Rape and Prostitution

 18. RAPE AND PROSTITUTION 

Hello and welcome. I invite you to take a short walk with me as I travel through my journey of healing as a sexual abuse and assault survivor. Please stay to the end to enjoy my gem of positivity.

I was working at a place where the managers abused their use of power. One of those abuses of power, was the manager directly responsible for me telling me I needed to take in his brother-in-law, as a co-tenant in a house I was renting on my own, or lose both my brother’s job and my own. I was afraid I would indeed lose my job if I did not give a man I will only refer to as Alex, house room.

Now because of the abuse at work, I was anorexic when Alex moved in. I couldn’t fight him off when he raped me one morning, in my own bed, a mere two weeks later. Two weeks after that, Alex started to collect payment for letting other men rape me.

Yes, it was rape. At no time did I consent to these other men. My non consent was such that Alex had to hold me down each and every time, but only in the beginning. After about six weeks , I stopped fighting. I knew each man would get what he paid for, whether I fought or not. All that happened if I fought was I got hurt worse.

I was in no way, shape or form to injure a client. Early on, I happened to kick a young virgin in his crotch. Big mistake. Alex simply grabbed a knife, and ran the sharp tip down inside my vaginal lips twice. “Now you know what it’s like to be hurt there. Never hurt a customer again, or I’ll hurt you worse than this”. Needless to say, I never did hurt another of the many blokes.

All this time, I was still going to work every day. No matter how tired I was when I got home, I was forced to “service” between seven and ten men a night as well. And every time, Alex took money for their pleasure. In short, I was an enslaved prostitute, even though I know that the sex was rape. A trapped sex worker, to use the parlance of today’s world. I lost not only my sense of self and self-worth, I lost my sense of love, especially self love.

Yet I never benefited from the income I made from the forced prostitution. Why, might you ask? The money was paid directly to Alex. The money I earned was simply to pay for Alex’s illicit drugs and support his alcoholism. I never profited from this activity. Alex never even paid the rent, which he told me he would be responsible for. Although now, I am no longer being used, I still use the epithets of society to describe myself; slut, whore, easy lay, useless scum, spread my legs for anything in trousers.

Prostitution is often vilified by society, for the service provided. However, let me ask you: what makes the prostitute so much worse than the people who pay them for the service provided by prostitution? Prostitutes would soon run out business were it not for the “customers” they service. Many of these “customers” are family men, and plenty are what the police would call “repeat offenders”.

Prostitutes are not less than any other person. They may earn their money from an illegal activity, but they are still people of worth, like no other. They still have thoughts and feelings of their own. They hurt when injured, often deep emotional pain. They lose their sense of what love is, particularly self-love. It is the need to ease this emotional pain, this lack of love, which can drive a person into the arms of another, believing each time, that this one will be different. This one will love me for me.

I was forced into prostitution. But it didn’t stop me from telling myself this customer will be different, this one will actually see me as a human being; not just an easy lay they pay for. They never did. And each time, the well of emotional pain grew, as did my loss self-love and worth.

I was fortunate. My brush with prostitution ended for me when Alex moved out. What didn’t end was the emotional trauma within me. The emotional pain was such that I lost sight of my own self worth, and self love. Something which I am working hard, many years later, to rebuild.

This time, the gem is a simple affirmation: 

I am worthy of love

I feel that many people miss the importance of this statement. I know I did for the longest time. I am not just worthy of the love of others, whether I am paid for sex or not. I am worthy of loving myself. And you are too.

Thank you for taking this short walk with me. Please leave a comment on what you do to show yourself love. And until next time, just breathe and believe.

With love and care, Ruby

Rape and The Unit

 17. RAPE AND THE UNIT

Hello and welcome. I feel privileged that you are able to take this short walk with me as I work my way through my journey to heal from abuse. And don’t forget to stay for the gem of positivity at the end.

This time I’m going to talk about what I will only refer to as The Unit. As a response to some of the traumatic abuse in my life, the repeated rapings etc, I developed an eating disorder. To be specific, I became anorexic. The Unit was an eating disorder unit in a mental health facility. 

