echoes into the silence

trigger warning: rape

75% of all the rape cases worldwide that MSF deals with come from Eastern Congo. An entire generation has been irrevocably damaged. And there is silence. There is a cold haunting silence that the screams of an entire population cannot penetrate.

Sometimes being a political organiser gets to me. Sometimes I have to remind myself why I do this. Because sometimes it all seems so petty, talking to a voter about taxes and who we should raise them on. Sometimes I wish I could go to Africa and see what I see and then type until my fingers bled, trying to get someone to see with me. Because when the response I get here to the above statistic is 'doesn't surprise me' with a casual shrug of the shoulders, that's a problem. And it's not that the stat is surprising - it's the attitude behind it. Then again, if rape in the US is an accepted culture all its own, then perhaps the response shouldn't have been surprising. Perhaps the real surprise should be 'why is rape culture still an acceptable culture in the US'? No wonder it's so easy to wrapped up about Sudan and people dying, but rape is rape, and hey, if a woman in the US 'asks for it' by the clothing she wears, or the places she visits, or the men she looks at, then why should we talk about why women and girls in the Congo are being raped by the thousands? Because that's the real problem. We don't TALK about it.

It's a forbidden, taboo topic that we can't talk about, ever, except to quote stats about it. 1 in 3 college women, 1 in 4 women across the US in their lifetimes. We can't talk about it, so no-one ever corrects the myths about who does the raping and how they rape. We can’t handle rape as a culture so we put the blame where it’s easiest – on the woman who actually dared to speak out. We have to make it easier. We have to trust women more. But talking? And getting some things straight? That’s just as important.

There were two surveys* done of populations of men, asking them if they’d raped. In the first one, 6% of men admitted raping. That’s not the scary part. The scary part is that of that 6%, of the men who had raped more than once, the average number of rapes was nearly 6. SIX. That’s a ridiculously high recidivism rate. In this survey it breaks down to 4% of the men committing 28% of the rapes. In the second survey, 13% of men admitted raping. The average number of rapes was just over 6. AGAIN. SIX. In this survey, it breaks down to 8.4% of the men committing 95% of the rapes.

That is scary, but not in and of itself the most shocking part. No, that comes with "The stereotypical rape incident characterized by a man violently attacking a stranger was not reported by any of the respondents". But SOMEHOW, and this is where I get mad, SOMEHOW rape is only to be ‘believed’ if a woman is dragged from her car, screaming by some unknown man in a mask. Don't get me wrong: I AM SURE THIS DOES HAPPEN. But the fact that a woman who is date-raped faces her peers siding with 'the good guy who was just confused' infuriates me. I've been there and I can't get over how quickly friends of mine bought into the rape-myth. That because Timothy seemed like a good guy and we knew each other and people had seen us that night. So clearly he couldn’t have raped me. I wish I were making that up. I have written about rape. And again. And again. And too many other places to mention. And I still cannot even come close to comprehending our rape culture.

I really didn't mean to make this post about US and rape culture. I wanted to have it be about Africa and the women who live in its heart who live in darkness night after night after night. Who have nothing and no relief. But I cannot write about them without writing about us as well. We abandon our own women day after day after day and make it damn near impossible for her to be taken seriously about being raped. We strip away any of her innocence because it’s the only way we've figured out how to live with the realisation that we KNOW these men, so we need to justify knowing them. That is what we do to our women.

And what do we do to the women of Africa who are not 1 in 3 but every single one of them over and over and over again? What do we do to the generations that will be shattered by this, tortured by this hollowing of thousands upon thousands of souls? What do we do? We define ourselves by our silence. We don't talk about our own culture and our own women and we don't talk about the women buried by a face of war and rape and war crimes. We fill the silence with jokes and assumptions and myths and accusations. And we ignore the underlying helplessness. We ignore any cry thrown into the silence because we might recognise the sound of her voice.

I wish I could put the helplessness I feel into proper words. I wish I could mention the outrage in some other way. I wish talking to the silence got me back something other than an echo.