This article was published in The Sydney Morning Herald on September 6th, 2008. The account of the rape was verified from my victim's statement.The day I was raped
Helena can now talk about it … she has reached the point where she again feels she is worth something and the rape no longer defines or controls her.
Photo: Glen Mccurtayne
At 5am on July 8, 1999, Helena Kauppi was beaten and raped at knife-point. This is her story.
In 1999 I lived on Canterbury Road in Canterbury. I had recently been diagnosed with possibly having muscular rheumatism. This causes you to wake every morning in a lot of pain. The doctor told me the best thing for the pain was to exercise, first thing, no matter how much I didn't want to. So I did. I had worked out a regular route which I would walk every morning.
That particular morning, a Thursday, I woke early. It had rained the night before and I thought I might need my umbrella but when I looked out, the sky was clear, the air was crisp and cold and the stars were piercing in the blackness.
On my walk I had to cross under a railway bridge. The only light came from a streetlight beside the bridge. As I walked towards it a youth jumped a fence under the bridge and, from the light of that streetlight, I could see the knife he held in his hand. This image has remained in my memory like a photograph.
Every person reacts differently when confronted by a situation like this. I reacted in a way that psychologists call dissociation, though colloquially you might call it freezing. I knew that I had nowhere to run to, no-one to call to and no way of defending myself. I had only my clothes and my house keys pinned on my pants.
When you dissociate it's a bit like being anaesthetised, yet still being wide awake. You have no sense of sensation, all your muscles are relaxed, you act robotically to whatever the other person says and the whole scene takes on a surreal, dream-like quality.
The youth ran behind me and held the knife to my side. He made me walk across a concrete footbridge. I could not feel anything, I could not feel my feet, and it seemed to me that I floated along.
"I want to f--k you," he said, his breath close to my ear.
"No you don't," I said.
"Why not?"
"I've got AIDS"
"How lovely."
He must have hit me in the back of the head then, because I suddenly fell forward and partially blacked out. I remember the deliberate effort I made to stay awake. He pushed my face onto the concrete and pulled my pants down and, as he lay on my back, an oppressive weight, feeling for my vagina, he forgot about the knife. I moved my left arm over and grabbed hold of the handle, the blade was already in my right hand. I wanted to throw it into the river but his weight on my back seemed thousand-fold and, as my muscles were all relaxed, the effort to move was impossible. Suddenly he realised that I had control of the knife. He began to beat my hands into the concrete. I know this only because I saw it. Then he began to beat me in the back of the head: I know this because my face kept smashing into the concrete. Finally he got the knife. He made me walk under some casuarina trees and lie down. I did not feel the cold on my body, though my pants were pulled down to my ankles. I did not feel the ground beneath me though there were sticks and stones. I did not feel him laying on me or rape me, though his face was barely a foot from my own.
Helena can now talk about it … she has reached the point where she again feels she is worth something and the rape no longer defines or controls her.
Photo: Glen Mccurtayne
At 5am on July 8, 1999, Helena Kauppi was beaten and raped at knife-point. This is her story.
In 1999 I lived on Canterbury Road in Canterbury. I had recently been diagnosed with possibly having muscular rheumatism. This causes you to wake every morning in a lot of pain. The doctor told me the best thing for the pain was to exercise, first thing, no matter how much I didn't want to. So I did. I had worked out a regular route which I would walk every morning.
That particular morning, a Thursday, I woke early. It had rained the night before and I thought I might need my umbrella but when I looked out, the sky was clear, the air was crisp and cold and the stars were piercing in the blackness.
On my walk I had to cross under a railway bridge. The only light came from a streetlight beside the bridge. As I walked towards it a youth jumped a fence under the bridge and, from the light of that streetlight, I could see the knife he held in his hand. This image has remained in my memory like a photograph.
Every person reacts differently when confronted by a situation like this. I reacted in a way that psychologists call dissociation, though colloquially you might call it freezing. I knew that I had nowhere to run to, no-one to call to and no way of defending myself. I had only my clothes and my house keys pinned on my pants.
When you dissociate it's a bit like being anaesthetised, yet still being wide awake. You have no sense of sensation, all your muscles are relaxed, you act robotically to whatever the other person says and the whole scene takes on a surreal, dream-like quality.
The youth ran behind me and held the knife to my side. He made me walk across a concrete footbridge. I could not feel anything, I could not feel my feet, and it seemed to me that I floated along.
"I want to f--k you," he said, his breath close to my ear.
"No you don't," I said.
"Why not?"
