In the past few months, women have been everywhere. Okay, maybe not walking on the street after dark, in highly-paid jobs, or in a doctor’s office being listened to - but their rights have been up for debate and their stories plastered on front pages.
As a survivor of sexual assault, healing alongside the never-ending newsstorm feels like being stuck on a faulty rollercoaster cart - swinging back and forth between uplifting hope for new conversations, and paralysing fear that your trauma will never be anything but a gripping newshook.
I’m a journalist for a national broadcasting company, and spend my days knee-deep in the details of news cases like Gisele Pelicot’s rape trial in France.
To me, Gisele Pelicot is nothing short of a modern-day hero; her power, courage and steely determination has promised to echo on for decades.
When it was revealed her husband paid men to rape her whilst she was drugged and unconscious, she waived her right to anonymity, giving up the chance to live a quiet life away from the media, with space and time to heal from such a horrendous ordeal. By doing this, she paved the way for women everywhere to speak out about their experiences.
51 men are on trial for what they did to Gisele. Some of them told the court they thought she was dead, in some feeble attempt to justify their harrowing crimes.
As someone who’s experienced a similar assault at the hands of one person, the thought of it happening at the hands of 51 men is unfathomable. Perhaps worse still, original investigations by authorities revealed 83 different men were being sought after in connection with the rapes. 51 (including Gisele’s husband) were identified, the rest were never found.
It’s common for people who have experienced sexual assault or harassment to blame themselves, to feel guilt, embarrassment, shame, and even anger at ourselves for ‘allowing’ it to happen.
Despite this, Gisele Pelicot told us: ‘it’s not for us to have shame. It's for them.’
I’ve been in therapy for around 4 months now, and have read countless self-help books and social media pages with quotes on letting go of the shame, guilt, and rage which comes with the sexual assault healing process.
A few years ago, I survived rape. It's taken me two years to be able to say that out loud, let alone tell the people in my life about it. The details are for myself and my angel of a therapist to know, but it’s the single most difficult thing I’ve ever had to deal with. It consumed and enveloped my entire self-worth, self-belief, and self-love. For a long time, there wasn’t even a sense of self. I became shy, scared of people, cautious of being hurt by anyone close to me, even if they’d been in my life for years. I felt like a walking crime scene. My body is only just starting to feel like my own, something I can look at without thinking about how it was used against my will. It felt like a breeding ground for violence, like my spirit was being held hostage by the physicality of what my body could do for a man. Who would care if I’m kind, funny, or passionate, when I was once seen as so much less than that to someone.
So much of my life fell into tiny pieces when I was raped. I moved out of where I was living and frantically found somewhere new to live. I lost so many friends who were associated with what happened, and essentially lost the most valuable part of me - my passion for living. I was fortunate to be in a job I enjoyed, and threw myself into that. But nothing was going to shift what had happened to me without speaking about it.
At the start of this year I finally sought out trauma-focused therapy called EMDR (Eye-Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing). It involves using side to side eye movements combined with talking therapy, to process trauma symptoms like negative emotions and bodily sensations. It has undoubtedly helped me live my life properly, rather than tie myself up in knots every morning and every night.
It was impacting my current relationship - my trust was wrecked and I couldn’t see the wonderful person in front of me, due to the shadow of what I survived still hanging about. I felt distant from my friends and family, who didn’t know what had really gone on. I felt anxious about starting my career in journalism, in case I had to cover a story too close to home. I wasn’t living the life I’d expected to be living at age 23.
I think I was hesitant to spend time speaking about what happened, as I didn’t want to give the person who did it any more time. I wanted to leave it in the past and move forwards. I tried everything - apart from facing it head-on.
It's hard to put into words how grateful I am for my therapist, she’s a wonderful woman who I’ll forever marvel at. She’s changed my perspective, lifted the weight of my trauma, and showed me a life full of light and joy I can see as my own.
But nothing I’ve heard in the last two years has come close to striking me as much as Pelicot’s words. A simple statement, perhaps an obvious one to some people, which holds so much weight.
