Khadija Magardie’s article last week headlined ”Giving gristle too much credit” accuses women who have been raped of being ”so impressed by the penis that they imagine it to wreak such havoc in their lives”.
A year ago I was raped. With a gun pointed to my head, I gave up my independence to a stranger because I was afraid. It seemed a better choice to give him his few minutes of pleasure and walk away with my life. Like Magardie, I didn’t think rape was the worst thing that could happen to anyone.
I would get counselling and in time I would feel better, I convinced myself. Later I learned that no amount of counselling and support was enough to make me the person I was before: a brave woman who loved taking risks. I have now become a freak who’s scared of any place with trees and bushes. I don’t want to bore you with details of how I cry myself to sleep or how I can’t keep a relationship that shows potential for being stable and serious, or how I react to harmless comments about how I look.
Magardie suggests that death is more severe than rape. How would she know? She’s never experienced either. I can’t speak for the dead, but I can speak for a million other women in the world who like myself have been made to feel dead inside. I’m not sure which is worse: dying or living with yourself feeling such hate towards yourself. I look at myself in the mirror and I hate what I see; the vibrant woman who was there does not exist anymore. I’ve lost interest in things that mattered the most, my job, friends, going out, clothes — nothing excites me, not even getting a new boyfriend. Thanks to my father for insisting that my son and I move in with him, for my son can now go to movies. Sometimes he woke up from his sleep because I was weeping. It scared him and I hate myself for putting him through that.
They say counselling and talking helps. I’ve found that talking to someone who sounds like she has been programmed to respond the way that she does is as good as keeping quiet. During my third session, my counsellor had gone on leave and there was a new one. Of course she asked if it would be okay for me to talk to her — it didn’t make any difference, the previous counsellor was also a stranger anyway — so I sat on that lovely couch and started talking.
The new counsellor said the exact same things that the previous counsellor had said.
I decided from that day on that I was not going to wake up in the morning and go all the way to hospital just to be told: ”You are reacting normally to an abnormal situation” and ”it’s okay to feel angry” and ”I understand how you feel”. What was this ”reacting normally” — what’s normal about disliking oneself?
A colleague told me I had two choices: one was to allow it to destroy me and the other was to deal with it and move on. I joined a support group of rape survivors. Every Friday afternoon we sat and talked about our experiences. I thought it would be better to talk to people who knew and understood what I was talking about, and not because they read it from some textbook.
Listening to stories of how men invaded women’s privacy depressed me even more. I saw women who claimed to be ”recovering”, but saw no sign of recovery in them; they still cried when they spoke about it and still had vivid memories of it. One of the woman was left wheelchair-bound after being shot by a gang of six men who raped her and killed her husband and child. Not only does she have memories to live with, but she also has her disability to remind her every day of her life.
Magardie suggests that women don’t report rape because they are ”ashamed”. That is not true. A report recently published by the South African Human Rights Commission has found that the justice system does not work for rape survivors. During our support-group session I learned that many survivors continue to be harassed by the system.
I didn’t lay charges against the perpetrator because of my previous experience. Two years earlier I had laid sexual harassment charges against my lecturer. My friends had warned me against it, but I was not going to let him walk away with it.
The police officer told me there was ”not enough evidence” and that sexual harassment would be ”impossible” to prove. He said they would investigate, but I knew it was a way of getting me off his back.
Like many other survivors who had been or knew someone who had been failed by the system, I lost confidence in it. The police had failed to prove a sexual harassment charge when I knew the perpetrator.
How were they going to prove this one? There were no witnesses, I had never seen the perpetrator before, it happened in Pretoria and I stayed in Johannesburg. I knew what would happen if I reported it — the same thing that happened before: they would take my statement and that’s where it would end.
In her attempts to make death more severe than rape, Magardie argues that death is ”irreversible”. Maybe she should tell me how rape can be reversed.