A four-letter word

I first published this poem on here on March 31. It's an issue that should always be spoken about and never swept under the carpet. Men, women and children are raped or sexually assaulted every day - while you are reading this. Most people don't speak out. Most cases never get to a court room, and once they do, most do not end in a conviction. Around the world, the statistics are shocking (see below). Rape is also used as a weapon during war. It's all about taking a person's power away, and crushing and humiliating them, and depriving them of dignity. 

A four-letter word

RAPE.
A four-letter word.
A small word, easy to ignore,
easy to hide in the cracks in the system,
too easy to look away from, skim over.
 
The statistics tell us how it is:
one in four women,
one in six children,
one in eighteen men.
About 70,633 reports in 2022,
and that’s just in the UK.
 
We’re talking 736 million women around the world.
I repeat: 736 million sometime in their lifetime.
Can we visualise that number?
Can you see all their individual faces?
 
The number of charges show how many victims
are being failed. The sheer number tells us
something is wrong – they’re not being heard.
And these are the ones who spoke out,
who were brave enough to say ‘this happened’.
Their voices are being lost on paper.
 
Education is needed. Protection is needed.
People need to feel safer walking the streets,
going to sleep under their own roof,
just going about their daily lives.
Is that too much to ask?
I guess that’s too much to ask.
 
A victim reporting a rape needs support,
action and subsequent follow-up,
not to be turned away, given excuses.
A friend is still waiting, years later,
yet they said he might be a serial offender.
I wonder what he’s doing now.
 
We reported a flasher once, as girls.
Followed us home, darted out from the bushes,
he knew the direction we would take,
waited for us and started to masturbate
right outside the door we were meant to enter.
Did he expect us to clap? We reported it,
sat through an interview, and nothing.
We wondered if he did anything worse.
 
RAPE.
A four-letter word.
The most offensive four-letter word
in the English language – and you might
have thought I was gonna say c***.
 
More cases need to arrive in court,
more offenders should be brought to account,
or rape becomes a way of life for some,
a living prison for others. The perpetrators
go free, walk around, even do it again,
leaving the victims hurt and afraid.
 
Even the word victim is wrong:
it removes all power from the person,
places them in a position of weakness,
steals their confidence and identity away –
they’re the person the crime was done to
when the offender had no right to do it.
 
Survivor is the better word:
the person who was strong enough to go on,
who picked up all the scattered pieces
and tried to continue despite it all,
even knowing nothing was being done
in this now more dangerous world.
 
Some are too ashamed or scared to speak,
thinking they will be blamed or disbelieved,
better to be quiet, pretend it didn’t happen,
when it is the offender who should be ashamed.
 
It’s time men and women stood up and said no, 
there is no place for rape in society.
Survivors need to join hands around the world,
so their voices become the loudest argument heard.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, March 31, 2023

The statistics 

According to Rape Crisis, these are the statistics in the UK:
1 in 4 women have been raped or sexually assaulted as an adult;
1 in 6 children have been sexually abused;
1 in 18 men have been raped or sexually assaulted as an adult.

The highest number of rapes within a 12-month period was recorded by police in the year ending Sept 2022 as 70,633. Over that same period, only 2,616 rape cases went to court.

In 2021, only 1 in 100 rapes recorded by police resulted in a charge that same year.

This is a drop in the ocean compared with the figures globally. According to the United Nations, an estimated 736 million women (almost 1 in 3) have been subjected to physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence, non-partner sexual violence or both at least once in their life.

Rape is used as a weapon of war, power, control and subjugation. In a resolution adopted in 2008, the UN Security Council affirmed that “rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity or a constitutive act with respect to genocide.”