"I've got AIDS"
"How lovely."
He must have hit me in the back of the head then, because I suddenly fell forward and partially blacked out. I remember the deliberate effort I made to stay awake. He pushed my face onto the concrete and pulled my pants down and, as he lay on my back, an oppressive weight, feeling for my vagina, he forgot about the knife. I moved my left arm over and grabbed hold of the handle, the blade was already in my right hand. I wanted to throw it into the river but his weight on my back seemed thousand-fold and, as my muscles were all relaxed, the effort to move was impossible. Suddenly he realised that I had control of the knife. He began to beat my hands into the concrete. I know this only because I saw it. Then he began to beat me in the back of the head: I know this because my face kept smashing into the concrete. Finally he got the knife. He made me walk under some casuarina trees and lie down. I did not feel the cold on my body, though my pants were pulled down to my ankles. I did not feel the ground beneath me though there were sticks and stones. I did not feel him laying on me or rape me, though his face was barely a foot from my own.
He took my jacket and my gloves and I glanced back to see him wiping my blood from the concrete with them. Then I ran. I thought I ran one way, but instead ran another. I flagged down a passing car and asked the driver to take me to the hospital. It was only on the way there that sensation returned and I realised how much pain I was in. One finger had been cut to the bone and I was dripping blood all over my clothes. My left elbow had been wrenched so badly that it later swelled up like a giant, purple grapefruit and was excruciatingly painful. I had bruises on my head and my face and my knees.
The police came to the hospital and took a statement. The detectives came and took a statement. I went through the indignity of a sexual assault kit examination and saw a psychologist. Finally, after 12 hours, I was driven to a friend's house by an extremely kind police officer. The rapist, however, was never caught, though I believe a search was made.
Being raped makes you feel unbelievably worthless, dirty and disgusting. The fact that someone could treat you with such total disregard, could abuse you without the smallest consideration makes you feel as though you have no value. Over the years I have discovered that to regain your self-worth requires the support of family and good friends. It is not enough to just talk about it once a week to a counsellor; every day you need to feel that you have value, that you are loved and needed. Unfortunately, at that time, I struggled on my own.
Some months later while I was in a shopping centre I heard a woman's voice say: "She's a slut." I remember this because it was the first time I had heard anyone use the word "slut" in a public place. Over time, however, I would hear it more and more often, and begin to realise that it was actually directed at me.
Rape victims will sometimes think they hear people sexually abusing them because they often feel guilty or partly responsible for what has occurred. This is hardly surprising because often when you hear of a rape your first thoughts are something like: "Why was she out so late?" "Why was she dressed like that?" "She should have known better." The first thoughts are to blame the victim. I never blamed myself, however, so when I saw people leaning out of a car or train window looking at me and shouting out sexual abuse I never doubted that it was real.
Over the next few years the verbal abuse increased. I have been called a slut, whore, prostitute, c-nt, dog, bitch and any other word of abuse you can ascribe to a woman. Some people would mumble obscenities at me under their breath; others would bark them out on the bus or in the street so that everyone turned to look at them. Sometimes I was spat at and some people would just point at me and laugh.
Rapists do often verbally abuse their victims but I do not know what the rapist has said of me to encourage other people to do so. I believe the rapist and I both lived in the same area and that he hoped that, by getting his friends to abuse me, I might leave and he would have less fear of being recognised.
So why didn't I say anything to the people abusing me? Rape is an extremely difficult and emotive subject to talk about. Until you have reached a point where you again feel that you are worth something and that the rape does not define or control you. When you are out of that place of abuse and can look and see the flowers around you, then it becomes possible to talk about it. It took me seven and a half years to reach such a point, but I have found that talking about it is an extremely liberating and cathartic experience.
Statistically, one in four girls will be sexually assaulted before they turn 18 - that is reported abuse, not unreported. The idea to sexually abuse someone does not come out of nothing; it already has to be there before the abuse begins. If, as a society, we accept that sexual abuse is permissible because other people are doing it, because someone has labelled the person as promiscuous or because they have been abused before, then we are perpetuating sexual abuse within our community and this ends up affecting us all.
In all the days of all the years that I have been abused only on two occasions have I ever heard anyone say anything against it. Only twice have I ever heard anyone say: "Hey! You don't say things like that." Until more people refuse to accept sexual abuse on any level, sexual abuse will continue. And the most insidious thing about it is the silence. But that one quarter of all women in Australia who are sexually abused deserve a voice for they are our sisters, daughters, mothers, girlfriends, wives, grandmothers …
cartoon by Leunig
