Refusing Blame, Embracing Rage: A Rape Survivor Sows the Seeds of a Revolution

By Mary Elizabeth Fratini

This is not my story, but I write it anyway. It became my story, and yet it is still her life. I tell it to pay tribute to a woman stronger than words can convey, who would laugh at me for saying so; to acknowledge the woman and mourn the pain that brought her into being. What is a woman’s life without pain? We are nature-made to dilate – the word alone makes me cringe, but that pain is natural, it is transformative, creative, life-affirming and unforgettable. The pain of being raped is also transformative, it is also unforgettable, but it is not natural. It is destructive, annihilating, external and seemingly uncontrollable. This is the story of one woman who said no, who meant no, and who made that a reality far behind the late-night assault despite efforts to insist that it was all her fault in the first place.

It was June when I got a message from Sarah in Virginia, months before her scheduled vacation from Peace Corps service in Guyana, South America. What are you supposed to say to that news, when your overwhelming reaction is, thank god it wasn’t me? You can try to overcome that guilt, but it is inescapable – a visceral reaction from living every day with the knowledge that you are only a half step from becoming a statistic and feeling like that half step is wildly beyond your control. Even realizing that it was only an attempted rape does little to mitigate the fear – mine and Sarah’s.

She told the details simply: She woke up to a stranger standing at the foot of her bed, wearing a mask. When she sat up, he lunged at her, putting both hands over her mouth and shoving her down on bed. He said, I won’t hurt you, we are just going to have sex. She struggled into a sitting position and said, I have lot of money; you can have my money. He grabbed her neck with both hands and began to choke her, then punched her in the eye. She fought free and started screaming her neighbor’s name over and over again. He stood up, told her to stop and then ran out of the room. She followed him, still screaming, as he ran out the door, across the lawn and disappeared into the night. Her neighbor took her to the local police station where all the questions centered on why she was living alone. Why didn’t you have a light on? Because it was the middle of the night and I was sleeping. Why wasn’t the door locked? Why wasn’t the window locked? They were both locked; he climbed up onto the porch and reached his hand through two missing bars on the front window to unlock the door. Why weren’t those repaired? Who did you talk to in the village? Did you bring any men into your house? Why did you let your friends in your house? Because they were my friends, women and men.

She received a medical evacuation to Washington D.C. and called me from her parents’ house in Alexandria, Virginia. Having left without any of her belongings, she had to get a new driver’s license to drive to therapy three times a week. The photo, taken just days after the assault, shows plainly the remaining bruises and black eye. Though long expired, that license sticks in my mind, the only remaining physical evidence that the attack ever happened. She had 45 days to decide if she would return to the village and finish her term of service. As her evacuation came to a close, Sarah faced the reality that her attacker was probably someone from her own village who would never be identified. How can I go back when he is there, she asked, and never know who he is?

In the end, she returned to Manhattan as a jobs skills coordinator at a vocational training program for homeless people in Harlem. Her therapist recommended a book called The Gift of Fear that in turn recommended just one self-defense program nationwide: IMPACT (see sidebar for more information). Their Basic course for women was twenty hours – two hours a night, two nights a week for ten weeks. She came home exhausted but invigorated from both the release of fighting full-force in simulations and class discussions about the deeper meanings of self-defense. They asked, what are we telling our daughters about themselves, about women’s value, when we advise them not to fight back during an assault for risk of being killed? If you are not willing to fight for yourself, if you are not worth dying for, than what is? And I had no answers, ashamed to discover I’d never even considered them. Just posing the queries revealed the insidious depths to which society’s commodification of women’s bodies had wormed its way into my head, and the only adequate response was anger. Not just anger, but rage. Rage for Sarah and Sarah’s rage for herself. In ten weeks I watched a woman stand up and tell the truth about her world, witnessed that aphorism in action, and felt its power in the face of seeming futility.

At the end of the course, IMPACT held a graduation ceremony for students during which friends and family could watch them fight. We sat on small metal bleachers beside the practice mats in an unremarkable and unadorned gym. The padded assailants initially looked like anime-drawn sumo wrestlers, but from the first altercation they became instantly menacing. The simulations began simply, with unwanted attention defused through verbal commands – STOP! Step Away! – and moved into fights of increasing severity. My breath stopped and blood pressure rose at the start of each encounter, and I felt genuinely relieved with each resolution, like some unintended demonstration of Aristotle’s theory of dramatic tension and release. And then came Sarah’s final scenario: awakening to find a stranger in your bedroom.

