Suzanne Harrington: The hidden hurt behind the 'quiet' assaults that haunt us
Eva Victor in Sorry Baby.
Can you make a film about sexual assault that is warm, funny, and real? Actor and comedian Eva Victor recently did this – she wrote, directed and starred in a film that turns standard trauma plot on its head.
Based on personal experience, is set around a rural New England university, and centres on the warm, funny, and real friendship between two women.
Victor’s character is sexually assaulted by her academic supervisor – the film is about how her reaction to this assault. How it isn’t particularly linear, doesn’t follow a neat series of reactions and conclusions.
It’s about how one person – the assaulter – dehumanises the other person – the assaultee – by not seeing them as human, but as an object to overpower. A thing. How ordinary it is, how undramatic.
The assault isn’t shown. Just the aftermath, when she tells her friend, played by Naomi Ackie, what happened. Next day a tutting doctor lectures her for having a bath straight afterwards; the assumption is that every woman knows the post-rape rules and abides by them.
The university sends two female staff to abdicate all responsibility, while reiterating that they understand how she’s feeling because “we’re women.”
There is no female screaming or begging in this film, no knife held to a female throat, no female blood or bruises, no terrifying stranger dragging a woman down an alley with threats of murder – all the tropes we seem to feel are necessary for the depiction of male-on-female sexual attack. The rapist barely features.
Until the unshown assault, he is presented as a respected, respectful academic. Does this lack of physical violence make the assault any less devastating?
Meanwhile, Ailbhe Griffith, an Irish woman who was violently raped by a violent man twenty years ago near her Dublin home, is now an advocate for restorative justice.
The man was jailed for nine years. He’s out now. Seeking restorative justice, she met him, and found the experience to be empowering – she said that the meeting shrank him to just a person in a room, rather than the monster of her memories.
She’d likened her internal life in the aftermath of the violent physical and sexual attack to being in a warzone that nobody else could see – a lucid description of PTSD.
Astonishingly during this restorative justice meeting, she reports how the rapist, rather than begging her forgiveness, instead assessed her appearance and told her she was “not so glamorous anymore”.
Reading this made me want to bash his head in with a brick. Even so, she says that meeting him gave her back her power.
Griffith thought the rapist – a random stranger - might kill her (Had two other strangers not intervened, this may have happened).
These are the kind of assaults that make the news. The quieter, less violent ones like the one portrayed in – not so much.
The ones involving the blurry waking up next to someone after a party; the ‘misunderstandings’ on the sofa; the awkwardness on a date, where you might feel the need to ask for Angela, or is that making too much of a big deal of it?
The responsibility landing on the woman for her lack of sufficient gate-keeping should anything happen; even post #MeToo, the lingering sense that it’s somehow her job to keep herself safe from any pestering, pressuring, persisting.
That unless it involves actual physical force, it’s not such a big deal. Something to be brushed off, forgotten, buried. Do these quieter assaults not also count as devastating?
Do they not stay with you, even if nothing jail-worthy happened?
