Rape and Suicide
May 13th 2009 04:33
I have been reading about the woman who was allegedly sexually assaulted by a number of NRL players in the past couple of days and I think something needs to be said here: I know how she feels.
Without getting into issues of consent there's some things that can be discussed here. (I think there's a thin line that covers what consent might be and mostly it's saying 'yes' to something, regardless of whether the rules might be changed along the way. The thin line covers very few of the broader issues - that someone is too drunk to say yes - or that someone doesn't say yes but it's thought to be implied by their presence - or that someone just doesn't ask in the first place and assumes they can just have what they want regardless of the other party. Or that someone does actually want to very deeply harm the person they have in front of them.)
I'd like to say that you can't deny that rape is about deeply harming someone, I suspect because the perpetrator is very deeply harmed themselves and wants to ensure that someone else feels the same way. So why not hit someone? Take their car? Why rape? Because there is a very deep need to harm women and this is because they 'deserve it'. That may sound outrageous but if we look at traditional society structures - women aren't valued and therefore don't deserve the same freedoms that men do. We out-value them by default: I am valuable so you are not. Men are long lost on the of value, they can't be valued in their family strucutres without 'earning the money', it's not a one-way street. But it's scary that violence against women is SOOO prevalent and so little is being done about it, perhaps because we think it can't, we're helpless against it?
So few people actually say their experiences out loud - we get to hush up our experiences and not saying anything but there's a large percentage of the population out there that has been through some kind of sexual assault - men and women. I admire the women's courage for speaking up and I appreciate the media for coming out with it all.
The problems I do see though are the gossip mills that run rampant once something like this has been said - the readers and the media are open slather on the alleged victim and perpetrators. It happened a few years back when the Canterbury Bulldogs players were in the media after it was alleged a woman was raped by a number of players. The media went nuts with stories about rape experiences, attitudes of 'boys will be boys' along side opinion pieces of football players needing to be reigned in. Nobody really gets it.
It seems to me that men have very little respect for their female counterparts and that's a social problem - not a football based issue or a particular type of man, but a social problem. No one is taught to respect women and the media isn't about to start respecting anyone because they outed themselves and said they were raped. The churches don't respect women and their rights nor do family traditions of women being at home and men bringing in the money - there's all those value issues inter-tied here about there being more value in office jobs than house work etc, and of course women fall into those roles that are less valued.
Why do I want to say all this? Because I need to say it. I need to say I didn't deserve what happened to me and I can see how it is allowed to happen in our society. The problems run so deep that we barely notice them anymore. It's just another football player doing something wrong, it's just another woman being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I think that what needs to be said is that very few men are taught respect and few women are asked to respect themselves. Otherwise women do feel like they 'deserved it' because society is telling them that there's just nothing they can do about it. It happened because they are a woman and men will be men. But this just isn't right. Who's saying to me, other than myself now, that I didn't deserve it. That thought is so ingrained that I don't tell anyone - because they freak out and assume that I did something wrong (consciously and sub-consciously), they begin to shy away from me and don't even know why. They can't handle the truth of it all - it happened and I didn't actually deserve it. They just can't place it anywhere, they have no concept of how it could have happened if I didn't do some-thing that was wrong
They think, because of social 'truths', that if I was raped then I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, that I shouldn't have slept with that guy, that I should have listened to my mother when she said that something bad always happens to girls who wear skirts that are too short. Because obviously if you wear a short skirt, pick the wrong guy or go to the wrong bar at the wrong time then you did actually want to go get yourself raped. Christ, if only someone had seen this years ago, so many women would have been saved. We would have just stayed in doors and waited for our future husbands/lesbian lovers/father to our children to just come a knockin'. We wouldn't have bothered having any friends, because we wouldn't have left the house (and neither would they) and could've just run around in a burkha in case anyone saw our knees!! For fucks sake will someone wake up here and stop spreading this shit. We go out, we have a few drinks, we meet other people, including men, some of whom we love and occasionally there’s one who we can’t/who wants to harm someone - we would have to hibernate if this was to not happen! This IS our society. We can bitch about it, but it’s all we’ve got – we blame women, we blame the victim, we blame anyone but ourselves, because ‘we can’t do anything about it’.
