When the guidelines said “A term that more accurately describes the reality of a person who has suffered in this way is ’survivor’”, my first thought was “Not all of them survive.”

My personal view is that I don’t like either term. Firstly neither of them express a sufficient degree of defiance and I find defiance to be a very useful feeling. It turns powerlessness and the enforced passivity that is often the essence of victimisation, into action. Secondly, I think that both terms inevitably stigmatize me for having been subjected to a specific event/s, and I am not willing to play by those rules, the rules whereby the abused become the shame bearers for the abusers. Stimgatization takes a negative event and turns it into an identity, so I think it is very difficult to speak of one’s experience of a past event in “I am” terms without being stigmatized, however unwillingly. The statement “I am” is a claim of identity, however you look at it and I refuse to build or define my identity upon those events. However influential they have been and are, they still are not the defining feature or foundation of me. So if the occasion arises I prefer to talk about my experiences of sexual assault in concrete terms where both the abuser and I take our respective places and the temporal context is explicit.

My other qualm is that by taking on a label, either victim or survivor, I can talk about my experience without ever having to mention the rapist/abuser in anything other than disembodied and abstract terms. I see this as an extension of the passive voice problem whereby the role of the person who rapes is discreetly removed from the narrative.

(Slightly meta but I don’t think that the label and stigma of rapist/abuser should be indelible, however until such time as a rapist/abuser demonstrates that they are safe people to be around then a stigma should indeed be applied to abusers and rapists. Rapists are extremely prone to recidivism and as much as I believe that all people regardless of behaviour are owed a debt of basic respect, I simply do not accept that rapid assimilation into wider society is a cure for the kind of thinking and behaviour that enables someone to violate another person in this most cruelly intimate manner. All of my experience, and the experience of people I know supports the diametric opposite, that it is the avoidance of stigma that is the problem, that the all too ready excuse of “he’s just a good bloke who went too far” actually enables rapists to rape again.)

Trust academic literature for new and improved euphemisms for rape – “Coerced Sexual Debut”. *sigh* just Google scholar it to see what I mean.

The guidelines are available at –
http://www.ifj.org/assets/docs/185/063/c3093b9-8c8e63f.pdf

I don’t know if that exact story is true, but that sort of thing certainly did happen. I know that Hannah Arendt discusses the case of a mother who was forced to choose between selecting one of her children to die, and having all her children killed (and herself).

When I used the term ‘grey area’, I was talking specifically from a legal point of view and what would have to be established in order to convince a jury that there was an absence of consent for the purposes of a s.61I or 61J sexual assault conviction. Personally, I have no doubt that what those kids did to that girl amount to rape in the way that the term is understood outside of legal circles, but within a courtroom, there’s a lot there that any competent defence lawyer could have played around with, and that is probably why the prosecution were happy to accept a plea to a lesser charge.

As for why the Tele was happy to use ‘rape’ and ’sexual assault’ in reporting this particular case, while the Herald wasn’t, I have no idea. Perhaps they had legal advice to the effect that since the offenders were minors and their names could never be made public, there was no risk of a defamation case. That is conjecture, though.

Once again, I just want to make it perfectly clear that in no way do I personally believe that the legal ‘grey area’ around the consent in this case ameliorates the culpability of these boys for their actions. I’m just pointing out that it would have been a less than cut-and-dried case if the prosecution had gone after a sexual assault conviction.

Coerced acquiescence is not considered legally valid consent in any other circumstance.