Translator: Yifat Adler Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
A few month ago, I was in Africa.
I was volunteering as a midwife
on the border of northern Uganda and southern Sudan.
Alongside me was Lia, a midwife from Germany.
It was market day, and we were going shopping.
We promised a very pregnant woman named Lilian
that we would buy her some things she needed for her baby
and some underwear for herself because she couldn't go home.
Lilian came to our birth center after her husband beat her so badly
she had fractured ribs
and permanently lost hearing and sight on her left side.
When Lilian went to the hospital to seek care,
they told her they couldn't treat her
unless she went to the police to issue a statement.
But when she went to the police,
they told her they couldn't give her a statement
unless she paid twenty dollars, which, of course, Lilian didn't have.
On our way to the market, Lia and I stopped at the police station.
We had three cases of gender-based violence to follow up on.
There was a twenty-year-old gang rape victim,
an eight-year-old girl who had been raped by a family member,
and Lilian.
The police told us
they hadn't been able or didn't really get to even try
to look for any of the men who were involved in the gang rape.
They had made no progress arresting Lilian's husband,
and that very afternoon,
they were about to release the man who hurt the little girl;
a man who told her he would kill her if she ever told anyone.
As we stepped out of the police station, Lia must have seen my eyes
because she said, "What do you need?" and I said, "A place to cry."
So we made our way through the market crowds
and found a private alley
where only one hundred African children stared at the weeping white ladies.
I told Lia I wasn't crying just about the way things were in Uganda,
but because I feel that this is how it's like all over the world.
And she said, "I know. It's like this in Germany too."
She told me about the time she was being stalked,
and the police told her over and over again
they couldn't do anything until something actually happened to her.
And I told her about my experience in the hospital in Israel
when I needed care after my own rape.
Gender-based violence and rape culture affect all of us,
no matter where we live.
Now, when I say "rape culture,"
I'm not just using a provocative, radical, feminist term -
though there's nothing wrong with being provocative, radical or feminist -
I'm simply using the best words I have to describe the culture that I grew up in.
A culture that not only allowed me to be raped
but wouldn't give me the conditions I needed to heal.
It was this lack of conditions to heal that nearly cost me my life
and claimed the lives of many of my friends.
When I was twelve,
I was way too young to be thinking of concepts like rape culture.
I hadn't even thought about kissing a boy yet.
But that did not protect me from being raped.
It was a humid and hot day of late July.
That afternoon, I was happy.
It was that pure embodied joy
of splashing and swimming and laughing with friends in a cool body of water.
As darkness fell,
I stepped out of the Sea of Galilee and into the dressing room on the beach.
A group of grown men were waiting for me there.
Actually, they were not waiting specifically for me
but for any female child.
Because, just like terrorism, rape is not personal.
I became part of a statistic that affects boys, girls, women and men.
My wise, human soul knew how to go on living.
I was always busy with school and friends and art and activism.
I never forgot what happened,
but it remained closed behind a door
that I stared at for hours but never opened
until the wisdom in me knew I was ready.
Seven years ago, I met a handsome carpenter.
We started dating, and the intimacy between us was the trigger.
The trigger was important, but just as important was the timing.
I was ready to face the pain,
and I was ready to enjoy all the gifts of life
that were hidden behind that closed door.
I started experiencing
very intense symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep.
Every smell and sensation brought up a trigger and a flashback,
and I had these episodes, in the night or day, of dissociation,
that were often accompanied with a strong urge to self-harm.
What I needed was a safe place
where I could touch and feel my pain but not die from it.
I needed a place that would understand what I was going through
and welcome my process
as a healthy reaction to an atrocity that I had faced.
But the only place society had to offer me was a psychiatric hospital,
and as bad as things were, my crisis was about to get much worse.
In ancient Hebrew, the word for "crisis" also means "childbirth."
In English, "emergence" is right there in the midst of every emergency.
But our modern society seems to have forgotten this innate connection.
We don't know how to hold space, for crisis or for birth.
We don't know how to have the time
to wait for natural processes to unfold.
We see a rose bud, and we just want to open it up.
We fear and try to control processes and moments
that just need to be witnessed with faith and patience.
The amazing thing was that in the midst of that pain,
I would experience these waves of overwhelming fear,
and then, when I had the right conditions around me,
I was able to breathe through the pain, just like childbirth contractions.
It was like those expansive moments in birth
where you feel like you're dying.
And that's only because you really are dying
because a new "you" is being born,
a "you" that can do the impossible.
But in the hospital,
everything seemed to be set up to make my symptoms go away.
