I want to write a blog about rape, something that’s deeply personal to me. I’m very cautious about writing this because it’s something that just in general isn’t spoken about. It makes me feel very vulnerable, so please be kind. I think though that talking about it is important, so more women and girls can realise that they are not alone, that there are ways of coping with it and that life can get better. Some of you will know I have been sexually assaulted and raped over a period over my formative years and that it has had a profound effect on my life, outlook and mental health. However I feel I have taken lots of steps to overcome some of the obstacles that I’ve had to endure. I want to write some facts about rape and try and clear up a few misconceptions and hopefully give a little bit of knowledge about how to survive it, or how to support someone through it. Please note that I am writing this from the perspective of a woman or girl, because that’s what I know.
I think when people imagine rape they imagine someone being grabbed on a dark night by a random man they don’t know. That happens but very frequently the woman/girl knows her assailant. Often she is groomed and very frequently it’s a primary caregiver. Being groomed is a process that can start young, is subtle, deceptive, and cruel. It makes you question everything your instincts tell you and it leaves you feeling tainted. Rapists may say such things to a child as: “You sat on my knee today and you bounced about, you wanted this.” “What would your Mum/Gran/teacher/sister think if they knew what you were doing now, you’d be in big trouble.” “Little girls like you get sent to children’s homes.” “You are scum for doing this, nobody would want you after this.” The main theme in my own experience was that I would be the one who would get in trouble if people found out.
Grooming in adulthood could consist of a rapist/abuser saying “If you love me you’ll do this.” “I just got carried away.” “You put the idea in my head by telling me not to do that!” “I’ll tell everyone you’re a whore if you don’t do this.” In both cases often it is wrapped up and disguised as a gift of love.
The abuse can often be subtle. It can creep up. It can start (in childhood and adulthood) with some inappropriate touching and very gradually build up so that by the time you realise that something very wrong is happening, you don’t know how to tell, because it’s gone on so long and how do you explain? Imagine being eleven and having to explain to your teacher/parents/grandparents that you think that someone is having sex with you, when just thinking about it makes you feel dirty. So it becomes a shameful secret. As an adult that kind of grooming can leave you feeling like it’s your own fault; in childhood, it’s even worse. In both cases all the shame that should be on the rapist/abuser is placed on oneself. It makes you feel like you gave consent even when you didn’t. Both types of abuse make you feel like it’s your own fault. Sometimes it starts so young that you don’t even remember it starting. It’s just something that has always happened and you don’t realise it’s wrong until it’s far too late for you to feel like you can do anything to stop it. Always, adult and child, with grooming it’s extremely difficult to tell anyone else what’s going on because there is so much shame.
It’s true that children who are abused often go on to be adults who are abused. I have experienced sexual abuse in both childhood and adulthood. When I was an adult I fell into a relationship with an abuser. He made me think it was love. He told me that he had to warn me that once he started having sex he couldn’t stop so that if I consented to have sex with him I couldn’t stop it once it had started. Naively I thought this was okay, after all, men have always been unable to control their sexual impulses in the past and being forced to do things was the norm. I ended up in frequent situations with this man when I would be pushed into violent sex with him, where I’d beg him to stop and he would continue hurting me until he decided it was enough. He would even violate me by taken condoms off during sex without my knowledge. I had been groomed in the past to accept this kind of behaviour as loving. I felt that it was something in me, or about me, that made me turn men like this, rather than it be about them and what they do.
I remember aged eleven finally realising what was happening after having sex education in school and the topic of abuse being covered (not very well, I might add!) The reality of my situation really hit me. I still didn’t feel able to tell anyone what was happening and I just felt disgusted, and that disgust was turned inwards on myself. I remember the first time I self-harmed. I was doing homework, in which we were doing something with a compass. I remember dragging the compass along my foot – not hard enough to cause serious injury but enough that it bled. It felt like a relief. It felt like a punishment for being so dirty. From then on I self-harmed off and on. It started of with little cuts here and there where nobody would see. I would also bang my head against the wall and make myself sick. The sickness was to try and get the thing out my body that felt disgusting. As I got older and left home (at 16), I started to self-harm more often and cause more injury with my cuts. Now, aged 35, I have scars all over my body. I’ve cut to the bone. I only stopped cutting when, aged 31, I met Howard, and still even now I still think about it – not every day any more, but whenever I dwell on the rapes I get a strong feeling of disgust at my body and I want to hurt myself.
