Unbreakable: Women Share Stories of Resilience and Hope
5/5
()
About this ebook
Related to Unbreakable
Related ebooks
Mazin Grace Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Human Rights Overboard: seeking asylum in Australia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFlown the Nest:Escape From an Irish Psychiatric Hospital Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDamned Whores and God's Police Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sisters: June Levine the Irish Feminist Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Human Wrongs: British Social Policy and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTry Not to Think of a Pink Elephant Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Unconventional Career of Muriel Bell Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsErase Her: A Survivor’s Story: How the Best Years of My Life Were Stolen by Conversion Therapy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsReinventing Emma: The inspirational story of a young stroke survivor Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Quarterly Essay 50 Unfinished Business: Sex, Freedom and Misogyny Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Reclaiming Community: Race and the Uncertain Future of Youth Work Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGeneration F: Why we still struggle with sex and power Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsChocolate Pudding in Heaven: The Intriguing Journey of My Bipolar Mind Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAn Unconventional Wife: the life of Julia Sorell Arnold Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsImagine Carnivalesque: A Duo of Psychoanalytical Essays on South Asian Literature and Gender Identity Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIf These Hands Could Talk: The Girl Who Touched the World Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Exciting Life of Being a Woman Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDismantling the Disability: My Uphill Battle with Friedreich's Ataxia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLibidos and Life Lessons: A Memoir Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsShadow Sisters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Quarterly Essay 73 Australia Fair: Listening to the Nation Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBrat Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWomen without Men: Single Mothers and Family Change in the New Russia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector The Works of William Carleton, Volume One Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Darling Menopause: A humorous diary about the discovery of the peri-menopausal world and life lessons from it Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGreat Expectations Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Separation Solution?: Single-Sex Education and the New Politics of Gender Equality Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRedeemable: A Memoir of Darkness and Hope Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Saturday's Child: A Memoir Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Social Science For You
Come As You Are: Revised and Updated: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5My Secret Garden: Women's Sexual Fantasies Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Art of Witty Banter: Be Clever, Quick, & Magnetic Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dumbing Us Down - 25th Anniversary Edition: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Like Switch: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Influencing, Attracting, and Winning People Over Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Get Ideas Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5All About Love: New Visions Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Just Mercy: a story of justice and redemption Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A People's History of the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Verbal Judo, Second Edition: The Gentle Art of Persuasion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row (Oprah's Book Club Selection) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Unbreakable
1 rating0 reviews
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