Firstly, the rules. The staff didn’t tell me what the rules were, so how could I possibly be “good” and follow them? The only times a rule was talked about, was when I was being chastised for breaking it. Then the visiting hours. There were two hours a night on both Tuesdays and Thursdays, and if we were very “good” we could have up to six hours out on the weekend, sometimes even both days. However, being good was linked to whether we had gained weight, lost it, or just stayed the same. It always struck me as odd, in that each patient was in The Unit for our obsession with weight, and the staff also obsessed about our weight. 

Even using the phone, we were allowed 15 minutes on a call and that was it. Needless to say, the other people in The Unit thought of ourselves as inmates; our punishment a life sentence. And we were prisoners. The nurses treated us more like animals than actual people. We were rewarded or punished by our weight. I remember when the second-in-command nurse took it upon herself to inform me, in the middle of The Unit, that I was a “no-good, selfish bit of worthlessness”. My crime? I’d broken the 15 minute phone call rule — by five minutes. We even had  compulsory bed rest times: half an hour after every breakfast and dinner, and a whole hour after lunch.

If we inmates failed in any small way, we were punished. No phone calls. No visitors. When any one of us failed, we were put in solitary confinement to all intensive purposes. And the only way to be discharged from The Unit? Gain enough weight to suit the “powers that be”. Well, if the nurses were going to treat us like despicable prisoners who had done a heinous crime, they could have it. This meant war. We learned to make small actions of defiance. 

However, despite the cruelty of The Unit, I could have coped with that. But there was one exception. Unfortunately, friendships between inmates were strongly “discouraged”. We weren’t even supposed to keep in contact after leaving The Unit. But there were three inmates who developed a strong friendship — Chris, Karly and I. So about a three days after my 21^st birthday, “celebrated” in The Unit, Karly was moved to another unit. It distressed both Chris and I immensely. To cut a long story short, both Chris and Karly gave me letters when they were leaving The Unit. They both told me that I was such a person of worth, I deserved to get better and live. Both letters touched me deeply, as if they had written them together (they were in separate units at the time).

And now? I’m on my journey towards healing, something that didn’t start until seven years AFTER I left The Unit. The only coping skills I learned from The Unit, are ones that both my psychiatrist and psychotherapist call “maladaptive”. I now have to unlearn these skills; the burning, the cutting, the punching of myself until I am black and blue, the skipping of meals, the throwing up of what I do eat, the eating of pet food to punish myself, the denial of sleep, even my negative self talk. 

However the point of this story is that sometimes other people can see your value as a worthy human being, before you can even catch a glimpse of yourself. Both Karly and Chris could see my intrinsic value. I just wish I had been able to show them that they were valuable too.

This time, the gem is a quote that is attributed to Joseph Smith, Jr:

If my life is of no value to my friends it is of none to myself 

Despite the fact my friends are no longer around me,  they wanted me to know that my life had been of value to them. Therefore it is of value to myself. That value is in healing. And it is in healing that I am showing the value in the lives of my friends.

Thank you for walking this short time with me. Don’t forget to leave a comment about what you value in others — it will show you your own value. And until next time, just breathe and believe.

With love and care, Ruby

Rape and Bullying

 16. RAPE AND BULLYING 

Hello and welcome. At this time, you get a glimpse into my life and past as a sexual assault survivor. Please stay to the end, to enjoy my gem of positivity.

In this post I’m going to discuss an issue which made me more vulnerable to my predators. To be blunt, as is my way, I was bullied at school by my supposed “friends”. It wasn’t because I had done anything wrong, or hurt them in any way. It was simply for the sheer pleasure that they got out of seeing me break, time and again. 

