Written by Suchita Thepkanjana
Illustrated by Sylvain Chan
Content Warning: This article mentions rape and other forms of sexual violence, including domestic abuse
‘Rape’ is an ugly word. So ugly, most people actively avoid saying it.
‘Rape’ conjures an image of violence so intense, we often prefer to leave it tucked away in the darkest corners of society, where it is easily forgotten.
But for Dr. Julia Costet (Department of Government), this word and all its connotations come up daily — not simply in the news, but in her career.
She recently finished her PhD thesis entitled, ‘Speaking Rape: Engaging Experience for a Feminist Social Practice of Rape Survivorship’. Inspired by the #MeToo movement, her research explores the development of a lexicon surrounding sexual violence and its relationship with survivor silence.
The core of this research is the lived experiences of rape survivors whom she herself has helped.
Julia spent the past two years volunteering for the North London Rape Crisis Helpline, where she supports anonymous callers through the aftermath of their rape.
For her, ‘rape’ is not merely an ugly word — it is a very harrowing, very complex reality that she fights on the frontlines.
And this is what she has learned…
“Rape is not as straightforward as we would like it to be.”
To whom does sexual violence happen?
The most common answer will probably describe a young woman in a sketchy alleyway at night. But the reality is much more complicated.
“Being on the helpline is very shattering because you realise that [rape] affects very different regions,” Julia claims.
For example, she has learned from the helpline that most rapes occur within families and intimate relationships. But, sexual violence primarily operates in “the spaces where people are especially marginalised.”
She continues: “[Sexual violence] is interwoven and interlocked with a lot of different political dynamics, race, gender, residential status, employment…”
She recalls that an alarming portion of callers to the helpline were minors, while other callers have been migrants, sex workers, and students.
Perhaps most surprisingly, for many callers, rape was not the “worst thing that has ever happened to them,” and they had survived through multiple traumatic ordeals.
“This just shows that certain patterns of violence, certain lives, experience so much precarity and vulnerability,” she explains.
According to her, we need to complicate who the ‘Rapeable Subject’ is.
Rape does not exclusively happen to the average woman on the streets at night. Believing it does obscures how rape is intrinsically enabled by a “wider landscape of social suffering,” by intersecting structures of oppression that leave certain groups less protected.
As Julia articulately puts it, “Rape is made possible by institutional and structural features of our lives, where certain people are rendered vulnerable to this kind of violence.”
“We need to sit comfortably with ‘Speaking Rape’”
On a more hopeful note, we can begin to tackle sexual violence with what Julia calls ‘Speaking Rape’, arguably the most important thing she learned from the helpline.
That means, first and foremost, getting past the ‘ugliness’ of the word that makes us so vehemently avoid saying ‘Rape’ at all.
“It’s a dark topic, but it’s also something that happens so often to so many people that if we keep stressing how dark it is, we’re only going to discourage people from coming forward and feeling comfortable to talk about it,” Julia explains.
“I’m not saying we should do that so that people will be less afraid, but for us to identify what the source of that fear ought to be,” she continues, “Because now, [that fear] is the dark alleyway. But should we be questioning broader patterns that are politically enabled by institutions? Should we be more fearful or resistant to that?”
Furthermore, she believes safe spaces like helplines are the places that foster this Speaking of rape.
At the North London Rape Crisis Helpline, for example, volunteers are trained to give survivors “complete agency” by “never putting words onto the experiences that they’ve had.”
She explains, “there’s something really politically important about this because … what rape does is disempower or impose some kind of narrative on someone … so having the space to be able to put your own words to redefine this experience is really important.”
Spaces like these, furthermore, allow survivors to “map where this violence takes place, what renders it possible, and what conditions enabled each individual iteration to be possible.”
Yet in a world where sexual violence shows no sign of stopping — the ONS reported an 11% increase in sexual offences over the past year — we must ask: is it even possible to end sexual violence in its entirety?
Julia hesitates, before saying, “I need to believe that it is possible.”
“Ultimately, we can only envision a world without rape by addressing its existence, and the structures of oppression that enable it, head-on. Given that sexual violence thrives in silence, the first thing we can do to end it is to speak.
