Scenarios of Victim Recovery:
A Sexual Assault and Attempted Murder
Victim
from
Violence and Nonviolence: Pathways to Understanding by
Gregg Barak
Susan J. Brison is a professor of
philosophy and the author of Aftermath:
Violence and the Remaking of a Self, a book about her recovery from a
stranger’s attack in the summer of 1990. The sexual assault and attempted
homicide occurred on the side of a country road in a village outside of Grenoble, France, as Susan was out taking her morning constitutional one
beautiful summer day. In an abridged essay about her experiences, she describes
her ordeal:
I had been grabbed from behind,
pulled into the bushes, beaten, and sexually assaulted. Helpless and entirely
at my assailant’s mercy, I talked to him, trying to appeal to his humanity,
and, when that failed, addressing myself to his self-interest. He called me a
whore and told me to shut up. Although I had said I’d do whatever he wanted, as
the sexual assault began I instinctively fought back, which so enraged my
attacker that he strangled me until I lost consciousness. When I came to, I was
being dragged by my feet down in the ravine. I had often thought I was awake
dreaming, but now I was awake and convinced that I was having a nightmare. But
it was no dream. After ordering me to get on my hands and knees, the man
strangled me again. This time I was sure I was dying. But I revived, just in
time to see him lunging toward me with a rock. He smashed it into my forehead,
knocking me out. Eventually, after another strangulation attempt, he left me
for dead. (Brison, 2002, p. B7)
This
passage is from Violence & Nonviolence: Pathways to
Understanding Ch 8, which explores recovering from violence. This
chapter and ch 9 (Models of Nonviolence) and 10 (Policies of
Nonviolence), tackle the transformative processes involved in moving
away from the reciprocal relations of violence and toward the
reciprocal relations of nonviolence
Susan relates many of the thoughts
and feelings she had while negotiating her victimization and post-trauma
experiences. She does so from the vantage points of victim, woman, feminist,
philosopher, and mother.
She begins her story of recovery
in the Grenoble hospital where she spent 11 days following her attack. During
her stay, she repeatedly heard from doctors and nurses about how “lucky” she
was to be alive. Initially, Susan believed them, but it was not long before she
had discovered what she had not previously known: “I did not yet know how
trauma not only haunts the conscious and unconscious mind but also remains in
the body, in each of the senses, in the heart that races and the skin that
crawls whenever something resurrects the buried terror. I didn’t know that the
worst—the unimaginably painful aftermath of violence—was yet to come” (Brison,
2002, p. B7). In examining the experience of trauma, hers and others’, Susan
confronts the ambivalent feelings of going on (or not) with life:
Many trauma survivors who endured
much worse than I did, and for much longer, found, often years later, that it
was impossible to go on. It is not a moral failing to leave the world that has
become morally unacceptable. I wonder how some people can ask of battered
women, Why didn’t they leave? while saying of those driven to suicide by the
brutal and inescapable aftermath of the trauma, Why didn’t they stay? Jean
Amery wrote, “Whoever was tortured, stays tortured,” and that may explain why
he, Primo Levi, Paul Celan, and other Holocaust survivors took their own lives
decades after their physical torture ended, as if such an explanation were
needed. (Brison, 2002, p. B10)
More than 10 years after
the event, Susan has “recovered” as much as any victim of physical and sexual
assault can. As she tells it, “While I used to have to will myself out of bed
each day, I now wake gladly to feed my son, whose birth gave me reason not to
have died. Having him has forced me to rebuild my trust in the world, to try to
believe that the world is a good enough place in which to raise him” (Brison,
2002, p. B10).
"to 'recover' from rather than
merely 'survive' violence, there must be comprehensive efforts to
deal not only with those victims and perpetrators of interpersonal
abuse but with those bystanders to violence and the myriad policies
that tend to ignore, dismiss, or deny the harm, injury, pain, or
suffering experienced by millions of people daily as a result of the
prevailing institutional and structural arrangements."
For the first several months
after the attack, Susan felt a sense of unreality and disorientation. She
didn’t know exactly where she was and how or if she fit into the world. It was
“as though I’d outlived myself, as if I’d stayed on a train one stop past my
destination” (Brison, 2002, p. B7). She explains how her sense of unreality was
fed by the massive denial of those around her, a common reaction from loved
ones and others toward those who have been victims of rape. Inadvertently, some
people would communicate how the violent act might have been avoidable or
somehow her fault.
Susan then explores why she found
herself keeping her attack secret from all but medical and legal personnel.
Shame was part of it; not wanting to be stereotyped a victim was also a motivation.
In addition, she found herself in a professional dilemma. Having previously
done some academic work on pornography and violence against women, she did not
want her work to be discussed as the ravings of a “hysterical rape victim.”
Susan did, eventually, go public as a rape “survivor,” but only after she had
come to terms with what little control she had over the meaning of the word
“rape.” In other words, “using the term denied the particularity of what I had
experienced and invoked in other people whatever rape scenario they had already
constructed” (Brison, 2002, p. B8).
As a philosopher, Susan tried to
make sense out of her experience, realizing that sometimes knowledge sets one
free, and at other times it fills one with incapacitating terror or uncontrollable
rage. Turning to philosophy for meaning and consolation proved to be of no
assistance to Susan. In fact, she discovered that there was virtually nothing
in the philosophical literature about sexual violence. About all Susan knew for
sure was that she was not feeling herself. For a time, she even believed that
she might have incurred permanent brain damage as a result of her head injuries.
Had my reasoning broken down? Or
was it the breakdown of Reason? I couldn’t explain what had happen to me. I was
attacked for no reason. I had ventured outside of the human community, landed
beyond the moral universe, beyond the realm of predictable events and
comprehensible actions, and I didn’t know how to get back. (Brison, 2002, p. B8)
Years later, after Susan
had spent time off from teaching doing a full-time research gig, had returned
to teaching at Dartmouth College, and had been speaking publicly on the topic
of sexual violence, she would find herself losing her voice, both literally and
figuratively:
It was one thing to have decided to
speak and write about my rape, but another to find the voice with which to do
it. Even after my fractured trachea had healed, I frequently had trouble
speaking. I lost my voice, literally, when I lost my ability to continue my
life’s narrative, when things stopped making sense. I was never entirely mute,
but I often had bouts of what a friend labeled “fractured speech,” during which
I stuttered and stammered, unable to string together a simple sentence without
the words scattering like a broken necklace. (Brison, 2002, p. B9)
During the first year or
so of her recovery, Susan found that although her abilities to speak would come
and go, her ability to sing seemed to be more resilient:
For about a year after the assault,
I rarely, if ever, spoke in smoothly flowing sentences. I could sing, though,
after about six months and, like aphasics who cannot say a word but can sing
verse after verse, I never stumbled over the lyrics. I recall spending the
hour’s drive home from the weekly meetings of my support group of rape
survivors singing every spiritual I’d ever heard. It was a comfort and a
release. Mainly, it was something I could do, loudly, openly (by myself in a
closed car), and easily, accompanied by unstoppable tears. (Brison, 2002, p. B9)