I had a nurse tell me that if I cried,
they would have to put me in the closed secure unit.
I had a doctor telling me he had no choice but to physically restrain me,
only because my body was doing what I needed to do
to get the violence out.
I met incredible women there,
women who had so much talents and brilliance and bravery.
And they had lived through rape and incest and child prostitution.
We were all told in so many different ways,
not to talk about our trauma,
not to remember,
and not to believe our own memories.
At first, I attributed these interactions to anecdotal human failings:
Maybe the nurse had a bad fight with her boyfriend.
Perhaps the intern doctor didn't get enough sleep.
But after working with the Israeli Ministry of Health
to gather testimonies from thousands of women,
I now know
that these silencing practices are a norm.
Most doctors, nurses and police officers are incredibly good people.
They go out of their way every single day to save lives.
But there are aspects of our institutions in our culture
that are still part of the problem and not part of the solution.
(Sighs)
I know
that healing is something that takes place by itself
when we have the right conditions.
And these right conditions aren't expensive or complicated.
If you've ever given birth
or tried to do something incredibly difficult,
then you know how much it means
to have people around you who are not afraid of your fear,
who know that you know your way through the darkness
to the underworld and back.
And if you know this,
you know what a woman or man need when they are recovering from rape.
(Sighs)
Dr. Martin Luther King said:
"We will remember not the words of our enemies,
but the silence of our friends."
It's one thing to feel like there's a few bad people in the world,
but it's an entirely different feeling
to sense that all the good people let you down.
And it was this feeling that I had in the hospital
that finally led me to despair, and I tried to take my own life.
I'm not sure why I didn't succeed, but many of my friends did.
Over the last three years,
I lost seven of my closest friends to suicide.
Each and every one of them
had lived through sexual violence and hospitalization,
and they each said in the letters they left behind
that it wasn't the trauma that took their life.
It was the way that society wouldn't make room for their pain,
it was this feeling that there's just no place for us in this culture
and for the things that culture has forced us to live with.
It was during my friend May's funeral
that I vowed to do everything in my power
to realize a vision and a dream that we shared:
a Land Where Women Heal.
Land Where Women Heal is a place where women come
and receive evidence-based, trauma-informed professional care
from psychiatrists and psychologists.
It's not a building, but a village.
Embrace by community and connection to nature
are integral parts of the healing.
In order to offer free care for survivors,
the village includes a social business.
This allows the project to be self-sustainable.
All our income generating activities
are connected to healing rape culture.
Empowering girls, teaching safe-sex education,
healing womanhood, menarche, menopause, birth.
I know that there is an innate connection
between honoring and celebrating these cycles of a woman's life
to healing everything, you know, the bigger picture.
(Sighs)
This model is a pilot. It's meant to spread and be copied.
My wish is for there to be some sort of a Land Where Women Heal
in every state and country around the world.
And then, of course, are the men and the boys,
who need so much healing too.
I know that through truth and reconciliation,
we will be able to trust again,
trust the institutions of our culture and trust one another.
But there has to first be room for the pain.
There has to be room for the atrocity
that so many of us have been living with for so long.
A crisis is a birth, it happens when we are ready.
I actually believe that remembering this is key not only for PTSD and sexual abuse
but for the whole field of mental health that needs healing too.
A crisis is a birth that happens when we are ready,
and we as a society are ready.
That's why all this pain is coming up.
That's why we are finally able to say: "Me too."
The goal of all this is not shaming or blaming;
the goal is healing.
I welcome every person who is able to say,
"Ow! I can't believe I did that. I can't believe I did that to you.
What has happened to me?
What has happened to us that we are doing this to each other?
What's going on?"
All I ever wanted for the men who raped me
was for them to be able to awaken from the nightmare they must be living in:
to do what they did to a little girl.
Imagine the disconnection from their own hearts.
I want to invite us not to be afraid of this pain that is coming up.
We are getting our soul back.
We are birthing the culture that our grandchildren will live in.
Can you imagine a world
where it is safe to be a child, a man and a woman?
Safety is not just about preventing things from happening.
We bring children into this world,
and we don't really have control over what life will put them through.
Safety is about being willing to meet the emotions that life brings.
So, can you imagine a world where it is safe?
And what does it feel like?
What does it feel like to walk around safe in this world?
What is your vision for the culture that comes after rape culture?
What is your vision for a world without rape?
What does it take to get there?
And if it takes a while to get there,
can we at least, meanwhile, do everything we can
to make sure that survivors have everything they need
to be supported to heal and to choose life?
Thank you.
(Applause)