenly find they are powerless. A Western Cape police officer who shot dead his child’s rapist is now serving six years in prison.
Police ineptitude in the investigation of these crimes is staggering – only 7% of 49 000 reported crimes last year were prosecuted.
It is unlikely the rapist or rapists will ever be arrested. If a rape case comes to trial, the family has to endure the insensitivities of a judicial system that focuses more on criminals’ rights than on the intense trauma victims of a violent crime experience. Rape does not just happen to the woman, it happens to her family. It happens not during one particular moment, but causes trauma that persists for months and years.
Gill and Craig are a successful professional couple. They are expecting their first child. Eighteen months ago, Gill was raped by one of three intruders while Craig was bound in a duvet on the floor next to her.
The two went for intensive counselling after the rape. They credit it with helping their marriage – not only to survive, but to strengthen.
Says Craig: ”Rape is the worst thing that can happen. Your natural instinct is to protect, and there is tremendous guilt if you cannot. You feel you should have not allowed it to happen. Counselling showed me there was nothing I could have done, and we had to keep calm to live. But it still put a huge strain on our relationship.
”We had to start some things anew. We had to completely redevelop our sexual relationship. We had to relearn sex with our partner as an intimate act. Communication was critical; if the one partner withdrew we had to acknowledge that was fine and we should not take it personally.
”That doesn’t mean you don’t rail against the universe – why did this happen to us? Why are the police not doing more? Even now, nearly two years down the line, I get angry and emotional.”
Craig and Gill hired a private investigator who in three days traced the perpetrators and goods taken from their house. ”The police would not raid them because they said they would violate the privacy of the occupants of the house our goods were in. They never arrested them.
”Sometime later, however, when they arrested two of them because they murdered someone, our case was never linked to the charges against them,” says Craig. ”The police asked me to come to the identity parade. I said I would only do it through one-way glass, and never heard from them again.
”Our treatment at the hands of the Randburg police had been fantastic but once the case went to the sexual offences unit …”
Craig bites his lip and pauses. ”We were dead set on not leaving the country, moving house or changing our lives. We were not going to allow ourselves to be victims. We had to be survivors. We were not going to let them win. You are so buffeted by emotions afterward. At times the rape is all you can think about. But it cannot become a major component of your life.
”Everyone rallies around you initially, but after three months, when depression and the real shock hits, no one is around – they have gone on with their lives.
”I had my own business and for two to three months I didn’t really function. My short- term memory was appalling. I had to make a conscious decision to get out of bed in the mornings. I felt quite alone. I finally gave up my business, got a good job and set about rebuilding our relationship.”
A father whose daughter was raped some years ago says: ”It is unimaginable what happens to you inside when your daughter is raped. How do you describe hell? There are no words. There are feelings of massive revenge, you just want him killed. It stays with you for the rest of your life.
”Our major problem is the courts. I hope those men who stabbed that child 44 times never get out of jail. There is now a minimum sentence of life imprisonment if the girl is under the age of 16 and she is raped, but recently Judge Dennis Davis ignored this and gave 18 years to three rapists who had raped a young girl. He said even rapists must have a chance, but what mercy do rapists ever show?
”A woman journalist wrote a piece defending Davis. She said he and other judges do not like Parliament robbing them of their independence, but freedom and independence is no licence. Judges have to be accountable to the society they serve – and people are sick of rape.
”For months after my daughter was raped I slept in the room next to her. It is so horrifying. You live with hatred, you want to buy a gun and shoot him, even in court. Since the rape I have never totally relaxed. I live with the constant fear that something could happen to my daughter or wife.”
Timothy, a tall, gentle 15-year-old whose mother was raped, says he has ”terrible anger”.
A child who has been brought up to avoid conflict, he was in a woodwork class at school when two boys were arguing. ”One said to the other, ‘Your mother is a man.’ I just flipped, I went and pushed him up against the wall and said, ‘Don’t you ever say anything about anyone’s mother.”’
He pauses and looks down. ”In some ways my mother and I aren’t as close as we were. She never used to be frightened of anything, but now she is always anxious about security. She never used to cry or lose her temper, but she does that now, sometimes for nothing.”
In Edna’s home, sexuality is a taboo subject, making it difficult to discuss her brutal rape. Within three months of the attack, her husband and her 19-year-old son had both begun drinking.
”My son couldn’t even look in my eyes for the first two months,” she says. Both refused to go for counselling. She and her husband have separated and her son is showing marked delinquent behaviour.
Megan’s child was raped. In the four years since the rape she and her husband have not had sexual relations. She talks in gory detail of how she would like to kill her daughter’s rapist – who got off with a minor sentence. She used to sit outside the place where he worked thinking of how she would kill him if she saw him.
The family has been for counselling, and while her child is coping exceptionally well, she and her husband are still consumed with pain.
Thabo, a successful entrepreneur, recently walked out on his fiance, Faith. They have a one-year-old child and have been living together for almost three years, but he says he can’t take Faith’s temper tantrums and insecurity – classic post-rape trauma symptoms.
Faith was sexually abused by her stepfather from the age of nine until she ran away at 14 and lived with her aunt. Her mother refused to acknowledge the abuse.
”What I couldn’t stand,” Thabo says, ”is that she always wanted the approval of her mother. She kept visiting her and when she returned she would be moody and withdrawn. I couldn’t take it any more. I gave her everything but it wasn’t enough. We probably should have gone for counselling, but it’s not really something you do in black culture.”
Faith’s experience is not unique. In some black communities, in some religious faiths and in many conservative families the girl child who is raped is expelled from the family either physically – and goes into the care of the state, or lives on the streets – or emotionally, because rape is a taboo subject. The violated woman becomes untouchable – and, in a sense, guilty.
David glares at a counsellor two weeks after his wife was gang-raped for four hours next to him. ”I don’t want counselling, I just want to kill them. I have some friends in the police who say if these guys are caught they can arrange for them to be killed in jail …”
He and countless others have entertained such faint, desperate hopes. But the chances are the rapists won’t be caught, and if they are, he’ll find his friends will not deliver on bar-talk bravado. What David and others like him need to come to terms with is that rape is the most traumatic of psychological violations: nothing is more intimate and threatening.
In most instances, the man too is raped – not physically, but psychologically. Some of the men approached to speak about the topic for this interview became so emotional they wept and became incoherent.
Rape brutalises entire families, it destroys marriages and emasculates the men the rape survivors love and need. Unless greater attention is given to helping these men, too many relationships will needlessly fail – whether between spouses or between parents and siblings. It is a loss no rape survivor can afford.