Bermuda has a serious sexual abuse problem.... Well I'm sure the whole world has it but I really can't begin to speak to that, I don't know how. This might seem out of the blue but I was watching Law & Order, it was all about rape and rape victims and it got me thinking around the issue, initially I thought maybe I'd have a conversation about it, but talking about rape makes my words nonesensical and my mind fumble. I just don't like to do it.
I really hated how the actors in the show who were playing the victims of rape were all "victim-ey" it felt like overkill, these women were just utterly destroyed by some rape that was supposed to have happened 5 years ago, I didn't like how pathetic and emotionally volatile they were acting...
My lack of sympathy for the characters in this show was startling to me when I recognised I really thought about my reaction to the situation, even though it was ficticious... and it made me think of the rape issue that we all ignore in Bermuda. It is prevelent. Everybody is somebody or personally knows a victim of rape/ sexual abuse, like, if women came forward about this in Bermuda, it would be fucking alarming but who wants to be that "pathetic snivelling idiot" who has to see a shrink for something that "they probably could have prevented anyway".
Bermuda has a problem. There are tired mothers with a distorted sense of self worth raising children who are well aware of how their mothers feel about themselves. There are men who habitually make children that they don't give a shit about and we, the mothers are left to pick up the slack and bear the burden. I think single black women particularly understand that society doesn't really have time for our problems, somewhere along the lines we just take the blame and suck it up. I mean, we take the blame for shit we don't even have any control over. We don't have time to be victims and we have no sympathy for it either, and this problem just gets worse, it is like an untreated gangrenous wound poorly bandaged up and it stinks but somehow despite the problem being obvious...everybody ignores it. I get that I may be rambling but I'm trying to figure it out, why in a community so small, does sexual abuse continue to be that white elkephant in the room, it is a little twisted you see, when a woman gets raped in Bermuda, from my knowledge, my frame of reference, what I have had the chance to gather, more often than not, she "could have prevented it" if she was "smarter" or "safer" or "not so dumb" or...if she didn't drink so much...or she could have spoken sooner or she should have kept it to herself. We find a way to take responsibility for somebody elses sexual depravity, find a way to take "power" because we don't want to lose our control. But in a safe environment, where the topic comes about, people would choke if they realised how many Bermudian women take this little badge of shame out when nobody is around to reexamine the details trying to find some loophole that means they aren't damaged goods...and the other thing is...we're only 22sq miles long. We are only 65,000 or so people. Many women know who their attackers are because they knew/know them, they see them regularly. How are you supposed to escape someone who lives next door to you or someone you work with or a fucking relative. It must feel like a daunting sense of internal chaos when at any given point, you could come across that person/people and how are we supposed to act...this is why we don't cry over things like this. We bury them and try to ignore them and do well so that we don't have to own the shame of having been a victim of something so dirty.
I find it appalling how quickly people are to villify a woman who has suffered assault, she gets raped and then if she reports it she gets fucked again so they can take a rape kit and then she has to go to court and tell a bunch of strangers what happened to her so that they can decide whether or not they believe her and in Bermy it's worse, if you come forward because confidentiality doesn't exist, everybody will know and they'll talk about you and find some way to cast judgement on your character because you were raped and you came forward with it...wtf. This is why most Bermudian girls know that if it happens to them, they ought to let it go. This is why the same fucking predators are able to walk around freely, even if they are reported all they have to do is demonstrate a cause reasonable doubt. Through my own personal opinion, I think that Bermudian women have a seriously deflated sense of self worth, we have a lot of issues around the way that we relate with eachother and with men, I think it is because we live in a society that places disproportionate blame on the woman for everything and instead of saying "I got pregnant, I'm not the only one at fault" or "I have been abused and it isn't my fault" or "yes I got raped and I do not take any blame for that!" We shut the f*ck up. We "don't need a man to do his job and take responsibility" in cases of abuse, we know we should have been able to protect ourselves better, and we know that if we've been raped, we put ourselves in bad situations and we should have been smarter, we know that there is nothing to talk about because we're "strong, (in most cases) black women" we have shit to do, mouths to feed, kitchens to clean man...that's why these characters on law and order flat out irritated me, this bitch told this woman she has "post traumatic rape syndrome" I said "wtf, this bitch needs to put on her big girl pants and get over that shit! Post traumatic rape syndrome my ass pshhh!" The mere thought of a woman losing her interest in life and becoming a neglectful mother and descending into a life of drug abuse all because she was raped once just irritated me... But then I thought, hmm, maybe that's how it happens for white upper middle class Americans...they get the chance to be victims and we, know that we need to be survivors because rape hurts more when you're used to pretty things in life I guess, it means more when it didn't happen because you got too drunk, it matters more when you report it right away, we feel worse for you if you're a working mother than if you're a promiscuous teenager, and we understand in Bermuda that a large portion of the people on the jury will be thinking "look at her, she asked for it" and we know that there's even more shame involved if we speak up and our attacker gets off, and our families don't want to be embarrassed by this stain that we've caused and our children need not suffer because we can't handle our own shit...and it could have been worse and so under wraps it goes. In a box somewhere from sight and instead of talking about it and working through it, we hide, we keep it secret until maybe we snap or maybe, and hopefully in the comfort of the company of someone who we know has also been raped, we can talk about it without feeling stupid for having been such an idiot and allowing something like that to happen to us....
Bermuda needs to address this, there really is only so much that our women, who are raising our society, can give after being taken from in so many ways for so long...we can't really be too confused about why we're having the issues we're having when the mama's are under all this strain.
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