It started when I was in the third grade. The silent treatment, to the point of them even saying, “Do you hear something?” To which the response was always, “No, I don’t hear anything. It must be nothing.” That’s what I was. Nothing. If I tried to join their games, they would just walk off. Even in the classroom, I wasn’t safe from their torture of me. They would tear pages of work I’d done out of my books. They stole things of mine, then claimed they hadn’t. But if I went to the teacher, the stolen item/items would all of a sudden be on my desk when the teacher came to check. Their smug smiles said it all. 

As I grew, however, the bullying became physical and sexual. In high school, I was the butt of a ring of girls and boys. Often they would encircle me, pushing me from one to another, until I finally ended up on the concrete ground. I wouldn’t let them have the pleasure of seeing me cry, although I often did in private. Rumours would spread across the school that I was having sex with this boy and that one. I was rumoured several times that I was pregnant. People would pass me in the passage, sneering the words “slut” and “whore”. I am however grateful that there was no social media to continue this bullying to the greater world.

Because of their treatment of me, I dreaded going to school. I would make up every excuse I could think of, in order to stay at home. If I did go to school, I developed what I now know were obsessive compulsive tendencies. It also opened the way for other people, whom I had considered kind, to abuse me physically and sexually. In fact, one such person was my year eight English teacher. I wrongly believed that because they were being kind to me and hurting me out of love and kindness, it made their reprehensible abuse okay.

In this day and age, bullying is taken to new heights of depravity. There is now social media for the bullying to continue into the greater world. At least once I was home, the bullying stopped. Children these days are not so fortunate. It is bringing forth with it, higher levels of mental illness, higher rates of suicide in our youth, and at younger ages than ever before. It can also be the spark that drives the explosion of mass violence, particularly in schools.

It is not enough to tell the bullied victim that, “it will all blow over, you’ll see”, or “just stand up and say I’m not afraid of you”. The message needs to be directed at the population as a whole. Bullying is not okay. It is not acceptable. It is not a way to live.

This time, the gem of positivity I have chosen, is a quote that is attributed to none other than Abraham Lincoln himself:

I would rather be a little nobody, than an evil somebody.

I am starting to learn this. That those who bully, may think they are somebody, however those same words and actions portray them to be evil at heart. And I’m choosing to be a nobody and heal, than to let the evil of bullying fester within me. Which can so often happen. The bullied child, becomes a bully themselves in later years. But healing can happen — it just takes time.

Thank you for joining me on this short walk through my journey of healing. Please feel free to leave a comment on how you handle the bullies in your life. And until next time, just breathe and believe.

With love and care, Ruby

Rape and Creative Expression 1.

 15. Creative Expression 1.

Hello and welcome. Join me, as I share a glimpse of my journey towards healing, as a sexual abuse survivor. Please stay to the end, so that you may enjoy my gem of positivity.

This post is actually a poem I wrote whilst in a mental health facility. I needed to express myself, without causing damage to either myself or anyone else. To be quite honest, it was either write this poem to save what little sanity I felt I had at the time, or be sectioned, which means being locked up in a secure unit for a minimum of three days. Believe me, the poem is better than the alternative.

There are no words 

To describe the hatred

I feel.

It is more than

Total annihilation that

I wish for this 

Body of mine.

To bleed is good - 

Like draining the

Evil from this

Human form.

I so desperately 

Desire to be

Loved and wanted,

But instead I 

Hurt on the inside

With a pain too

Much to bear.

I deserve the acts

I commit to my

Own body - 

Ruining it to stop 

The games

Men like to perform 

On it.

When I’m at my lowest, this poem describes the tortured feelings of not just my body, but my very soul. It is a glimpse of how I think and feel about myself because of the abuse I have had.

However, as dark as the poem seems, there is actually a light. That light is in the fact I can write about this darkness within me, instead of doing those acts of violence towards myself. The poem shows a way of getting how I feel out of my head, so that it’s not just festering within me.

This is what they call, in therapy-speak, creative expression. To get your feelings out in a non-violent manner. It doesn’t have to be poetry. The simple act of journaling can help make a difference to your coping strategies. Even doodling. The point is to just let it out. If you press so hard the paper tears, that doesn’t matter. You are still expressing yourself and how you feel, in a manner that is neither detrimental to yourself, nor to the people around you.

