Women need to get loud, and stay loud – especially when it comes to defending themselves and speaking up about sexual violence.
That was the theme at the Take Back the Night rally and march Thursday, a global rally and march held each year to reclaim the streets and raise awareness and foster solidarity about sexual violence.
It’s also something Amber Spence is working hard to do.
A rape survivor and survivor of gender-based violence, as well as a PhD candidate at the U of G working to articulate the harms of rape, Spence thought happiness was a myth. That is, until she broke through the silence shrouding her experience.
“The silence in the aftermath was deafening. It was so loud I could hardly hear myself think, or even feel anything at all.”
She didn’t know how to talk about it, and when she tried, it seemed like no one wanted to hear it, focusing on how they couldn’t fix it or how sad and angry they were.
“Their uneasiness often led them to suggest to leave it in the past, turn a new page. Some would tell me I was lying for attention. Either way, it wasn’t helpful. The storm that was inside of me needed language, words that could accurately describe what I was feeling.”
Because she couldn’t find the words, she struggled to understand her experience, so she repressed it.
“If I couldn’t remember every single detail, I told myself, maybe it means it didn’t really happen.”
She changed her hair, makeup, clothes, her name. She began to self harm.
“So I continued until my soul couldn’t be silent anymore,” she said.
Taking a class in university on the concepts of evil helped to break the silence for her. The philosopher, Susan Bryson, wrote of experiences that mirrored her own.
“I didn’t realize others felt this way. The silence that had wrapped around me stopped me from connecting to other survivors, from understanding myself in any meaningful kind of way,” she said.
“I thought happiness was a myth, but I realize now that the silence around me has been broken, that it’s not,” she said. “If I had remained silent, I don’t think I would still be here.
“I acted against my instinct to hide and accepted this opportunity to speak for the 14-year-old girl who desperately needed to see a survivor empowered enough to speak on it and name it to break the silence she was trapped in,” she said.
Silence can also be a double-edged sword, said Cindy McMann, public educator with Guelph-Wellington Women in Crisis, which organized the event.
“As Audre Lorde said, we think our silence will save us, and it doesn’t. She writes, my silence has not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. It hasn’t, it doesn’t, and it won’t.”
But we also face consequences for speaking up about sexual violence, she said, like denial, blame, disbelief, and so much more.
“We’re held responsible for these consequences when we name the violence that we experience. We’re also held accountable for the consequences that can happen when we don’t speak.”
If an assailant goes on to harm someone else, for instance, “we’re led to feel like it’s our fault for not sounding a warning.”
“We’re blamed for our silence as much as we are blamed for our speech.”
But agonizing over whether to stay silent or speak up, she said, is just a distraction from how badly systems are failing us, “because frankly it’s not our fault that somebody else woke up one morning and chose violence.”
“It’s not your personal responsibility to speak up about sexual violence in a world that is likely to retraumatize you if you do so. That’s not the silence that we have to break.”
What’s needed is for the systems themselves to “speak up and have our backs,” for education systems to talk openly about consent, for the legal system to allow restorative justice.
“We need our provincial government to speak and formally declare intimate partner violence an epidemic and then fund it like it is, because these systems are not going to speak up for us unless we speak up to them,” she said. “That’s the silence we need to break, and we have the power to do that as a community, because we will always be louder together than we ever are alone.”
Events like the rally are a chance to not only break the silence, “but to smash it,” she said.
The rally was kicked off with speeches from McMann and Spence, as well as music from CJ Cooper and Sound of the Drum. Afterwards, participants marched to city hall and back to Marianne’s Park for a lesson in self-defence by Leslie Allin from Wen-Do Women’s Self-Defence, where they learned to raise their voices and to smash the patriarchy (and potential assailants) with a hammer fist.
