Victims suffer all over again in a world where sexual violence sells

Date

November 3, 2013

Mainstream culture has a lot to answer for.

A female teacher at a Tasmanian school where I spoke on the objectification of women could not stay to hear the end of my talk. The images I showed were too confronting, bringing back traumas suffered two decades ago.

”The very acts that have become part of my trauma were there on display as a part of mainstream culture,” she said.

Do advertisers, magazine editors, fashion, music and video game producers think about how their violent images traumatise female survivors of sexual abuse and degradation?

Boys’ T-shirts in surf stores depict women naked, bound and splattered in blood. Mainstream advertising shows women pinned down in simulated gang rape scenes, tied up in car boots, buried, chopped into pieces, decapitated. Women are shown as passive, vulnerable, often naked and as sex aids.

These images, among 200 in my presentation, took Genevieve back 20 years. Genevieve worked hard to turn her love of acting and performing arts into admission to a performing arts school. ”It went without saying that you did not get in just on talent but on marketability,” she says. ”I remember consciously dressing in a low-cut body suit and tight jeans aware my acting skills were only part of my ticket in. From that moment I was a commodity and accepted treatment as such.”

Groomed by a lecturer, she ended up drugged and sexually assaulted for three days by five men. Each played out fantasies that were listed in explicit writing on the walls. Because of their power and status she didn’t go to police, fearing retribution. She also felt being cross-examined in the courts would retraumatise her. She had seen what happened to other victims. What Genevieve suffered came back to her as I spoke. Seeing my images caused her to panic. Her heart beat rapidly, she went into a sweat and felt herself dissociating and losing time.

She says she felt retraumatised. ”I could feel a rising wave of fear. I’ve spent 20 years rebuilding my life. Every day I have to make a wall between me and the world. I’m so busy trying to protect myself.

”Deviant behaviour is now on public display every day,” she says. But do those who profit from the images they use to sell things even care about the impact on women like Genevieve?

She is worried about the normalising of these images to children. ”What hope do my boys have of knowing where the line is? What hope does a girl who experiences these things have of understanding and support when she is confronted by constant exposure to images that say it is OK?” she says.

Two years ago Brian McFadden (his former fiancee Delta Goodrem was an anti-violence ambassador) produced a song Just the Way You Are (Drunk at the Bar) that contains the lines: ”I like you just the way you are, drunk as shit dancing at the bar, I can’t wait to take you home so I can do some damage … I can’t wait to take you home so I can take advantage.”

One survivor wrote on my blog: ”So, Brian McFadden, do you think this is something to poke fun at? Does my story deserve its own catchy tune and rounds of laughter and applause because you were so clever to come up with something witty that ultimately diminishes the trauma of my experience and belittles my feelings about it? I’m really ever so glad that we live in a society where cretins like you can influence a whole new generation of young boys and men to sexually assault women and girls and then have a big old laugh about it later …”

Such imagery and words create a harmful cultural narrative about what it means to be a woman. Media, advertising and popular culture reflect values. Any reading of the social landscape tells us women are really only good for one thing: to be used sexually.

Anti-violence-against-women campaigner and sexual assault survivor Kate Ravenscroft points out that one in three women are victims of violence. Yet the trauma of their experience is diminished and belittled. The cultural messages that make violence appear sexy is the same culture in which survivors of sexual assault have to survive. ”Seeing that violence treated flippantly, carelessly, can be devastating. It can actually provoke post-traumatic reactions and symptoms,” she says.

Women such as Genevieve battle to control rising panic most days, everywhere they go, because the acts done to them are on display so casually, with the tacit approval of governments who love to repeat a mantra that ”self-regulation” is working. It’s not. And it’s real women who are hurt because of it.

Melinda Tankard Reist is a writer, speaker, media commentator, blogger and advocate for women and girls.