“A word after a word after a word is power,” writes Margaret Atwood in her poem Spelling.
Accepting the Sydney Peace Prize in 2004, Arundhati Roy says, “[There’s] really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”
When you are a woman who has been raped – No. Let us begin again. A deliberate act of violence does not merit the neutrality of the passive voice.
When you are a woman and a man rapes you, one of the things he takes is your voice. He takes away your “no”, your “stop”, your “I don’t want to”. And if you are unable to speak, he takes your right to use your voice to tell him “no”.
Last week, a 20-year-old American named Brock Turner was sentenced to six months in jail for assaulting an unconscious woman. (He penetrated her with his fingers, leaving dirt inside her vagina. He was convicted of the intent to commit rape of an intoxicated/unconscious person, penetration of an intoxicated person and penetration of an unconscious person. Under South African law this is rape; calling it rape or assault is a matter of semantics. I will call him what he is: a rapist.)
Before he raped an unconscious woman behind a dumpster, then-19-year-old Brock was a star. He was a freshman at Stanford University, there on a swimming scholarship, on track for the Olympics.
Brock is the poster boy for the kind of man rape culture protects. White, middle-class, good grades, stellar athlete, a “good kid” with a “bright future”. He got drunk at a party and fooled around with a drunk girl. Boys will be boys, you know?
During the trial, during the judgment, in its aftermath, it is rape culture that speaks.
Rape culture is the voice of Judge Aaron Persky who says that a sentence longer than six months would have a “severe impact” on a man who raped an unconscious woman.
Rape culture is the voice of Brock’s father, Dan Turner, who describes his son’s crime as “20 minutes of action”. Who laments that his son “will never be his happy go lucky self” again. Who is worried because Brock no longer enjoys a big rib-eye steak or his favourite pretzels or chips. Who reminds us that this convicted sex offender has no prior criminal history. Who reassures us that Brock is “committed” to educating other kids about “the dangers of alcohol consumption and sexual promiscuity”.
Rape culture is the voice of Brock’s childhood friend, Leslie Rasmussen, who wonders where we should “draw the line and stop worrying about being politically correct every second of the day and see that rape on campuses isn’t always because people are rapists”. Who says, “This is completely different from a woman getting kidnapped and raped as she is walking to her car in a parking lot. That is a rapist. These are not rapists.”
We are fed rape culture from the time we are told as little girls that boys pull our hair because they like us. We swallow these words like medicine, swallow them with our voices until they fester in our bellies, poison seeping through our brains.
It is time for us to vomit them up.
The Stanford victim reclaimed her voice from Brock Turner. She yanked it from his hands and put it back in her own mouth.
She wrote him a letter that she read out in court at his sentencing, 12 blistering pages that British journalist Helen Lewis has called one of the most powerful speeches of the 21st century. Her statement has been widely published and praised for its brutal, unflinching honesty.
After blacking out at the party, she woke up in hospital, told only that she had been found behind a dumpster and potentially penetrated by a stranger. The nurses were kind.
“When I was finally allowed to use the restroom, I pulled down the hospital pants they had given me, went to pull down my underwear, and felt nothing. I still remember the feeling of my hands touching my skin and grabbing nothing.”
She only learnt the details of how she was found when she read the news on her phone at work.
“And then, at the bottom of the article, after I learned about the graphic details of my own sexual assault, the article listed his swimming times. She was found breathing, unresponsive with her underwear six inches away from her bare stomach curled in fetal position. By the way, he’s really good at swimming. Throw in my mile time if that’s what we’re doing. I’m good at cooking, put that in there, I think the end is where you list your extracurriculars to cancel out all the sickening things that’ve happened.”
She explains how the trial and her testimony was one long exercise in silencing her voice: “Do you remember any more from that night? No? Okay, well, we’ll let Brock fill it in.”
They would let Brock speak.
Brock said that she had said yes, had given consent, when she was “too drunk to speak English”.
He took her voice. Even in court he took her voice. Even in the papers, she tells him, “[My] name was ‘unconscious intoxicated woman’, ten syllables, and nothing more than that.”
“At the of end of the hearing, the trial, I was too tired to speak. I would leave drained, silent. I would go home turn off my phone and for days I would not speak. You bought me a ticket to a planet where I lived by myself.”
When they rape us, they silence us. When we speak out – about rape culture, rape apology, victim-blaming – we go deliberately unheard.
At the end of her letter, she addresses “girls everywhere”: “I hope that by speaking today, you absorbed a small amount of light, a small knowing that you can’t be silenced.”
We will speak, we will shout, we will roar, until they listen.