our men

THE MEN IN OUR LIVES
RAPE ONE

Imagine this: you are tied up on your bed next to your wife, an intruder is masturbating himself in her bent knee, another is swearing because he is battling to maintain an erection and adequately penetrate her. They then urinate on you both and say they have AIDS. Consider this: you are walking through a park with your girlfriend and your dad, two men hold you up at gunpoint, they take turns in dragging her slightly to one side and raping her. Or you're a 14-year-old boy and your mom gets raped while you're at the movies. Or your daughter's fiance says he can't marry her weeks before the wedding because she has just been gangraped by three black intruders and he "won't go where blacks have been." Or your teenage daughter's body is found with 40 stab wounds and a slit throat, she has been raped repeatedly. In the screeds and screeds of data on the rape of women and how to help them cope with life afterward, almost nothing has been written on the impact of the men in their lives. And so 80% of relationships fail, usually within six months of a woman being raped. Men who sit together in drinking groups and boast that they would kill any rapist who touches their wife, daughter or mother find that they are powerless. A Western Cape police officer who shot dead his child's rapist is now serving six years in prison.

Police ineptitude in the investigation of these crimes staggering (only 7% of 49 000 reported crimes last year were prosecuted) - it is unlikely that the rapist or rapists will ever be arrested, and so their is no rapist on whom to vent spleen. And even if the rapist/s are arrested reality means the family of the person raped are ever likely to get closer to him or them than in a court - if they are lucky enough for the case to come to trial. And then they have to endure the massive insensitivities of a judicial system that focusses more on criminal rights than on the intense trauma victims of violent crime experience. Rape does not happen just to the woman, it happens to her family; it happens not during one particular moment in time, but causes trauma that persists for months and years. The impact can be particularly difficult for fathers, sons, partners, brothers - in short the men in the lives of the women who are raped, friends included - the impact on all is devastating, and what is of greater concern is the fact that very little research has taken place into this field, and very little support is given to men, certainly nothing close to the support that women receive. This enhances feelings of isolation and loneliness in men and increases the risk of relationsips breaking down - the sad reality is that most relationships break down after rape, very few survive. Gill and Craig are a succesful professional couple, they are expecting their first child, 18 months after Gill was raped on the floor by one of three intruders, Craig was bound in a duvet on the floor next to her.

The two went for intensive counselling after the rape and they credit that with helping their marriage not only to survive but to strengthen. Craig says, "rape is the worst thing that can happen. Your natural instinct is to protect, there is a tremendous feeling of guilt if you cannot. You feel you should have done something and not allowed it to happen. This is where counselling helped me, it showed that there was nothing I could have done, we had to keep calm to live. Gill never felt I had let her down. But it still put a huge strain on our relationship, we had to start some things anew, we had to completely redevelop, slowly over time, our sexual relationship. We had to go step by step, we had to relearn sex with our partner as an intimate act, communication was critical, if the one partner withdrew we had to acknowledge that was fine and we should not take it personally. ""That doesn't mean you don't rail against the universe - why did this happen to us? Why are the police not doing more? Even now nearly two years down the line I get angry and emotional." In the instance of Craig and Gill they hired a private investigator who within three days had traced the perpetrators and goods taken from their house - "the police would not raid because they said they would violate the privacy of the occupants of the house our goods were in. They never arrested them. Some time later, however, they arrested two of the men because they had subsequently murdered someone, our case was never linked to the charges against them however. The police asked me to come to the identity parade, I said I would only do it through one way glass and never heard from them again. Our treatment at the hands of the Randburg police was fantastic but once it went to the Sexual Offences unit..." Craig bites his lip and pauses. "It makes you reassess your life, we were detemined not to let this incident change our lives, we were dead set on not leaving the country, moving house or changing our lives. We were not going to allow ourselves to be victims, we had to be survivors, we were not going to let them win. "You have to make it a policy of life, you are so buffetted by emotions afterward, you have to keep saying this is the way I'm going to live. You will never leave the rape behind, at times it is all you can think about, but it cannot become a major component of your life. Our home was our territory and we were going to reclaim it from this terrible violation of our space and our intimate life. "Everyone rallies around you initially, but after three months when depression and the real shock hit no-one was around, they had gone on with their lives. And some friendships that were good before, just don't make the grade, those friends don't support you through such trauma and you have to move on - there are other people who come to the fore. "I had my own business and for two to three months I didn't really function, my short term memory was appalling. I had to make a conscious decision to get out of bed in the mornings. I felt quite alone. I finally gave up my business got a good job and set about changing our life and rebuilding our relationship. In many ways it brought us closer." One father whose daughter was in her 30s when she was raped says, "it is unimaginable what happens to you inside when your daughter is raped, how do you describe hell? There are no words. There are feelings of massive revenge you just want him killed, it stays with you for the rest of your life. "My belief is that our major problem is the courts, I hope those men who stabbed that child 44 times never get out of jail. There is now a minimum sentence of life if the girl is under the age of 16 and she is raped, but recently Judge Dennis Davies ignored this and gave 18 years to three rapists who had raped a young girl. He said, even rapists must have a chance, but what mercy do rapists ever show their victims? When they have women and children under their control they are not merciful and when the courts have them under their control they must apply the laws appropriately. "A woman journalist wrote a piece defending Davies, she said he and other judges did not like parliament robbing them of their independence, but freedom and independence is not license, judges still have to be accountable to the society they serve - and people are sick of rape. "Society needs to be protected, men who rape don't ever stop. I read in England that one in five men who rape who are released, not only rape again but also murder. "There was a 17-year-old boy in the North West province who raped an elderly women twice, put her in the boot of her car and pushed it into the river, where she battled to escape - he got eight years and the judge gave him a paternal chiding. Then in the case of (cricketer Makhaya) Ntini, the magiststrate yet again ignored the the minimum 10 years sentence and gave him only six years, that was not good enough. What about the role of the United Cricket Board in supporting a man who had raped? What is wrong with Ali Bacher? "Gang rapists should be punished more severely than others. Judges cannot be unaccountable to society. It is the whole question of confusing freedom with licence. The whole family gets raped, when a woman is raped. No-one ever concerns themselves about the victim, they say the poor devil is in jail, he must be treated humanely, the rapist never gave the girl a chance. We went through a terrible time. I slept with a sword next to my bed, and she had guards at the house. I would like to see every rapist castrated immediately. "My daughter had a tough, resilient attitude, the pyschiatrist said the day she mentions the word rape you are over the worst. I slept in the room next to her. She used the word rape quickly. It brought us closer together.