It’s no secret that I have a serious mental health condition. Would I have it if I hadn’t been raped? Nobody can know for sure, but the way my psychiatrist explained it is that some people have a genetic predisposition for some kinds of mental illness. Some people go through their lives and it’s never triggered but others have trauma or other stressful events and their mental illness is activated. Having PTSD is also a common reaction to rape and abuse.
I’ve been in the psychiatric hospital so many times. It’s amazing how when talking to the other patients the subject of rape pops up, and it’s no coincidence that many women that I have met through hospital have gone through rape and often childhood sexual abuse.
I am very afraid of men. I view every man as a potential rapist. In particular I am afraid of the penis because a penis has been used as a weapon that really hurt me. I am very rarely alone with male friends. When I go on dates the fear of being raped is at the forefront of my mind. Sometimes I can be reckless and put myself in positions where I might be abused (this depends on my bipolar), while at other times I’m extremely cautious. Usually I do pursue relationships and try and act like a “normal” person would, but at the back of my mind I think “he’s going to rape me”. I am anticipating it often years after I’ve been in a relationship with someone. I would say with Howard it really only has been this year that I fully trust him never to hurt me in that way. It’s extremely frustrating for my male partners to accept that I expect that at some point they will do this.
I have never been grabbed in the street and raped by a stranger. However I know that this can happen and I believe that most men are potential rapists, so I walk alone at night with my keys in my hand and with my phone ready to dial for help. My startle response, my fight or flight reaction is very high. I panic if there is a man walking behind me when I get off the bus at night and have to do the short walk to my flat. I am terrified of that happening. When I sleep alone in my flat I am afraid that a man will break into my flat and attack me. I am afraid that my past abusers will show up and hurt me all over again. I cannot go through that again. It would destroy me to have to go through that again.
This is something I find really hard to talk about but not enough people understand this so I am pushing myself to share. I had orgasms during my rapes. I had mini orgasms when I didn’t even know what an orgasm was, and when I realised what was happening I felt extremely distressed. This does not mean I “enjoyed” being raped, just more that my body reacted to the stimulus. If someone forced me to sniff pepper the chances are I would sneeze even if I really didn’t want to sneeze. This response is very similar. I have spent literally years feeling disgusted with myself and shameful about this. When I was old enough to realise what an orgasm was and what was happening to me I just felt disgusted. I remember his face up close to mine and him whispering “You want this, you’re enjoying this”. I would lay silent. I would try not not react to the sensations in my body. It made me hate myself and hate my body.
Now years later in my thirties I realise that it’s not abnormal for this to happen. There are many other women out there who have similar experiences to mine. My therapist was very reassuring about this – that it’s normal and common and it doesn’t make me disgusting or dirty, so if you have been sexually abused/raped and experience an orgasm, you are not dirty, you didn’t want it to happen and you are not tainted and the shame is on your rapist.
I know that “triggering” is a word that is overused, but when you have gone through something as traumatic as rape or sexual assault there really are things that can be triggering. What I mean by triggering is that it provokes an extreme negative feelings. If I have been triggered through the day then I will more than likely have a flashback in the night, in fact just writing this blog slowly, bit by bit has caused me to have more flashbacks. I am sitting here in my kitchen writing this and having feelings of loss, shame, disgust and worthlessness. Logically I am in a place now where I can rationalise that I am none of those things, but the feelings are so ingrained and so powerful that despite my logic and the logic of people close to me I still feel it.
I can be triggered by reading about rape and sexual assault, seeing films, images … I have to be very careful what I expose myself to. Some days I can handle it a bit better than others. It depends on my mental state how much such things trigger me.
Many people who have been raped/sexually abused will complain of having flashbacks. I have flashbacks. For me they present as nightmares, but unlike other dreams that are abstract and vague, these flashback nightmares are almost exactly the same as my memory of what happened. I often wake up screaming in the night thinking that I’m being hurt again. If someone is with me I can calm down, but if I’m alone I feel very afraid, with a ton of adrenaline running through my body and my heart pounding. Sometimes I feel like I can’t breathe properly and that I’m going to die or I’m being choked. My psychiatrist has recently prescribed me some diazepam for nights I can’t settle. Talking to the therapist in hospital about the details of the abuse has meant that whereas I used to have flashbacks a few times a year, I am now getting them a few times a week. On one particular night when Howard stayed over I had about ten in a row. I would wake up frightened and panicking and then go back to sleep, only when I fell asleep it would start again and I would wake up, rinse and repeat. On nights like this some diazepam might help.
