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    Unbreakable: Women Share Stories of Resilience and Hope
    Unbreakable: Women Share Stories of Resilience and Hope
    Unbreakable: Women Share Stories of Resilience and Hope
    Ebook222 pages3 hours

    Unbreakable: Women Share Stories of Resilience and Hope

    By University of Queensland Press

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    About this ebook

    Every woman has a story of survival. In this revealingly honest collection, successful Australian women talk about the challenges they have overcome, from sexual assault and domestic violence to racism, miscarriage, and depression. While delving deep into these experiences and their personal cost, the contributors also demonstrate the strength and courage they had to move forward with their lives. In a time when bragging about sexual harassment doesn't preclude being elected president of the United States, we must stand together and speak out against violence against women. Unbreakable shows that every woman, no matter her success, has a story, and that together we are stronger. In Jane Caro's words: I want to pass on courage and hope to women who have also gone through such things by all of us speaking up about our own experiences. These things do not need to either define us or destroy us. We can find the strength to move forward, and this book shows how successful women have done just that. Contributors include Kathy Lette, Mariam Veiszadeh, Tracey Spicer, Lee-Ann Tjunypa Buckskin, Rebecca Lim, Van Badham, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Susan Wyndham, Andie Fox, Dee Madigan, Catherine Fox, Zora Simic, Nina Funnell, Sandra Levy, Polly Dunning and Jacinda Woodhead, with a foreword by Tanya Plibersek.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Queensland Press
    Release dateJul 12, 2017
    ISBN9780702259234
    Unbreakable: Women Share Stories of Resilience and Hope

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      Book preview

      Unbreakable - University of Queensland Press

      courage.

      The nature of trauma means that survivors often have memory gaps or recollections that don’t add up. One counsellor told me that she’s never once met a sexual assault survivor who had perfect, chronological recall.

      I Believe You

      Nina Funnell

      Ten years ago I threatened to kill a man. I did not know his name or anything about him. And yet when I threatened to kill him, I meant it.

      To this day I still wonder what would have happened if, by some fluke, the box cutter had made its way into my own hand.

      I wonder if I would have pressed the cold blade against his throat, as he had done to me just moments prior. I wonder if I would have found it in me to stab him as he lay there on top of me, strangling me, bashing me, indecently sexually assaulting me.

      I still don’t know.

      What I do know is that by threatening to end his life, I saved my own.

      I know that if I hadn’t wrestled him for the box cutter, if I hadn’t screamed and kicked and thrashed about like a wounded animal, I might not have survived the night.

      I do not say this to imply that women who have acted any differently in sexual assault situations have done the wrong thing. On the contrary, a different perpetrator might have killed me on the spot for fighting.

      So my story is neither cautionary nor instructive. It’s just my story and there is no way to tell it without including certain details.

      I was twenty-three years old and an honours student at the University of Sydney. I’d woken up that morning and showered like I would have on any other day. The only thing that was different about this particular morning was that it was the day of my honours presentation – a day I had been working towards for several months. It should have ended in celebration and elation.

      Instead it ended with me at a police station.

      I’d gone out for some drinks after class had finished (yes, I was drinking, as women are permitted to do from time to time) and I was making the twenty-minute walk home to my parents’ place in Sydney’s lower north shore.

      I was a few hundred metres from my front door when I was suddenly attacked from behind.

      A solid-built man I had never seen before had seized me. He held a box cutter blade to my throat and began dragging me into an adjacent park.

      I didn’t see or hear him coming as I was listening to music from earphones. (Later I would be told that this was just one of the many reasons I was to blame for his decision to attack.)

      He then said point blank: ‘I am going to kill you.’

      He punched me in the face and the force of the blow was so powerful that it knocked me off my feet and onto my back.

      I lay in the dirt, immobilised by fear, as he moved on top of me. They call this the ‘freeze response’ and I have since learnt that most sexual assault victims experience this sort of shock and paralysis.

      Then I felt the life being choked out of me. His hand was on my throat, my trachea was being crushed, and I could taste blood in my mouth. I was also vaguely aware of a deep pain beginning to grow in my shoulders and back.

      Hours later at Gladesville police station I’d be photographed and swabbed. I’d be asked to go into a small room and remove my top. Once in there, I would examine my body in the mirror and find what would soon become dark bruising across my back – bruising that was apparently caused while the weight of my attacker’s body ground my flesh into large, protruding tree roots.

      During the assault, though, I didn’t process that sort of detail. All I could think was: How can this be happening to me? Is this for real?

      Then my mind went somewhere else altogether. I shut my eyes tight and an old, forgotten memory played like a video before my eyes. I remembered being a young girl, maybe six or seven years in age. I was standing in that same park and I was watching my older brother play soccer on the field. I remembered how, at half-time, I’d eaten quartered oranges with him and his friends, and it had made me feel special that he’d included me.

      That was it. That was the simple memory that I held on to. It seems odd, doesn’t it? That a man is trying to rape and kill you and you think about eating quartered oranges with your big brother.

      I’ve since been told that my brain was valiantly trying to protect me from the trauma of what was occurring to me. In transporting me to another time and place – a safer time and place – it was trying to shield me from what was happening.

      And yet, just as quickly as I’d slipped into that dissociative state, I slipped back out of it again. And when I did, I found myself looking directly into my attacker’s face, which was only inches away from my own.

      His grasp was still on my throat. I couldn’t breathe and couldn’t move. I felt a sharp pain across my body and I remember thinking: I don’t want to die. Not like this.

      *

      When it comes to sexual assault, women are forever being asked ‘Why didn’t you say no?’ or ‘Why didn’t you fight back?’

      As though a rapist would ever listen.

      As though victims are the ones who should be responsible for preventing the violence we experience.

      If you really want to know why most women don’t fight back, it’s because of one of two things: either we are immobilised by fear, or we assume that fighting back will make things worse. This is, after all, something that has been drummed in to us all from a very tender

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