So, how does anyone counter this problem - I don't know that it can be. It's not just women being attacked either - it's the vulnerable men abuse young children, minority groups are under threat from mainstream society - it might sound simple but we as a society are really screwed up. We have everything back to front because we need to make a stance about ourselves – “I'm really hurt so I'm going to hurt someone else. You don't deserve your voice. You don't deserve freedom and you don't deserve good-will. I don't have it so nor can you!”
Disempowerment comes from many different angles and there’s very little anyone is doing to empower anyone else. It’s so harmful to our state of mind, our state of play too, that we just can’t get out of the hole. I can see there are people who make a stand, there are counsellor who help people and therefore there is a movement towards psychological development. But it’s not forceful enough to really make a difference yet.
Me saying that I didn't deserve it doesn't make a whiff of difference – I don’t know that I even believe it entirely – so many people have slanted it that way for me. In fact I still haven't got past the idea that I did deserve it. There seems so little left in life if I did deserve this, yet so many people seem to live freely around me, that there must be something to this life thing that I'm missing. How do I find that if I deserved something so horrible to happen to me?
I have to dig pretty deep before I start hearing voices which tell me that society is fucked up - not me, and that somewhere along the road the guy who did this to me went horribly wrong, I didn't actually do anything to deserve it. It wasn't actually my fault - there is really no one telling me that. Why??? Because everyone believes that they hear rather than making their own thoughts about it - they need to delve into this issue and unravel their thoughts and beliefs which are base don what they are told. And then they need to build up a thought about it based on their own 'musings' and understandings of what rape is and why we are so keen to let women take the blame. Why wont we stand up and say - no, this isn't right? Why wont we take a stand out there and say, 'guess what, society is wrong our rules and regulations are wrong, they just don't fit my life and my experiences and I can see that they don't fit with other people's either? Why are we so reliant on what others have to say about everything?
I understand why that woman said she wanted to commit suicide and that she wanted to kill all the players involved. When you have absolutely no control over what is happening to your body, you no longer have control over your life. Your body is so intrinsic to the purpose of life on this planet that there seems to be no point in taking it any further - and I can see that by taking those player’s bodies away then she could feel some justification for not having her own body. But of course it wouldn't make any difference to them either they'd be gone... so how do you make someone suffer when they have made you suffer... the cycle continues.
I think that forgiveness is a strange term. It seems so useful a concept but so hard to manage. If I forgive I'm giving them the right to do what they did. If I don't forgive then I carry this around for the rest of my life. The concept of forgiveness I'm sure was made up by someone who hadn't been through anything so traumatic, or at least hadn't admitted the depth of trauma involved. To be put in a situation like that woman was with so many men surrounding her and her so unable to do anything about it means that they have taken her rights away as a human being. They have also taken their families rights away to say that they are a good role-model and I hope to Christ that none of their sons want to turn out like their fathers.
I’m angry and I may or may not be being fair here. I don’t care though, no-one is willing to say that the men who do this are fucked up, and no-one is willing to see just how far into mainstream society it goes. It’s almost par for course that men don’t respect women – it’s taught at a young age and these footballers don’ t get much past their teen years before their thrown into the mix. There is no respect taught – anywhere – not at school, not at home, not in the media. It’s fucking nowhere and no-one seems to be saying THIS IS A PROBLEM.
I don't know what to do with such a situation. There’s no winning point that I can see for myself. What I can take away from it? Am I looking at it wrong? Is it just an experience? Do I need to make them/him pay for their/his actions? I don't know.
What if I step away from it? Could that woman in the media? Is it worse than what happened to me? All I know is that the more it's spoken about the more answers come to people and that's why I decided to say this today. It's too late to stop all this - it's been rolling a long long time before I came into this world. And my anger has been rolling a long time too. I do know that it’s not too late to stop and ask for some support rather than 'vindication' as the Bulldogs manager put it in 2004.
So I guess what I want to say at the end of all this is that it doesn't end for the victims, nor for the perpetrators I suspect. What does happen is that you begin to get your strength back when you can stand up and say something about it. So I encourage you all to do so, at the end of the day you've only got your voice left. Be it angry, sad, lonely, happy – just get it off your chest and say something.
