When the news puts the issue of sexual violence, consent and reporting on everyone’s lips, the repercussions affect many more people than just the few people involved in a specific case. This text is therefore about all of us.
By all of us, I mean people who have experienced one or more sexual assaults. I say “all of us”, because this is obviously a large majority of women. And a sexual assault, as a reminder, is when sexual touching (a kiss, a caress, a sexual relationship) takes place without the consent of one of the partners involved.
Many of us have been profoundly affected by the evolution of feminist movements over the past decade. For many, the era of social media has served to realize that we are not alone. Many of us have been able, in recent years, to break the taboo that surrounded each of our experiences.
Through public speaking and the dissemination of testimonies, we were able to take full measure of the banality—if I can put it that way—of a large number of sexual assaults. The denunciation movements contributed to bringing down the myth of the asocial and monstrous stranger who prowls in an alley and then attacks a young woman who cries for help while waiting for a savior.
We already knew that sexual assaults mainly take place between people who know each other. But it perhaps became even more concrete, tangible, when reading all the testimonies that involved couples, exes, friends, colleagues, members of the same family.
Public discourse is, of course, only the tip of the iceberg. In recent years, it is first and foremost between us that speech has become free. We confided in each other. We thought about what was said in public, and what it woke up in us. And what seems increasingly clear to me, with hindsight, is the extent to which the mythologies surrounding sexual assault continue to weigh on our relationships with others and with ourselves, despite the efforts made to reveal reality. You don’t get rid of archetypes so easily.
How many of us still have difficulty reconciling the reality of sexual assault, that is, sexual touching without consent, and the image we have of the “aggressor” ? How many women still mobilize, more or less consciously, the image of the monster when they hear the term “aggressor”? How many still say to themselves that since the person who touched them without their consent is not a monster—and that they even loved him—there cannot have been an attack? How many still believe that naming the aggression of a loved one for what it was is at the same time confessing — shamefully — one’s affection for a monster?
Similarly, the term “victim” has not yet ceased to evoke a set of stereotypes. A victim, according to the myth, would be a perfect damsel in distress, a woman whose life is shattered. However, a woman can indeed suffer serious emotional and physical damage after a sexual assault, while others will react to the experience differently. Here, of course, a very complex set of factors explain these differences from one person to another – including the relationship with the aggressor, power relations, age, previous life experiences, and many others. others.
Just as we often doubt the reality of sex without consent if there is no perfect “monster” involved, we still often question the reality of the assault if there is no perfect “victim” in the case. And this doubt, we often use it between us, between people who have suffered attacks, and even to ourselves, in our inner dialogue. One wonders: if I don’t identify with this idea of the “victim”, have I really been attacked? Now that I have healed from this injury, that I have taken a step back, that I feel stronger, can I still call myself a “victim” of an attack? If I didn’t receive the unsolicited gesture as a “serious” offense, had I consented?
Women, over millennia, have developed all sorts of strategies to survive sexual violence. Among these strategies, there is community support, speaking out, but also humor, de-dramatization, and, often, very often, empathy for men — which sometimes goes beyond the compassion that we offer ourselves. And that is the whole paradox. Everything that women have put in place in their daily lives to continue to live despite violence is also used to trivialize sexual violence against women.
We think that if a person still feels attached, in one way or another, to a man who touched them without their consent, then there may not have been an assault, so of “aggressor”, therefore of “victim”. We are still surprised by the complexity, which may seem paradoxical from the outside, of the psychology of a person who has been hurt by an attachment figure. We make our ability to evolve, heal, forgive, grow, nuance, understand a proof of our lack of credibility rather than a demonstration of our humanity.
I want to tell us that this complexity, these hesitations, these nuances, these healing journeys, these realizations about the influence of myths on our own stories are not problems. They are quite normal, and, more often than not, quite to our credit.
If institutions see the psychological complexity of people who have been sexually assaulted as problems, if they tend to want to “fix” sexual violence with radical “solutions” that do not take into consideration people’s humanity and their capacity to evolve is that these institutions must change. It is not up to us to twist our life stories to fit them into their Manichaean logic and their obsolete mythologies.