She went through the steps as trained: faking compliance, waiting for an opening, fighting until the attacker is down, and then standing to assess the surroundings. But as she assessed the situation, a second assailant grabbed her around the middle, locking her arms at her sides and lifting her off the ground. Sarah yelled with a rawness absent in the earlier altercation and fought: NO! When her feet hit the ground again, she threw her left elbow into his ribs. He grunted, loosening his grip enough for her to free one arm and she yelled, GROIN!, grabbing his testicles and ripping them forward. He let go and stumbled backwards, but he wasn’t down, and she wasn’t done. She yelled and attacked, punching him in each eye with a closed fist and taking the bottom of her palm to his nose and chin in a violent upward thrust. He grabbed one of her legs as he fell to the ground, pulling Sarah with him. She flipped over so that her free leg was on top, and raising her foot high she slammed it where his already broken nose would have been until he finally lay still.

And so I cheered the scissor kick when it finally came, how many months later, in what seemed like a karmically ordained reenactment of the very setup of her assault. She kicked his ass and I howled my support from a guttural depth, with no conscious knowledge that I had done so until I heard the reactions of people around me. I cheered for a celebration of women demonstrating physical power, for women physically protecting themselves, for the public display and celebration of taking responsibility for our own integrity in the face of a society that divorces our bodies from our selves.

It was my redemption for failing to conceive of a world that faults the perpetrator and not the victim, where our autonomy is so sacred it is not trespassed without punishment. Having never lived free of the knowledge that some people want to harm me solely because of my gender, I’d also absorbed so many other messages: How many times will we continue to hear that it is our clothes that brought it on? Our negligence in watching our drink? Our too proud insistence on the right to solitude – don’t we know we need an escort? – or our changeable and unpredictable moods – how could any man know what we really mean because, of course, our words bear no connection to our intent? And so we are forced to choose between being misunderstood with potentially violent ramifications or suffering social condemnation as ice princesses, bitches, hags or, worse yet – feminists.

YES! I yelled, punching my fist in the air as Sarah’s heel came down on the bridge of his nose. I knew the assailant here was innocent, but the rage in my veins turned him into the embodiment of every attacker, every misogynist, every lurking, creepy stranger who ever made me cross the street regardless of the time of day. I cheered for her aggression as the antidote to the passivity we have all shared. This kick was the refusal of all that bullshit, it was a NO! on behalf of all women. And I envied her that.

Mary Fratini is a freelance photojournalist living in Montpelier. She can be reached at 229-6178 or maryfrat@vermontwoman.com.

About IMPACT

The IMPACT full-contact form of personal safety training has its origins with a group of martial artists who decided in the early 1970s to develop a new form of self-defense for women. There are 11 affiliated chapters across the nation. All courses involve full-contact, full-force interactive fights with a thoroughly padded mock assailant trained to re-create common assault scenarios ranging from subtle harassment to actual physical violence. Our training methods give rise to a physiological and psychological condition known as the “adrenaline state”, a condition we experience when facing fear or stress in a real emergency. The body’s reaction to stress is “fueled” in large measure by the discharge of adrenaline into the blood system. Every time adrenaline is discharged into the bloodstream, a set of consistent, predictable psychological and physical impacts occur. It does not matter to the brain whether the stress is positive or negative. It is our body’s way of preparing us for “fight or flight.” Due to our socialization, much of the “fight or flight” response is no longer viable. Women have been told that they cannot fight or flee, so they just freeze. Even in mildly frightening situations, where no actual emergency occurs, many women find themselves frozen from fear, unable to act. Our goal is to replace the subconscious information currently stored in your brain with clear and easy responses to most kinds of verbal or physical assault. The class conditions our brains to react appropriately in stressful situations so that we do not have to rely on inaccessible cognitive thinking.

All information courtesy of Prepare, Inc. For more information, call 1-800-345-5425 or visit http://www.prepareinc.com.

Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals that Protect Us From Violence

A national expert on predicting violent behavior, de Becker’s book covers violence in all areas of our lives, highlighting the need to re-develop our intuition through true stories and advice that rings true, even when it feels difficult to implement. For example, the need for women to be firm and comfortable saying no, at any time – and to any one – seems rude at first, but de Becker’s hypothetical response to that characterization is compelling:

“…Just because a man makes an unsolicited and persistent approach in an underground parking lot in a society where crimes against women have risen four times faster than the general crime rate, and three out of four women will suffer a violent crime; …just because I have to consider where I park, where I walk, whom I talk to, and whom I date in the context of whether someone will kill me or rape me or scare me half to death; …and just because these are life-and-death issues most men know nothing about so that I’m made to feel foolish for being cautious even though I live at the center of a swirl of possible hazards doesn’t mean a woman should be wary of a stranger who ignores the word ‘no’.” 

Mary Fratini is a freelance photojournalist living in Montpelier. She can be reached at 229-6178 or maryfrat@vermontwoman.com.