Yet your expression might not be in producing a tangible object. It may simply be turning the music up and dancing as wildly and crazily as you can. Or punching a pillow until the stuffing comes out. Getting a telephone book or newspaper, and tearing it into as many tiny pieces as you can. 

It has taken me a long time to learn this lesson. A long time, and many locked units. But you know what? I feel so much better after my creative expression, and I’m not stuck with the baggage of guilt that comes out of hurting myself and others.

And now we come to this post’s gem of positivity. This time I have chosen a quote from Peter Drucker, on pursuing creative expression:

If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.

That is what I’m learning. To heal, by shaking off the old shackles of keeping myself a victim, and creating a survivor. And it’s not easy — nothing worth achieving ever is. But it’s worth being a survivor.

Thank you for joining me on this short walk with me. Don’t forget to leave a comment on what you either do already, or think you’d like to try to creatively express yourself. You may just give an idea that helps someone else. And until next time, just breathe and believe.

With love and care, Ruby

Rape and Despair

 14. RAPE AND DESPAIR 

Hello and welcome back. At this time, I invite you to to take a short walk with me through my life as a sexual assault survivor. Don’t forget to stay to the end, in order to enjoy my gem of positivity.

The topic of this post is despair. As a sexual abuse and assault survivor, I have felt this emotion many times. Like depression, the colour I associate with despair is black. However, unlike depression, this black feels worse to me. It has the added qualities of absolute numbness and emptiness.

Like depression, despair is excruciatingly tiring. For me the worst despair I have ever felt was just recently. It was when I asked my therapist, Dr H, if it was too late. Had irreversible damage been done. His silence spoke volumes. 

The realisation that I have been irreparably damaged was complete and utter desolation. Like being in a a semi-dried well. Hollow, and empty, but still with the quality of dampness. It is closed. Like I’m going to be crushed by the empty loneliness. I guess another way of describing it is claustrophobic, like the very darkness of the black will kill me.

The picture that comes to mind, is that of a little child. Curled in a dark corner, crying. It is hiding away, as children do, when scared or hurt. Or like a dog that has been injured taking itself off to either heal or die, whichever comes first.

In my life, despair has been a large factor. Every assault and every trauma, has dipped me to the point of despair. And it’s a lonely feeling. Because it feels like everyone else is moving on but without me. I’m stuck in the damage (and so despair) of each situation. I’m trapped in the very evilness of what has been inflicted upon me 

Despair has brought me to the point of suicide. Like it’s too much for me to bear. But I know that if I truly give in, the despair will swallow me whole. The perpetrators win. If I give in to despair, I become a victim and not a survivor.

At my worst, I commonly say that the light at the end of the tunnel is an express train coming to run me down. I want to just stand there and let the train end it. That’s the victim in me speaking out. However, my survival instincts are strong. I always seem to find an alcove in the tunnel wall to hide in as the train passes safely.

Despair is a terrible feeling. And so are the thoughts that go with this emotion:

“I’ll never heal”

“I can’t get over this”

“Everyone will be better off without me”

The thoughts of despair do often lead to attempted suicide, if not the full final ending. I know; I have attempted suicide when those thoughts of despair have overwhelmed me. I am, however, still fortunate enough to be here with you to share my story. That’s not to say I don’t still have those moments of despair. But I now have a strong support network, to help me along. And you will find that you do too.

It has been a difficulty finding a suitable gem of positivity for this post. However, I have decided to go with the title of a song by Billy Ocean:

“When the going gets tough, the tough get going”

And that is just what I’m doing now. The going was getting tougher and, as I could see, unable to be beaten. That was the despair in me. But I’m tough. I lived through the trauma, and came out the other side. Not the same as I was before the trauma, but I’m here. And you are too.

Thank you for taking this short walk with me this while. Don’t forget to leave a comment on how you are beating your despair. And until next time, just breathe and believe.

With love and care, Ruby