A woman describes her experiences of gender based violence.
She explains why she does not identify as a survivor,
“Personally, I don’t identify as a survivor, although if anyone that went through the same experiences as me does I would understand.
To me ‘survival’ sounds like a strong word applicable to a life-or-death situation. Although I had found myself in unpleasant or even dangerous situations they were never as severe as experiences of some other women.
Unfortunately, sexual and gender violence permeates our civilisation to such an extent that we subconsciously grade it on a scale, whether we want to or not. Yes, I was groped, I was forcibly intoxicated, I was followed. But I was never raped, or continuously abused over a significant period, I never experienced an attempt on my life. Compared to many other women I have been lucky. I did not have to survive what others did.
And that is in fact the second reason – luck. I perceive survival as something that requires continuous effort. Surviving terminal illness, surviving attempted murder, surviving a car crash or another accident – they all require either tremendous effort or prolonged suffering. I wish I could say that I fought back against predatory behaviour, but mostly the behaviour was either too brief for me to perceive it as ‘survival’ or it stopped regardless of my response, I just got lucky. I do not feel agency over it, therefore to me it’s just something that happened, not something I survived. Perhaps that reasoning diminishes the gravity of my experiences.
In a perfect world, where gender-based violence wouldn’t be as common or varied in severity, these experiences that I’m dismissing by this rationalisation would be wild enough to categorise as survival. Unfortunately, as it stands, it just feels like an ordinary part of life that everybody runs into at some point. Most importantly, I think I don’t identify as a survivor because I don’t want these experiences to define my life. I want my life to be about other things and other events, which it is for most of the time. Not identifying as a survivor allows me to put those incidents at rest and not think back to them again.”
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