Women telling their secrets the ultimate act of defiance
In the weeks after revealing her experience of sexual abuse, Virginia Tapscott felt exposed in her home town. Then the purging began.
In the weeks since The Australian published my own experience of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of my stepgrandfather, I’ve been inundated with disclosures.
Mostly women and a couple of men, with long-held secrets they’ve been quite literally dying to tell. They speak of how their lives were irrevocably altered by the sexual abuse and assaults they have endured at the hands of family members. The mental-health issues that plague them and the loss of loved ones who endured similar treatment. A suicide note, equal parts disturbing and understandable, leaving me permission to write whatever I want.
I found the disclosures from ladies in their twilight years, the oldest being 70 and 83, the most confronting. With age has come a haunting vantage point from which to assess the damage and trace it all the way back to the abuse they endured as girls. Decades later, they still feel psychologically maimed by the male relatives who abused them. The one thing they want before they die is for the world to know the atrocities committed within the family home. The 70-year-old headed down to her local police station last week to report her abuse. I hope they don’t leave her in the waiting room too long; she’s been waiting 60 years for this.
It’s been incredible to witness leagues of survivors landing in my inbox and finding their voice. They detail the acts of their abusers and what they said to keep them quiet. The telling of a secret they were ordered to keep — it’s the ultimate act of defiance. From the darkest of days, a sliver of light.
We are purging ourselves of this information because guarding it is exhausting. I hope a weight has lifted. It’s been a mutual kind of bittersweet therapy. With each disclosure, I feel less alone but also increasingly shocked and sickened by the true prevalence of sexual abuse and assault. It’s a sad state of affairs when survivors feel compelled to reach out to a complete stranger rather than enlisting close friends and family to help them carry the pain. It’s a calculated risk — they can handle the chance that a stranger might recoil. But the risk of someone they love rejecting them is too great a gamble.
Through their stories, I’ve been getting to know the offenders who sexually terrorise their victims. I’ve been holding the perpetrators up to the light to see what’s inside. I refer to these men with the consent of the people who survived them.
There is the father who visited the bed of his eight-year-old daughter and told her to “be a big girl for me and this will all be over soon” before raping her. He’d been grooming her by soliciting sexual acts from her since she was four. He seems to view her as something he can use to relieve his urge. I suspect he holds this view of all women, that their purpose is to relieve men. It’s a view that’s so entrenched, it extends to his own baby. He raped her regularly until she was 15. This man walks free today.
There is the uncle who violently raped and tortured his niece from the moment she turned five. This man cannot be truly aroused unless his victim cries out in pain but he slaps her for whimpering.
His sadistic violence puts in him in the minority; most offenders are largely non-violent and cause no visible injury. He torments her in the most horrific ways — burning her, choking her, sexually degrading her — and afterwards, in the presence of other people, he helps her finish a craft project. He knows how to pretend to be normal. He walks free today.
The teenage brothers who experimented with their eight-year-old sister — sneaking into her bedroom to rape her. I guess they were getting erections but didn’t have access to women outside of the home. So they violated their own sister instead. They walk free today. The farmhand. The older cousin. The grandfather. The stepdad. The neighbour. The schoolteacher. They are all free.
What do we honestly expect to happen, and to continue happening, if most of the people that commit these crimes are never held accountable. Mostly, they never even have to answer for what they have done.
Many of the details of abuse I have received are not fit for publication. It seems ludicrous that we can’t even read the detail of what these women and children survived. We use umbrella terms such as “molestation” and “sexual assault” to mask the reality of these barbaric physical acts with a euphemism. We can almost trick ourselves into thinking maybe it’s not that bad. But I think it’s time to call it what it is. How can we stop it, if we don’t understand what “it” refers to?
One thing is clear about how we must move forward. We cannot continue to hold the perpetrators at arm’s length as some collective “other”. They are us. They are born in our hospitals, raised by us and buy groceries in the next aisle. The question is not what is wrong with them but what is wrong with us?
We foster the dangerous and erroneous belief systems that enable these men to commit the most heinous crimes. We cultivate the formative experiences within our day-to-day lives that lay down the groundwork and give rise to thought patterns that devalue and dehumanise women.
Every denigrating comment met with silence and every time we cast our eyes downwards so we don’t see something or read something that makes us feel uncomfortable. Every time we push it from our minds, we tolerate it.
These belief systems have been instilled and we’ve allowed them to flourish and endure. They’ve been tolerated at every stage of the making of these predators.
In many cases, the crime is clearly driven by the belief that men are superior and women are worthless. But I think it’s more than that — it’s the pervasive superiority of the self. A complete lack of empathy. The idea that self-gratification comes first, regardless of the pain or humiliation inflicted on others. The compulsive need to reassert dominance again and again.
I hope the perpetrator reads this and recognises the horror in himself. I hope he worries about when his victims will find their voices. I hope he knows they are coming for him. The most troubling point about all these disclosures, is that every single person did attempt to hold their abuser to account or to at least confront them.
They were compelled to do this because the injustice is overwhelming. We all, at some point, seek retribution as a reflex. But they were denied the relief of knowing that their tormentors would suffer in return. Most of these women were effectively gagged by other family members, by the police and by the judicial system.
In seeing many elements of their own stories reflected back to them on the front page of a national paper, survivors finally feel like their experience has been legitimised. The inquiries into institutional child-sex abuse fell short for them. They finally feel heard and like that they’ve been given permission to talk. “Thank you for speaking the words I have wanted to say for the last 50 years,” one woman said, echoing countless others.
Walking down the main street of my home town after the newspaper sold out, I did feel exposed. Now everybody knows where his hands have been. Everybody knows what happened when I was four. But the momentary discomfort of feeling exposed is better than the lifelong oppressive weight of the risk that “someone might find out”.
Every time I receive a quiet nod and a “thank you”, it’s reassurance that the shame is not mine. And everybody knows it.
If you need support, call Lifeline on 131 114 or 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732.
