Rape and the scars it leaves you with

Just a few days ago, a 12-year-old rape victim was made to wait for seven hours in a Noida hospital only to be asked to come back later to do the medical tests. In another story, police made a three-year-old girl - who was raped - to go through every normal procedure of rape including that of person parade identification. The survivor of Uber rape case had to move court to object to testifying again in the court calling it the "trauma of retrial". Indian newspapers are full of reports where victims of rape have to go through further ordeals once they have communicated about rape to family and police. Even worse are the stories where village elders urge the rape victims to marry their perpetrators. These incidents show that in India there is very little understanding of what rape is and what is its impact on the victim. Although one may know vaguely that rape has an insidious effect on mental health of the survivor, the details are often missing. In fact there is such a lack of information on the terrible consequences of rape that victims themselves live for years in a dark foggy netherworld grasping its full effect on their psyche.

In the minds of most people rape or sexual assault is an isolated event where a victim has been violated sexually by another person without his or her consent. But this is not the whole story. In fact, rape is a seed of trauma that shall unfold in victim's mind for rest of her life. Rape permanently alters a person's existence. Rape is much more than physical injuries left on the body. Rape leaves an indelible mental scar on the victim.

Often effects of rape are described under the ambit of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder). The victim often reacts immediately after rape with shock and disbelief. Then the reality of the trauma starts settling in. Rape leaves a festering wound on the soul that gives out a sharp pain at unknown turns. It is a mutilation that triggers the most visceral disgust of the self at most unsuspecting hours.

First and foremost, rape reduces the victim to her body. That is, it denies that she is a human being. It deems her to be an object purely for consumption. She becomes an object deprived of will power and personality. She is stripped of herself, divorced from her "I". Any person you will meet has his or her point of view. His or her world starts with how "he" or "she" exists. The stories around "he" or "she" justify that they are human beings, their emotions are valid, their experiences are real. But once you strip someone from that subjectivity, what is left is a mere skeleton of a human being. Subsequent to rape, the victim often holds a scarred perspective on life - viewing her own participation in it with suspicion, disdain, and disgust. She will be in a lifelong struggle to come to terms with both her new reality and to be "normal" again. But the rape survivor's "I" is a fractured I - a collation of what she knew before the event and what she experiences as part of her traumatised disillusioned self. Reversely, for a predator, rape is ultimate weapon to tell the victim that she or he as a person doesn't matter. She will grapple with this nullification of her being for rest of her life.

Rape is traumatic event causing such extreme spike in emotions that it permanently skews one's narrative towards that particular event. Unlike for a normal person, whose life is a series of troughs and peaks, a trauma survivor's chronicle of life gets entangled in that particular event thereby not allowing the person to move on. What you will find often is that trauma survivors keep circling around the facts of that particular event vainly hoping to eventually find meaning where perhaps none exists. More so, the trauma permanently strips them of semblance of congruity that characterises normal lives.

Rape survivors struggle with imprisoned frozen identity - no matter how much she would grow there will always be that moment where she was captured and her spirit overpowered. Survivors often have to disconnect from their selves during the moments of abuse or rape in order to function normally. Otherwise, they would find it tough to function with a caged psyche delimited and defined by a single experience.

In societies where women and children are unidimensional beings, rapes and abuses are pernicious. Remorse would only result if fundamentally the perpetrator empathises with the psychological harm done by him. Since women are not deemed to be full human beings, this rarely occurs. Moreover, in a society such as ours, rapists and even family members see rape not as an intellectual abuse but more as loss of virginity (or "honour") alone. In such cases rape is expected to be resolved as soon as a suitable groom (often the rapist himself) is found for the girl. In this perspective, the victim is equated only with her sexual function further adding to the injury she has already received.

In a vicious extension of culture of entitlement, the abuser tries to assign informal consent by imputing vulgarity to the victim (in which case, it is understood she would universally be receptive to any sexual contact). This is perhaps the root cause of the myth of the bad girl. Truthfully, a rapist is capable of attributing vulgarityto the most innocent of victims. Veiled gestures or pre-planned coercive actions are tools for the sexual predatorsto believe in victim's inherent obscenity and justify themselves. In this case, her resistance might even be a delicious challenge and an invitation for further abuse.

There are ways to heal from rape but none that restore the victim to the normal she might have known before. In essence it is impossible for a trauma survivor once scarred to rejoin the chorus of all-is-well with humanity.The rape victim is destined to live in a prison of immobile fractured selves.The impact of rape can be alleviated by acknowledging women as complete human beings. We can begin by being sensitive and sensitising our organisations to the trauma of rape. Rape should never have happened. The least the survivors deserve is dignity, respect and understanding when they are brave enough to report it.