The diary of Charlene Smith in the week leading up to the trial of the man accused of raping her
A week before the trial, I “crashed”. The police had asked me to give further details of the penetrative acts during the rape, and I did. But it put images back in my head I had for eight months tried to remove.
Within hours I was in Milpark hospital, experiencing serious heart pain and terrible flashbacks. During a flashback one logical part of your brain knows where you are, but the other is consumed by fear and by images of either the rapist or incidents during the rape.
I wouldn’t let nursing staff lay me on a bed, I leapt out of one cubicle when I saw rolls of tape on a table – tape like the one used to bind me during the rape. I crouched in a corner on the floor behind a curtain while a nurse soothed me.
I felt unbelievably selfish. In another part of casualty was a young man who had been shot in the face by a hijacker and a young police officer shot in his side in Hillbrow, and here I was cowering in a corner, sobbing, “Don’t let him in, don’t let him in. Don’t tie me up, don’t tie me up.”
That night as I lay sedated in a hospital bed, a young doctor came into my room. He was drawn and exhausted, desperate and angry. “I can’t take the carnage anymore, I can’t bear this profession. I can’t bear telling people someone they love is dead – and then I have to give the best treatment to criminals. I can’t take this anymore. It’s hurting me too much. I get morose, it’s damaging my family relationships.”
How do you describe fear once it seizes your heart and dominates your mind?
“Crashing” is part of post-rape trauma syndrome. I explain to other rape survivors that after a rape we symbolically walk a narrow suspension bridge above a high gorge. Initially, we cannot consider living day by day, or even hour by hour; those are time periods too long to the deeply traumatised. We have to live minute by minute and celebrate each minute we survive.
Each time we do something we thought we could not do, like leave our home or sit for longer than 30 minutes in a restaurant without becoming fearful or go out at night, we have to congratulate ourselves and begin freeing ourselves of the walls of fear built around our minds and hearts.
Feelings of wanting to die are common, but we have to hold on to the narrow suspension bridge and strengthen it in our mind’s eye.
In the beginning the bridge is poorly made; it has fraying rope handrails, the floor is weak and sways. I tell survivors, forget about the floor of the bridge. It will every now and again collapse under your feet – you have to expect that and know it is normal. Don’t fear for your sanity (which we all do). Build the handrails, first into strong rope, then steel. Once the handrails are steel, slowly begin strengthening the base upon which you walk – knowing that this is a long process, that the floor can and will fall out from under you when you least expect it.
Five days before the trial I walk into a store. A skinny young woman comes up to me. “Are you Charlene Smith? The same thing happened to me …” We go for coffee.
When she was 13 she was caring for her small siblings when there was a knock on the door. As she opened it, a man who used to push a cart selling vegetables along township streets forced his way in.
He hit her, and she fell, cutting her face open against a step. He raped her. Her siblings yelled out of a window, and as her cousin who was playing soccer outside ran in, the rapist ran out.
“He picked up his trolley and continued down the street as though nothing had happened,” she said. “No one chased him.”
When her mother came home she counselled her daughter: “This never happened. Don’t think about it, chase it from your mind.”
But trauma, untreated, poisons the mind. The 21-year-old woman, who retains a vivid scar on her face, cannot sustain a relationship or a job. “Every time I look in the mirror, my face reminds me. Yesterday I cried all day for nothing.”
She still has flashbacks. She becomes agitated if people raise their voices, even in the normal course of conversation.
Two weeks before the trial I spend three hours with the prosecutor preparing for the trial. I can’t look at photographs of the interior of my home taken by police after the rape. I avert my face from an identikit of the rapist. I refuse to read the statement. I speak freely about the rape on public platforms, the minutes leading up to it, those after – but the details of the act itself are unbearably painful.
I e-mail a friend in Vancouver: “When the prosecutor went through the trial with me, do you know what made me cry? It was recalling how on the night I was raped I had to walk past children in casualty who were colouring in at a little table, and here I was just in a gown with masking tape all over my body and blood on my hand. I hated walking past those children, it was like exposing them to violence, and that was when I wept.”