Without getting into issues of consent there's some things that can be discussed here. (I think there's a thin line that covers what consent might be and mostly it's saying 'yes' to something, regardless of whether the rules might be changed along the way. The thin line covers very few of the broader issues - that someone is too drunk to say yes - or that someone doesn't say yes but it's thought to be implied by their presence - or that someone just doesn't ask in the first place and assumes they can just have what they want regardless of the other party. Or that someone does actually want to very deeply harm the person they have in front of them.)
I'd like to say that you can't deny that rape is about deeply harming someone, I suspect because the perpetrator is very deeply harmed themselves and wants to ensure that someone else feels the same way. So why not hit someone? Take their car? Why rape? Because there is a very deep need to harm women and this is because they 'deserve it'. That may sound outrageous but if we look at traditional society structures - women aren't valued and therefore don't deserve the same freedoms that men do. We out-value them by default: I am valuable so you are not. Men are long lost on the of value, they can't be valued in their family strucutres without 'earning the money', it's not a one-way street. But it's scary that violence against women is SOOO prevalent and so little is being done about it, perhaps because we think it can't, we're helpless against it?
So few people actually say their experiences out loud - we get to hush up our experiences and not saying anything but there's a large percentage of the population out there that has been through some kind of sexual assault - men and women. I admire the women's courage for speaking up and I appreciate the media for coming out with it all.
The problems I do see though are the gossip mills that run rampant once something like this has been said - the readers and the media are open slather on the alleged victim and perpetrators. It happened a few years back when the Canterbury Bulldogs players were in the media after it was alleged a woman was raped by a number of players. The media went nuts with stories about rape experiences, attitudes of 'boys will be boys' along side opinion pieces of football players needing to be reigned in. Nobody really gets it.
It seems to me that men have very little respect for their female counterparts and that's a social problem - not a football based issue or a particular type of man, but a social problem. No one is taught to respect women and the media isn't about to start respecting anyone because they outed themselves and said they were raped. The churches don't respect women and their rights nor do family traditions of women being at home and men bringing in the money - there's all those value issues inter-tied here about there being more value in office jobs than house work etc, and of course women fall into those roles that are less valued.
Why do I want to say all this? Because I need to say it. I need to say I didn't deserve what happened to me and I can see how it is allowed to happen in our society. The problems run so deep that we barely notice them anymore. It's just another football player doing something wrong, it's just another woman being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I think that what needs to be said is that very few men are taught respect and few women are asked to respect themselves. Otherwise women do feel like they 'deserved it' because society is telling them that there's just nothing they can do about it. It happened because they are a woman and men will be men. But this just isn't right. Who's saying to me, other than myself now, that I didn't deserve it. That thought is so ingrained that I don't tell anyone - because they freak out and assume that I did something wrong (consciously and sub-consciously), they begin to shy away from me and don't even know why. They can't handle the truth of it all - it happened and I didn't actually deserve it. They just can't place it anywhere, they have no concept of how it could have happened if I didn't do some-thing that was wrong
They think, because of social 'truths', that if I was raped then I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, that I shouldn't have slept with that guy, that I should have listened to my mother when she said that something bad always happens to girls who wear skirts that are too short. Because obviously if you wear a short skirt, pick the wrong guy or go to the wrong bar at the wrong time then you did actually want to go get yourself raped. Christ, if only someone had seen this years ago, so many women would have been saved. We would have just stayed in doors and waited for our future husbands/lesbian lovers/father to our children to just come a knockin'. We wouldn't have bothered having any friends, because we wouldn't have left the house (and neither would they) and could've just run around in a burkha in case anyone saw our knees!! For fucks sake will someone wake up here and stop spreading this shit. We go out, we have a few drinks, we meet other people, including men, some of whom we love and occasionally there’s one who we can’t/who wants to harm someone - we would have to hibernate if this was to not happen! This IS our society. We can bitch about it, but it’s all we’ve got – we blame women, we blame the victim, we blame anyone but ourselves, because ‘we can’t do anything about it’.