For those who really struggle with flashbacks constantly in the night there is a medication available that really helps to stop them. For the moment I’m waiting to see what happens and not pushing for extra meds just yet. I have a feeling now the therapy is over they will settle back down. I’ll evaluate in six months. The diazepam might be enough, even knowing it’s there if I need it somehow helps.
One of the things I have heard around child sexual abuse and rape is the idea that the perpetrator “stole the child’s innocence”. Let me make one thing clear. Children are always innocent. I was innocent and even if they have been raped and abused multiple times, even with multiple abusers the child does not lose their innocence.
The whole idea of virginity really gets to me. I remember being a 17-year-old teenage girl and having my first boyfriend. For the first time ever I was enjoying my sexuality and exploring. When people found out that I was fooling around with him (not even full sex) I would get lectures about how I should keep my virginity for the right man/marriage, that I didn’t want to “lose my innocence or purity”. Imagine how that made me feel at the time! It made me feel sick to my stomach because in the conventional sense my “virginity” was taken long ago and not by choice. It made me feel even more tainted and dirty. As an adult I feel awful when people talk about losing their virginity because I never got the chance to choose my first experience and my first experiences were just ones of fear and confusion. I like to think that my experiences with my first ever boyfriend at 17, when I was sexual for the fist time through choice, was my awakening into womanhood and sexuality. The thing is, the concept of virginity is flawed. All it is, is experiencing something new for the first time – no different from riding a bike for the first time, or kissing someone for the first time or having pizza for the first time. The pressure around virginity is ridiculous and for a long time the idea that my innocence and purity had been stolen from me really disturbed me. I felt I was lacking something that other girls had, that it made me unworthy of love. What happened to me was wrong but it did not lower my value as a person. The only people that are tainted by rape and child abuse are the perpetrators themselves.
I kept my secret for a long time. When I was 17 I told someone (my boyfriend at the time) that something had happened. I kept it vague and I really played it down. I told him out of necessity because sometimes the sexual things we were exploring in a healthy and consensual way were triggering me and causing me to get upset and he needed to understand why. He never pushed me for details and I never told him who my abuser was. In my twenties I told some people close to me what had happened and got some negative reactions of people not believing me or just cutting off contact. It’s only really Howard who knows almost all of the story. It’s very hard for me to talk about this so publicly on my blog. I still feel so much shame, I’m aware though that by talking about it in an open and honest way it might help someone else that’s gone through it. I am finally starting to learn that the shame doesn’t belong to me, that I have nothing to feel ashamed of, it might just take a while for my heart to catch up with my brain.
When I was in hospital for five months and undergoing psychotherapy the subject of reporting my abuser came up. For the first time ever I seriously considered it. I looked into it though and I realised that unless someone else came forward then it would be my word against his and I’d likely go through the ordeal of reporting it without him being found guilty. They would rip into me, bringing up my mental health, past sexual behaviours, anything they could use against me would be used. I’m not strong enough for that, when the chance of getting a conviction is small. I would also have to tell every single detail to strangers. My entire family would learn the details of what actually happened and I’m not able to cope with that, not without becoming seriously mentally ill again. Also my abuser puts on a very happy, normal front to the world. There will be people who take his side against mine. It’s not something I’d say I would never do. If someone else came forward I’d certainly back them up, but now is not the right time for me to be making this kind of move, not when I’ve only just gotten reasonably well from a mental illness that has plagued me for ten years.
Sexual assault and rape are one of the hardest things to go through and overcome. It’s taken me 15 years to slowly begin to heal and stop blaming myself. I still need Howard to remind me that it wasn’t something I brought on myself. I still think about it and think, was I abnormal? Did I want it somehow? Does it make me dirty, spoiled, ruined, impure, disgusting? I still get times when I feel disgusting, like there is something dirty on or in my body that I need to get rid of. That being said there are more frequent times when I feel strong, proud that I survived that and that I’m still able to have normal functional relationships. There are more moments now when I think that it wasn’t my fault, that the shame isn’t mine to bear, and that I can move on with my life and heal.
I will be happy to talk to anyone who reads this who has experienced these types of things and wants to talk. Writing this has been scary but empowering. I am still very nervous of people’s reactions. As always any and all feedback is welcome, and I am happy to answer any questions.
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