"I don't know what advice to give to a man, it is so horrifying, you live with hatred, you want to buy a gun and shoot him, even in court. It is the worst experience in the world. Rape should be a capital offence. The court case was very unpleasant, if my daughter did not have the spiritual strength it would have been tough. I didn't know how I would manage without taking a gun into court, but it was two years before they caught him and that gives healing, the police buggered up all along the way. "It made me far more protective, since the rape I have never totally relaxed, I live with the constant fear that something could happen to my daughter or wife." Timothy a tall, gentle 14-year-old whose mother was raped said he has "terrible anger." A child who has been brought up to avoid conflict, he was in a woodwork class at school when two boys were arguing, "one said to the other, 'your mother is a man', I just flipped, I went and pushed him up against the wall and said, 'don't you ever say anything about anyone's mother'." He pauses a looks down, "in some ways my mother and I aren't as close as we were, she never used to be frightened of anything, but now she is always anxious about security, she never used to cry or lose her temper, but she does that now, sometimes for nothing. I hate living like this, I wish we could leave this country." But Timothy is lucky sexuality has always been discussed openly in his household, in Gertruida's home it is a taboo subject within three months of her brutal rape her husband and her 19-year-old son had both begun drinking and staying out late at night. "My son couldn't even look in my eyes for the first two months," she said. Both refused to go for counselling, she and her husband have separated and her son is showing marked delinquent behaviour. "I'm not sure if I can cope with much more of this," Gertruida weeps. Children of raped mothers, generally battle to cope even if the rape is openly discussed, before each of the two HIV tests I have had my daughter has in the two weeks before developed a festering stress-related eczema like rash across her torso, head and down to her fingers that can only be healed by intensive cortisone treatment.

Megan is a succesful businesswoman whose child was raped, in the four years since the rape she and her husband have not had sexual relations. She is consumed by anger, she talks often and in gory detail of how she would like to kill her daughter's rapist - who got off with a minor sentence. She used to sit outside the place where he worked thinking of how she would kill him if she saw him, deep down she admits she is angry that her husband a quiet, religious man did not try and kill the rapist. The whole family has been for counselling, and while her child is coping exceptionally well, she and her husband are still consumed with pain. Thabo, a succesful entrepreneur, has just walked out on his fiancee, Faith, they have a year-old child and have been living together for almost three years but he says he can't take her temper tantrums and insecurity (classic post rape trauma symptoms). Faith was sexually abused from the age of nine by her stepfather, her mother refused to acknowledge the abuse, even though Faith kept running away from home and for a time lived with relatives. On one occasion Faith's grandmother who was sharing a bed with the child once witnessed the naked man attempting to fondle the child, but still the mother refused to confront him or acknowledge the abuse. "What I couldn't stand," Thabo said, "is that she always wanted the approval of her mother, she kept going back into that house, and when she returned from a visit she would be moody and withdrawn and irritable. I couldn't take it anymore, I gave her everything but it wasn't enough. We probably should have gone for counselling but it's not really something you do in black culture."

Indeed, Faith's experience was not unique, in some black communities the girl child who is raped is expelled from the family and goes into the care of the state, or lives on the streets, she at least has a loving and concerned extended family. David sits and glares at a counsellor two weeks after his wife was gangraped for four hours next to him, "I don't really want counselling, I just want to kill them. I have some friends in the police who say if these guys are caught they can arrange for them to be killed in jail..." He and countless others have entertained such faint, desperate hope, chances are the rapists won't be caught, and if they are, he'll find his friends cannot and will not deliver on bartalk bravado. What David and others like him need to come to terms with is that rape is less a physical violation than the most traumatic of psychological violations, nothing is more intimate and threatening - he too was raped, not physically, but psychologically. What society needs to realise whether in terms of post rape counselling and support or in the sentencing of rapists - is that this is a crime that brutalises entire families, that destroys marriages and emasculates the men the survivor loves and needs the most - unless greater attention is given to supporting the men in the lives of women who are raped, too many relationships will needlessly fail - whether between spouses, parents, or children. It is a loss no rape survivor can afford.

Charlene Smith