So, how does anyone counter this problem - I don't know that it can be. It's not just women being attacked either - it's the vulnerable men abuse young children, minority groups are under threat from mainstream society - it might sound simple but we as a society are really screwed up. We have everything back to front because we need to make a stance about ourselves – “I'm really hurt so I'm going to hurt someone else. You don't deserve your voice. You don't deserve freedom and you don't deserve good-will. I don't have it so nor can you!”
Disempowerment comes from many different angles and there’s very little anyone is doing to empower anyone else. It’s so harmful to our state of mind, our state of play too, that we just can’t get out of the hole. I can see there are people who make a stand, there are counsellor who help people and therefore there is a movement towards psychological development. But it’s not forceful enough to really make a difference yet.
Me saying that I didn't deserve it doesn't make a whiff of difference – I don’t know that I even believe it entirely – so many people have slanted it that way for me. In fact I still haven't got past the idea that I did deserve it. There seems so little left in life if I did deserve this, yet so many people seem to live freely around me, that there must be something to this life thing that I'm missing. How do I find that if I deserved something so horrible to happen to me?
I have to dig pretty deep before I start hearing voices which tell me that society is fucked up - not me, and that somewhere along the road the guy who did this to me went horribly wrong, I didn't actually do anything to deserve it. It wasn't actually my fault - there is really no one telling me that. Why??? Because everyone believes that they hear rather than making their own thoughts about it - they need to delve into this issue and unravel their thoughts and beliefs which are base don what they are told. And then they need to build up a thought about it based on their own 'musings' and understandings of what rape is and why we are so keen to let women take the blame. Why wont we stand up and say - no, this isn't right? Why wont we take a stand out there and say, 'guess what, society is wrong our rules and regulations are wrong, they just don't fit my life and my experiences and I can see that they don't fit with other people's either? Why are we so reliant on what others have to say about everything?
I understand why that woman said she wanted to commit suicide and that she wanted to kill all the players involved. When you have absolutely no control over what is happening to your body, you no longer have control over your life. Your body is so intrinsic to the purpose of life on this planet that there seems to be no point in taking it any further - and I can see that by taking those player’s bodies away then she could feel some justification for not having her own body. But of course it wouldn't make any difference to them either they'd be gone... so how do you make someone suffer when they have made you suffer... the cycle continues.
I think that forgiveness is a strange term. It seems so useful a concept but so hard to manage. If I forgive I'm giving them the right to do what they did. If I don't forgive then I carry this around for the rest of my life. The concept of forgiveness I'm sure was made up by someone who hadn't been through anything so traumatic, or at least hadn't admitted the depth of trauma involved. To be put in a situation like that woman was with so many men surrounding her and her so unable to do anything about it means that they have taken her rights away as a human being. They have also taken their families rights away to say that they are a good role-model and I hope to Christ that none of their sons want to turn out like their fathers.
I’m angry and I may or may not be being fair here. I don’t care though, no-one is willing to say that the men who do this are fucked up, and no-one is willing to see just how far into mainstream society it goes. It’s almost par for course that men don’t respect women – it’s taught at a young age and these footballers don’ t get much past their teen years before their thrown into the mix. There is no respect taught – anywhere – not at school, not at home, not in the media. It’s fucking nowhere and no-one seems to be saying THIS IS A PROBLEM.
I don't know what to do with such a situation. There’s no winning point that I can see for myself. What I can take away from it? Am I looking at it wrong? Is it just an experience? Do I need to make them/him pay for their/his actions? I don't know.
What if I step away from it? Could that woman in the media? Is it worse than what happened to me? All I know is that the more it's spoken about the more answers come to people and that's why I decided to say this today. It's too late to stop all this - it's been rolling a long long time before I came into this world. And my anger has been rolling a long time too. I do know that it’s not too late to stop and ask for some support rather than 'vindication' as the Bulldogs manager put it in 2004.
So I guess what I want to say at the end of all this is that it doesn't end for the victims, nor for the perpetrators I suspect. What does happen is that you begin to get your strength back when you can stand up and say something about it. So I encourage you all to do so, at the end of the day you've only got your voice left. Be it angry, sad, lonely, happy – just get it off your chest and say something.
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