Even more, seeing it in on the front pages of news sites, all over my social media, offered a fresh sense of hope that we could speak openly about recovering from abusive relationships and sexual assault without victim blaming. I finally saw a future where I wasn’t weighed down with a secret elephant sitting on my shoulders.
Then, a few weeks ago, the world watched as Donald Trump won the US Presidential Election.
In other words, vulnerable marginalised communities across the globe stood in terror as the misogynist, bigot, and convicted fraudster Donald Trump won against a black woman wanting change, equality, and hope for all.
Let me explain why women are scared of Trump being in power. Aside from the impending doom of climate change, his appointing a vaccine-skeptic health secretary, and his terrifying approach to migration and deportation - Trump is a dangerous misogynist and rapist. I don’t use those words lightly, but it only takes a short internet search to see exactly why women around the world crumpled into tears on election night.
Without giving the president-elect more airtime than he deserves, just some of the reasons women are horrified at Trump’s re-election include: his part in overturning Roe v Wade in 2022 (putting pregnant people in direct danger by witholding basic healthcare), the string of reports of sexual assault against him, and his views on immigration which will overwhelmingly impact women of colour across the globe.
It’s tough to read that list and justify why more than 76 million people voted Republican.
When you’ve experienced rape, or another sexually-motivated crime, you spend a lot of time on tenterhooks, waiting for the next time you’ll have to defend yourself or bite your tongue in a dinner-time debate or a jokey workplace discussion. You feel your body is up for grabs, your rights are the subject of another person’s fleeting thoughts. To see this on such a wide scale, with the majority of Americans not seeing rape and misogynistic attitudes toward women as a dealbreaker, you start to feel nobody would ever believe you if you told your story.
As someone who works right in the thick of the media, spending most of my time in a newsroom, its not lost on me that the media has a lot to do with changing attitudes toward women, and unfortunately by association, rape.
To me, going from Gisele Pelicot to Trump leading the headlines within weeks was whiplash. I didn’t - and still don’t - know where to turn for solace. Opening my news app in the mornings may reveal one of two things - people will believe you, or, people won’t believe you. People see a rape survivor as a powerful and influential individual, or they’re voting a rapist in to lead the most powerful country in the world. How can we possibly keep up - and how do we stop placing our worth on whether people believe us or not?
I spent too many years of my life gaslighting myself. It’s an odd thing to explain. On the one hand I couldn’t be more sure of what happened to me - I used to see it in excruciating detail every time I closed my eyes at night. On the other hand, self-doubt and fear of rejection rears its head every day to convince me I’m making it up. I strongly doubt the media’s portrayal of rape survivors doesn’t have anything to do with that.
This all sounds quite bleak, and in a way, the future might be. But I, and we, have to live in it - so what do I plan to do, to heal alongside Trump’s America, and as a journalist in the grips of the horrifying news agenda daily.
For me, it's about giving us much (if not more) power to those who make us feel comfortable and empowered, as the media does to those who don’t. Everytime I hear a comment about ‘single cat ladies’ and ‘men’s careers being ruined due to allegations’, I think of Gisele. I think of the courage, bravery, and nerves of steel she showed the world. I think of the words she said - ‘It's not for us to have shame. It's for them’ - not knowing they’d echo around the minds of women and non-binary people everywhere healing from their bodies being violated.
See, my body will never again belong to anyone else. It never belonged to him, but I forgot that for a while, for too long. I am in control of who I let into my life, and I no longer tolerate disrespect, and no longer allow second chances for those who try.
This journey is ours, and ours only. No media outlet, no magazine, no X user, can dictate to us how we should feel about what happened to us.
Now at risk of sounding like a ranting TedX speaker, it's about finding communities who DO believe us, who DO encourage us to heal and live a fulfilled, empowered life.
If you’re reading this at any stage in healing from rape or sexual assault - I believe you, you can heal, and you deserve to be treated with care and respect.
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