TYPES OF RAPE
MULTIPLE INCEST

Marta was eight when her uncle locked himself into his caravan with her and raped her. She saw her father peering into the window.

Within two years her father had begun raping her, then two of her brothers and another uncle. At the age of 25 she was raped by a colleague's husband, at 29 she attempted suicide. Now, at the age of 32 the sexual relationship with her recently widowed father has only just ended - maybe - he has left to live with another woman. She is profoundly depressed, and recently sexually molested her 13-year-old nephew.

Janne was six when her adoptive father pulled down her panties and began fingering her before raping her. On one occasion her five adoptive brothers made her perform oral sex on them in turn. Desperately unhappy she fled home as a teenager in search of her real parents, she found them and within months her real father began raping her. "For two years I believed I loved him, I allowed it to continue." And then he found another mistress.

This fortunately gave Janne the opportunity to meet and marry her husband of 10 years, even though on more than one occasion her father has tried to seduce her - after the last attempt two years ago she told her husband for the first time, breaking three decades of silence. Janne is a superb mother to her two children, and has a good relationship with her husband, but for sex, "to me sex is rape, when I finally told my husband what had happened to me, he wanted to kill my father, but I said, if you are in jail I won't be safe."

Janne is painfully thin, and Marta overweight;  incest survivors often try to disguise their sexuality by going to weight extremes, yet another incest survivor, Lalani has a superb figure - but then again she treats men with the  contempt of a rapist. She has no interest in their humanity, as a sex worker  they are mere purveyors of what she wants - money.

Lalani was six when her mother took her out of bed and to a room where a mattress lay on the floor, "she took off my pyjamas and told me to lay down. My father came in and began fondling me and then raping me. When I struggled my mother held me down." In years to come her brother and her sister's boyfriend, would rape the child while the mother, and often the sister too would hold her down. "When I left school I became a police officer and got posted to the sexual offences unit.  I never stopped working, I wanted to stop rape, particularly against children. And then one day I realised I couldn't and that all men wanted was sex and rape, so I decided I might as well make money from it and became a prostitute." Lalani now earns around R60 000 a month as a top sexworker at a Johannesburg northern suburbs brothel. She is dressed simply in a short denim skirt, white t-shirt and strappy white sandals, her looks are demure Afrikaans. While she speaks, her lover, a small brunette colleague leans her head on Lalani's shoulder and strokes her hair.

Beyond the broad details of what happened to her Lalani will speak little of her childhood, she has never been for psychological counselling. She says I and her lover are the only people that know. "I can't talk about it because it hurts too much. I get too angry," she shakes her head and bites her lip as tears well in her eyes. She has a sharp intake of breath, wipes her eyes and hardens her mouth, "I hate men."

Marta, an accountant, says she also contemplated becoming "a whore, because all people used me for was sex. I had such an obsession about sex. I masturbate often....One day I did something terrible and I can't forgive myself. I decided to hurt those who had hurt me and I tried to sexually molest my brother's son ...part of me felt it was okay to do that, but the other part of me hated myself, that is when I decided to get help because I did not want to become a Paedophile." 

What characterises all three women is a profound lack of self esteem, and an intensely negative world view. They have pitifully few friends and do not trust easily, they are obsessed with pornography and masturbation and yet hate sex. They lack motivation in their careers but are meticulous home makers. They want sexual intimacy in normal relationships and yet it leaves them feeling sordid. All loved and hated the primary rapist, usually their father, and so when they love someone in a conventional relationship they experience intense confusion, they have lost their moral barometer. If your first lover over many months or years was a rapist; then how should you regard sex with your husband or partner? They need those they love, but retain a selfprotective ambivalence in case a rapist lurks behind a husband's face. Fear of love is eternal.

It is easier, in terms of emotional recovery, to be raped by a stranger than a parent. All of society tells children that parents are their protectors and the people they should respect; religion demands they "honour their father and mother" - but what are they to infer when their fathers rape them and their mothers hold them down or keep quiet? In addition, the child subject to incest is threatened with death by those family members who rape her. Or in an emotionally or financially deprived family, the rapist may be the only one who tells her he loves her, or buys her clothes and gifts. Love, rape and fear become intertwined. Marta's uncle used to buy her gifts and tell her that he loved her and no-one else did. She mourns his death, and says with bitterness, "my father has never told me he loves me."

The child also believes that there is something about her that makes her a target for rape because in a family of more than one girl, where multiple family members are involved in rape, all the activists in the rape will pick on only the one girl and leave the others. In almost all instances her sisters will distance themselves from her and the mother often remains silent or participates.

The incest survivor's self image of unworthiness is enhanced and she usually indulges in excessive cleaning, sometimes bathing in bleach and scrubbing herself with household cleaners until her skin peels off. Their homes often have the faint hint of ammonia and are dull with overzealous cleaning.

They will often try and kill their abuser in an indirect way - Lalani poured water over a plug when her father was using a drill - and all attempt suicide.

They are convinced there is something about them that singles them out for rape. Marta recalls, ''my mother's youngest brother used to rub my private parts with a stone or put sticks up me until I bled." Incapable of speaking about what happened to her she has begun writing about it, in clear prose that echoes with loneliness and a complete sense of helplessness: 'my brother took me into the field, I didn't have the strength to stop it. I wanted all this violence to end. I felt like a cheap whore (a phrase all three use often). I was so frightened, I did not know what to do." At the age of 19, Marta met a man who treated her with respect and love and wanted to marry her. Her enraged father told her he would kill her if she kept seeing him and would tell him everything, and so she broke off the relationship and hasn't had one since, but for an intense relationship with a married woman two years ago.

Before her father recently left the house, she had no life of her own, at the time she noted: "If I leave the house he wants to know where I am going, with whom, when will I be back, and so I would rather not go, if I am late he beats me or demands sex." She hates him, "he is so dirty and untidy, sometimes he doesn't bath for days" and yet she loves him. Her face twists when she speaks of him, she lowers her eyes and her voice becomes small, she will talk in detail of what others have done to her but little of what he did, although her bathroom is the cleanest room in the house because it was while she was in the bathroom at age 10 that he walked in and said, "how nicely my breasts were growing and began fondling them and removing my panties."

Her mother began taking Marta to sleep with her - she slept in a separate room from her husband - "but she snored so loudly she would not hear him when my father came in at night and took me with him. Sometimes I wanted to kill her she snored so loudly. She did nothing to save me from him, and yet I think she knew."

But some mothers do take action - it is the law that fails them and their children. Carla, a beautiful and succesful actress was raped from the age of eight to 14 by a wealthy stepfather, who also raped her sisters. "None of us told our mother because after a difficult life she found someone she really seemed happy with. But finally I couldn't stand anymore. My mother acted immediately I told her, she called the police, there was a traumatic trial after which he was sentenced to seven years - six months later he was released for good behaviour. I wish he was dead." ** All names have been changed.

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