There is a rape crisis in this country. The British Crime Survey suggests there are more than 300,000 rapes and serious sexual assaults each year. Most are not reported. The conviction rate for those that are has plummeted from 33% in the 1970s to 5% now. And the Rape Crisis movement, set up thirty years ago to provide the support that victims so desperately need and to campaign for change, has been forced to close a third of its provision in the last decade.
I first phoned my local rape crisis one Sunday evening in April 1989. The day before, I had been on my way to see friends when my mind was suddenly swamped with memories of abuse – my blue ruffled swimming costume, father’s trunks, the sand dunes, his fingers, pain – flicking through my head on a loop, a scratchy home movie with jerky images and no sound.
The secrets were on the loose, after years confined to the recesses. It felt like I was cracking up. Many women do. Rape is a brutal, violating experience, an attack not only on the body but also on the self. And as if this isn’t bad enough victims are silenced, blamed and denied any justice. Is it any wonder that so many rape victims become anxious, depressed and suicidal, finding it difficult to move on from the trauma that they have experienced to rebuild their lives?
Like many people, I assumed that Rape Crisis was there for the immediate aftermath of rape, not to provide help years later. In fact, a significant proportion of calls to Rape Crisis are made by women like me who were abused when they were children, often by men in their families. And when I called I found a service that listened, understood and gave me help at a time when I desperately needed it. I was offered one-to-one counselling and had my first session later that week. It is impossible to overstate how much of a difference Rape Crisis made to me and my recovery from the terrible trauma of rape and abuse.
Thank god I needed them 20 years ago, not now. I would be looking at a wait of seven months to a year – that’s if I was lucky enough to live in an area where there was a Rape Crisis service at all. And it’s not just the face-to-face services that are feeling the pressure. My local Rape Crisis was only open a couple of evenings and two mornings a week. Other rape crisis helplines operated different hours – Monday night Birmingham, Thursday morning Manchester.
I was usually able to access support by phone somewhere in the country when I needed it – the days it felt like the back of my head was dissolving as another memory swept through. But many of the services I used have already been lost and those that remain are often forced by funders to turn away callers from outside their area.
Why have we let this happen? Professor Liz Kelly – a contributor in this series of articles – and chair of End Violence Against Women, has written ‘sexual violence is in many ways what people find most uncomfortable. It reveals the fault lines of social relations and it illustrates how badly human beings can treat one another. And people would rather not deal with it.’
A silence remains at the heart of rape – how much it happens, who it happens to and, most of all, who commits it and why. In recent weeks, the press has been full of coverage of three misogynistic murderers – Levi Bellfield, Mark Dixie, Steve Wright and Karl Taylor. The connections between these extreme killers, the everyday rapists and abusers and a culture that accepts and condones rape and sexual coercion are rarely made explicit. Yet Amnesty International’s 2005 UK survey found that almost a third of people thought women were partly or totally to blame for being raped.
While society looks away we allow perpetrators to attack again and again with no consequence, we do nothing to prevent the crime women fear most and leave survivors on their own to pick up the pieces of their lives as best they can.
It doesn’t have to be like this. Rape is a terrible crime but it doesn’t have to destroy women’s lives.
Recovery is possible. But only with support. Rape Crisis provides that support – services which can help women live again instead of just existing, and that for some women literally mean the difference between life and death.
This government has done more to address violence against women than any of its predecessors. And yet in its decade of power we have lost a third of rape crisis provision. Would I have recovered so well if I’d been facing my past now rather than twenty years ago? It is time for the government to put in place a coherent funding strategy for rape crisis. And time for you to demand that they do.
Constance McCullagh is the author of Funny Peculiar, a memoir of surviving child sexual abuse with a love of life and sense of humour intact, to be released on 6th May 2008
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