The Johannesburg Magistrate’s Court is a place that has no respect for people. The passages are filthy, paint peels from ceilings, there are not enough benches so people lean against walls or squat on their haunches outside courts. The prosecutor takes me into a court to explain procedure. It stinks.
This is the second prosecutor. The first treated me with such disrespect that I walked out on him. His insensitivity so traumatised me that I went to a friend’s office, curled into a ball and rocked back and forth as I wept. He took me to a doctor – and yet I am by far the strongest rape survivor I know.
About 10 days before the trial I receive a bomb threat at my home. I am disinclined to take it seriously, but an incredibly kind and efficient officer at the flying squad says I should. We trace the number of the caller, but I have yet to hear if anyone has been charged.
Rape in South Africa is about disrespect for the humanity of others, a violent culture and pathetic policing – indeed, a criminal justice system that is not just on its knees. A good deal of it has been unconscious for so long we no longer notice that it is not awake.
The father of rape is attitude, and its tinder is frustration. We need peer mediation and conflict resolution programmes in every school, because sexual violence is a manifestation of serious aggression, entitlement and impotence; we need to teach our children different ways of responding to frustration.
The deepest wound rapists inflict is not the path of a knife, the imprint of a hand – it is a psychological assault, and the law, the old and new drafts, fails to take that into account.
A woman, raped by 15, has nightmares not of the rape itself but of the rapists licking her face. How do you explain that to a society where rape is considered an assault using the penis as a weapon? A teenager raped on a sidewalk in Randpark Ridge remembers the sexual act less than the rapist breaking a bottle next to her face and “the hatred in his eyes”.
During torture or rape we survive by maintaining control over our mind – there is nothing we can do about the pain or degradation our body is experiencing, our mind is our tool of survival. But after rape, our terror becomes such that although our body may heal, and may resist HIV, our minds threaten to implode. The brain that helped us survive during the rape endangers us over weeks, months and years as it returns to the terror, often at the most unexpected times, in the most unexpected ways.
Many soldiers survived the Vietnam War through the power of their minds, but afterward could not cope with the banality of daily life in the peaceful United States. The war had not ended in their minds; a movie reel kept replaying horror in their heads.
The same happened to veterans of Umkhonto weSizwe. Those amnestied from death row no longer listened for the thud of the hangman’s trap door. But they came home to poverty and neglect, without the routine of prison, and so many commit suicide or turn to drink or crime.
I was in a supermarket a few months after the rape when I suddenly had an overwhelming urge to die. I felt I wanted to go home and kill myself. It took all my energy to stay in that supermarket, to ensure I was not alone.
It is between three and six months after a rape that the suicide risk of raped women shoots up; they change their jobs, their homes, their relationships begin collapsing. It is the time when their friends are commenting on how well they are coping that they enter their darkest phase.
Most of us fear the night. Amy Brown, the mother gang-raped who now has HIV, patrols her home until 3am most nights. Another survivor says if she is alone at home she patrols the house with a gun, peering out of windows, checking doors. She doesn’t sleep. If her family is at home, she sleeps with a gun next to her bed.
A woman from a large company called me in crisis. She had been raped and although she did not talk about it, her colleagues knew. She wanted to kill herself because every time she walked into the coffee room, or where some were gathered, they would fall silent.
The real battle begins away from gunfire, a criminal with a weapon and the mythology of heroism. The real battle begins in the quiet of suburban homes, often long after the event, in the mind of the survivor.
Today is the trial. I have terrible flu. I am up at 4.30am. I want to go to church at 6.30am for Holy Communion. I am not very religious but I want rituals that strengthen me. A friend gave me a rosary after the rape. I wore it continuously for the first three months afterward. A month ago I began wearing it again. I wear it now. I burn joss sticks next to a laughing Buddha.
Last night a friend with court experience made me go to his office and with three others took me through my statement and asked the sort of questions I might get cross-examined on.
I did not want to talk about the penetrative acts of the rape. I looked out of the window and the sky was the most magnificent lilacblue with vivid pink streaks. I fixed my eyes on the sky and spoke. This morning it is the same violet haze with vivid splashes of pink. I feel absolutely numb.