The Sunday News
MANY people have, at some point in time experienced a traumatic event and have also learnt that it takes time to recover or re-adjust.
While some people can easily deal with such situations, others are affected for the rest of their lives.
Rape cases for instance are heartbreaking and some people carry these anguishes for a lifetime and healing hardly comes.
The mental, physical and spiritual effects of sexual assault and rape can saturate the daily lives of survivors, which makes it difficult to heal and for some, there are severe effects in the immediate aftermath of an assault.
The effects of sexual assault and rape for some people come in waves that are not felt until the shock of the event wears off, yet for some the reality of the encounter is heartbreaking.
With time spent healing, developing strong positive coping mechanisms and taking care of oneself, such reactions tend to become less severe. Sexual violence can have psychological, emotional, and physical effects on a survivor.
In the world rape cases, reported and unreported, still escalate regardless of movements that have been put in place to help raise awareness and curb this violation on women and children’s bodies.
The male species still dominate and make women recoil into psychological and emotional hurt.
Statistics collected every year reveal that both men and women can be victims of rape and it is ugly because rape is not only the act of someone forcing themselves on you but also the raping your soul.
The violation and invasion of your body is the greatest effect of rape. Some people rise above their experiences and live life like any human being and refuse to be seen as victims.
This week our topic is on rape.
Many rape stories remain untold mostly because of fear and shame and in some cases because it is just not possible to open up.
Silence has the rusty taste of shame, I have been too silent, ashamed and scared of talking about my rape story, a story that has for years been shelved somewhere in my memories and today I just wanted to tell you, I know how it feels. Yes, I do.
My uncle raped me when I was 13. For years, I have blocked the rape from my mind and tried to convince myself that it had not happened . . . that it could not have happened.
Though I have managed to live with this for all my life, tied at the back of my mind there is no denying the fact that I was angry at my parents for not being able to protect me. I am somehow angry at my mother for bringing this perverted man into my life.
I have never been able to talk about it; even with counsellors, I have cried it all out but hardly let it out of my mouth.
I have never been able to openly talk about it and even my close friends do not know about it, but today I choose to write about it even though my heart aches and breaks with each word I type.
Most women live in fear of such incidents. We feel at risk because we know the statistics and the estimates, which stand at one out of four women being victims of sexual assault. I have been in a room where every woman had experienced rape.
I remember growing up in a fatherless home with a busy mother, who constantly had to be away from home fending for the family, I fell prey to a man with an insatiable sexual appetite, my own uncle.
Growing up as a child my uncle used to visit and each time he did, he would pick me up, throw me in the air and catch me and the innocent me enjoyed it and so each time he came over I ran to him so he could pick me up.
He would then sit on the couch and sit me on his lap and I would play with his face fascinated by his beard, because I enjoyed his company.
As my body developed he passed comments that often made me feel uncomfortable.
I can vividly remember him touching my chest one day and exclaiming that I had grown up to be a woman and he sat me on his lap and stroked my chest and the rest of my body. As I sat on his lap I felt a bulge in his trousers that I did not pay attention to at that particular time because I did not know what it was.
I innocently thought it was the biological difference that separated men and women.
It is only now, when I reflect on these memories that it occurs to me how perverted that man must have been for him to toss me in the air only to catch a glimpse of my underwear.
I constantly have flashbacks of how this perverted man fed on my unsuspecting body to satisfy his sexual urges turning my body into an object he could move sideways, up and down to stroke his manhood. A certain memory haunts me and I wish I could confront him, one day I stood up and noticed he had wet his pants and I laughed to myself thinking he had literally urinated on his pants but now that I understand human anatomy, I realised that he must have ejaculated on himself, using my body to satisfy his sick and twisted perverted mind.
I remember my uncle exclaiming that “sengivuthiwe”, meaning I was ripe.
I asked him what it meant and he brushed it off and told me to ask my mother, which I was never going to do. Coming from an all-girls school I was not used to these compliments and I was very uncomfortable and that is when I realised my body had changed, as it was taking a transition into womanhood and men could not wait to feast on it.
I can still smell his bad breath and sweat, I can still see his bloodshot red eyes feeding off my body and I can still replay the scenes, as though it was yesterday.
I have moved on and I do not see myself as a victim, in fact, I have no tolerance for the word victim because it does not describe me.
The violent acts of this man with a disgusting sexual appetite manifest themselves in my thoughts and memory, as I sometimes have flashbacks showing the deep seated exploitation of how different incidents affected me.
The memories I have, mark the persistent archetypal of a powerful memory connecting rape, which is regarded as a violent caption of the female body, and often leads to silencing and then a complete erasure of feminine subjectivity.
Fast forward to years on I have had times when I play back everything and my heart sinks and my body recoils and sometimes refuses to function sexually because of these memories. A part of me died on that day when my uncle forced himself on me and a part of me was destroyed and shattered like a broken glass.
I have tried to use sex as my healing weapon too many a time but when the music fades and I am all alone, I bleed from the inside and lose my mind even though I refuse to be called a rape victim.
So to all the men like my uncle who use unsuspecting children to satisfy their sexual needs, please stop raping children.
The men that notice body changes on young girls and start seeing them as sex objects stop raping them.
To the touts that always want to grab and touch women, respect a woman’s body it is not for your consumption and stop raping them.
To the men that strip women naked in the streets, you are violating women’s rights.
Lastly, to every man that has been sexually suggestive and raped women with their hands, words or actions this is the time to stop the rape.
The next time you want to rape a woman remember you are killing a woman because after being raped they assume the permanent identity of being sexual objects, the status they would have held during the rape and some can never recover from this exploitation.
If you have a heart-breaking story you would like to share email [email protected]. Till next week let’s keep talking.
