WUNRN
RAPE & SEXUAL ABUSE SURVIVORS
MOVE FROM TRAUMA TO HOPE - BOOK +
Voices & Faces Project:
Mission:
To stop rape we need to start talking.
For too long, survivors of rape and sexual abuse have been shamed into silence and invisibility. Even today, the media regularly blots out survivor faces and names, a practice that protects but also further isolates those of us who have been raped and abused. Participants in The Voices and Faces Project are speaking truth to both power and perpetrator. We are sharing our names, faces and stories in order to shift the national and international discourse on rape and abuse—a discourse in which victims are too often blamed, perpetrators too infrequently held accountable.
Book Info: http://www.randomhouse.com/book/229077/lived-through-this-by-anne-k-ream#excerpt
Excerpt:
“Hope,” Flannery O’Connor wrote, in her recently published diaries, “can
only be realized through despair.” Our emotional lives are characterized by
feelings that appear to be contradictory but are often co-dependent. We most
long for freedom after we’ve been fearful, peace after a period of
restlessness, words when we’ve been told, for too long, to be silent. Our
desires—our hopes—are our histories unmasked.
This book is a story of hope. In its pages, you’ll meet a community of rape and
sexual violence survivors—gorgeous, accomplished, funny, all-too-human women
and men—who have been shaped, but refuse to be defined, by their histories of
violence. They are brave, and they are outspoken—these qualities are perhaps
self-evident—but mostly they are hopeful. The hope at the heart of these
stories has less to do with the narratives themselves, however moving and even
inspirational they may be, and more to do with the fact that these survivors
are here to tell them.
The sharing of a story, especially a story of having survived rape or sexual
abuse, is inherently an act of faith in the listener. We do not testify to our
experiences because it is healing—although it can be—but because it is
necessary in a world that too often underestimates the scope and scale of
sexual violence. The women and men in these pages are believers in the power of
testimony—and in the power of you.
This book is a story of hope, and of truth. There is nothing beautiful about
the violence that has been visited on the survivors profiled in these pages.
Violence in the real world far, far away from a Quentin Tarantino film, is
never beautiful. Returning imaginatively to the place where someone has been
harmed is painful—and it should be. But through the lives that they are living
today, the survivors in this book remind us of all that remains possible in the
wake of the terrible.
Separately, each of these stories can be read as an account of an individual who
lived through sexual violence and emerged changed but intact. Collectively,
they are something greater: a window into a world where rape and abuse are
breathtakingly commonplace. Sexual violence is the ultimate shape-shifter.
Today it is rape in the United States military, tomorrow female genital
cutting, next the trafficking of women and girls around the corner and across
the globe. Yet all violence is characterized by one constant: it will leave
devastation and loneliness in its wake.
Loneliness is the quality I most associate with my own history of violence. For
all of the ugly details of the night when I was kidnapped and raped, the memory
that remains most powerful for me is not of the violence itself, or the
exhausting and stupid degradations—you bitch, you whore, if you say a
word, I’m going to kill you—but of the distant sound of a neighbor’s stereo
playing Madonna’s “Lucky Star” as I was assaulted. Years later, I found a way
to distance myself from that moment, turning it into irony—“Madonna! I was a
Clash and Bowie girl, so it was such an indignity”—but in reality, that Madonna
song, however banal, became the outside world to me. Her music was a stand-in
for life itself, a reminder of all of the frivolous things I wished for and
suddenly stood to lose. I knew as I listened to that song that I was no longer
of the world, but outside it, watching myself being raped, knowing that if I
lived, I could never go back to the place I was before.
Hearing the sounds outside of my apartment that night—the voices floating in
from the street, the playing of a pop song I loathed but suddenly wanted to
hear a thousand times more—was unbearably sad. I have never felt, before or
since, more alone. When I was released hours later, the sheer joy I felt
rivaled nothing I had ever known. It was the joy of life being returned to me,
the sense that however altered I might be, I was still there. In the months and
years that followed, I sometimes longed for that moment of first freedom. I was
at a turning point but could not yet see the difficult points in the road
ahead. I knew that I was going to live, yet had only an inkling of how
different my life would be. It was a perfect, temporary elation.
I come from a family that believes in the power of silences. “You don’t have to
tell all that you know,” my grandmother would tell us. Her words were meant to
encourage humility, but they carried with them the faintest whiff of a warning:
the world would be kinder to me, and I more appealing to it, if I kept to a
minimum the exposure of any uncomfortable truths. Like her monogrammed black
cashmere sweaters, her ever-present pink lipstick, or her good jewelry, this
was silence as a form of presentation: a way of showing the world who you were
by declining to speak of what you had lived through. Such an imperative took on
a new and troubling significance after I lived through rape.
People are comfortable with—even encourage—the silence and invisibility of
those who have survived sexual violence. When the mainstream media covers rape,
it most often declines to use the names or show the faces of victims, a
necessary practice that protects privacy, even as it renders us faceless and
further isolated. Of course, privacy is a small and important mercy to offer to
those who have already lost so much, and rape victims choose anonymity for a
variety of psychological, practical, and professional reasons. But anonymity
does not lend itself to community, and it was a community of survivors, with a
community’s collective power to challenge a world in which such violence
exists, that photographer Patricia Evans—herself a survivor of rape—and I went
in search of when we began the project that became Lived Through This.
According to a comprehensive World Health Organization report released in 2013,
one in three women across the globe has been a victim of rape or physical
abuse. One in five women in the United States will be raped at some point in
their lifetime. Nearly one in six boys will live through rape or sexual abuse
before they turn eighteen. Yet when we encounter these crimes, we experience a
sort of blindness. The violence that is before us should not be difficult to
discern—its symptoms and signs are often quite visible—but because it is easier
for our psyche and conscience, we choose, and it is often a choice, not to see.
Thus the devastation that is childhood sexual abuse becomes a “family affair,”
the near-epidemic rates of rape at colleges and universities merely part of
“campus life,” and rape and torture during armed conflict part of the
inevitable, expected “messiness of war.” Behind these euphemisms are the
stories you are about to read, stories that make the human costs of violence
painfully clear.
I have spent most of my adult life in the presence of a shadow self. I am a
woman who has lived through rape, haunted by the specter of the person I might
have been if I had never known such violence. I am deeply in love with my
life—perhaps more in love than I might have been had I not come so close to
losing it—and I have had the rare privilege of living that life fully and with
more joy than I once thought possible
.
None of this has stopped me from wondering who I might have been if I had never
been raped. Wanting my pre-rape self back has been a senseless, impossible
exercise, but the longing, like most unrequited longing, has been difficult to
shake. Yet in the writing of this book, as I have listened to and learned from
the remarkable women and men you are about to encounter—and many others not in
these pages—my two selves have finally come together. How can I wish for the
person I was when it is the person I am who has been entrusted with the telling
of these stories?