Silence no more (Writing sexual assault)

Thanks to Grace Tame, Brittany Higgins, and the friends of the woman who Christian Porter would deny knowing if only he could, we have stepped into a new chapter.

The first sentence of this new chapter is: Silence no more.

It’s the silence, born partly from fear of being believed, that has allowed grooming to lead to harassment, assault and rape. The #metoo and #letherspeak movements meant that we all should know that a woman is killed by a man every three days in Australia. And yet it was still possible to turn away.

Now, with Grace Tame being our Australian of The Year, turning away is not possible. Well, put it this way: if you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.

Lately, I’ve had my own awakening around sexual abuse through helping people write their stories, some of which includes paedophilia or the abuse and rape of adults. The suffering, the loss of opportunity, the ill health, harms not only the survivor, but all of us collectively. Our potential is diminished when a single life is curtailed, damaged or cut short.

If the individuals’ suffering doesn’t matter to you, the reduced productivity might…

Thankfully, brave women, men and non-binary people are telling their stories, often igniting and reliving trauma to explain the awful details and convey their effect so that we all might learn to shout: NEVER AGAIN! Then follow up with actions that mean what we say.

One such story-teller is Simon Lamb, whose book, Memoirs of a Black Lamb will be out late in 2021. His babysitter abused him when he was six. At 13, a paedophile had found and was grooming him via school contacts. The Royal Commission into Institutionalised Child Sexual Abuse found that the school should have and would have known this was going on, yet did nothing. Thanks to Julia Gillard recommending the Royal Commission, we now have a sense of the extent of historic child sexual abuse, and families and kids everywhere should be more alert to grooming.

I’m currently working with Baburam Poudel on his memoir. His sexual abuse started equally young as Simon’s. He was repeatedly raped by his older brother in Nepal in the late 1970s. But Nepal does not have a Royal Commission into incest. Does any country? This is the next aberration to confront—the harassment, abuse and rape of vulnerable family members by their own family. Baburam’s mother advised him to ‘keep away from that one’ (his brother), because ‘he’s a bad one, that one’. What else could she do, the only breadwinner of the family with eight children living in poverty and no rights as a woman?

It’s interesting that the two stories I can discuss publicly are men’s. Is this coincidental or is safer for men to speak out?

At Monday’s #March4Justice rally, I could feel the relief around me. Thousands and thousands of people stood in solidarity with survivors and committed to doing their darnedest to stop sexual abuse Australia-wide.

But this means we keep talking, listening, not tuning out, and shouting if we have to.