Sexual assault survivors: we see you, we hear you

Graphic warning:

This column deals with sexual assault and may be triggering to some readers.

Imagine this: nine years after you were brutally raped by a stranger as you were walking home from downtown, you have dialed into his parole hearing and are waiting breathlessly at the end of the line for the proceedings to begin.

You brace yourself to hear the sound of his voice again — a voice that cuts through your nightmares; a voice you would do anything to forget.

And then an official from the Parole Board of Canada comes on the line to say there’s been a technical problem and the hearing will have to be postponed.

The rapist hasn’t been granted parole, but he hasn’t been denied it yet, either.

In weeks or months, you will go through the process again.

And then again two years after that.

And two years after that.

And so on, and so on. Because as much as you want to move on, as much as people tell you to try and get past it, survivors of sexual assault — unlike their attackers — can’t apply for parole.

While Sofyan Boalag is serving an indeterminate sentence as a dangerous offender at Atlantic Institution in Renous, N.B. and is entitled to

regular parole hearings, the survivors of his brutality in Newfoundland and Labrador are serving what must feel like life sentences.

“The assault that I experienced will stay with me forever,” one survivor said in court, five years after the 2012 crime.

“This assault was an attack against my body as well as my freedom to be an individual, freedom of being a person with rights, freedom of being a woman, freedom of being an independent woman.”

Thinking of how those women must have felt when a technology failure prolonged their excruciation this week, I thought of “Shout” — a powerful poetry memoir by New York Times bestselling author Laurie Halse Anderson, herself a survivor of rape. And I wanted to let those women know they are seen and heard and that the injustice of their situations is recognized by those of us who have followed the trail of their pain.

While their attacker can look forward to another opportunity to make a bid for freedom in a few weeks’ time, they remain shackled by what was done to them, with no one offering them a temporary pass from the horrible memories and lasting trauma.

In a poem titled “diagnosis,” Anderson writes:

Rape wounds deeply, splits open your core with shrapnel.

The stench of the injury attracts maggots

which hatch into clouds of doubt and self-loathing the dirt you feel inside you nourishes anxiety, depression, and shame poisoning your blood, festering in your brain until you will do anything to stop feeling the darkness rising within anything to stop feeling—

untreated pain is a cancer of the soul that can kill you

But, while Anderson knows from her own experience how the trauma of rape can stalk your life like a shadow you can’t shake and shatter your sense of security, your selfworth, she also offers hope.

Hope that survivors can regain their voices and find strength in the fellowship of others who have survived.

After meeting countless survivors and hearing their stories, Anderson offers hard-earned wisdom in a poem titled “reminder”:

after you shout your open mouth will breathe in the light for which you’ve hungered

and your backbone will unfurl until you can again dance to the beat of your steadfast heart

To all the survivors, there is light after the darkness and freedom and strength after fear. To paraphrase Anderson in her poem “#Metoo”: “… stand taller/…shout louder/than they thought/we could.”