Our story of rape and reconciliation | Thordis Elva and Tom Stranger

2,720,169 views ・ 2017-02-13

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00:11
[This talk contains graphic language and descriptions of sexual violence
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Viewer discretion is advised]
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Tom Stranger: In 1996, when I was 18 years old,
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I had the golden opportunity to go on an international exchange program.
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Ironically I'm an Australian who prefers proper icy cold weather,
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so I was both excited and tearful when I got on a plane to Iceland,
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after just having farewelled my parents and brothers goodbye.
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I was welcomed into the home of a beautiful Icelandic family
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who took me hiking,
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and helped me get a grasp of the melodic Icelandic language.
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I struggled a bit with the initial period of homesickness.
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I snowboarded after school,
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and I slept a lot.
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Two hours of chemistry class in a language that you don't yet fully understand
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can be a pretty good sedative.
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(Laughter)
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My teacher recommended I try out for the school play,
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just to get me a bit more socially active.
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It turns out I didn't end up being part of the play,
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but through it I met Thordis.
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We shared a lovely teenage romance,
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and we'd meet at lunchtimes to just hold hands
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and walk around old downtown Reykjavík.
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I met her welcoming family, and she met my friends.
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We'd been in a budding relationship for a bit over a month
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when our school's Christmas Ball was held.
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Thordis Elva: I was 16 and in love for the first time.
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Going together to the Christmas dance
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was a public confirmation of our relationship,
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and I felt like the luckiest girl in the world.
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No longer a child, but a young woman.
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High on my newfound maturity,
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I felt it was only natural to try drinking rum for the first time that night, too.
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That was a bad idea.
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I became very ill,
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drifting in and out of consciousness
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in between spasms of convulsive vomiting.
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The security guards wanted to call me an ambulance,
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but Tom acted as my knight in shining armor,
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and told them he'd take me home.
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It was like a fairy tale,
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his strong arms around me,
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laying me in the safety of my bed.
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But the gratitude that I felt towards him soon turned to horror
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as he proceeded to take off my clothes and get on top of me.
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My head had cleared up,
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but my body was still too weak to fight back,
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and the pain was blinding.
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I thought I'd be severed in two.
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In order to stay sane,
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I silently counted the seconds on my alarm clock.
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And ever since that night,
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I've known that there are 7,200 seconds in two hours.
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Despite limping for days and crying for weeks,
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this incident didn't fit my ideas about rape like I'd seen on TV.
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Tom wasn't an armed lunatic;
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he was my boyfriend.
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And it didn't happen in a seedy alleyway,
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it happened in my own bed.
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By the time I could identify what had happened to me as rape,
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he had completed his exchange program
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and left for Australia.
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So I told myself it was pointless to address what had happened.
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And besides,
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it had to have been my fault, somehow.
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I was raised in a world where girls are taught
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that they get raped for a reason.
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Their skirt was too short,
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their smile was too wide,
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their breath smelled of alcohol.
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And I was guilty of all of those things,
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so the shame had to be mine.
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It took me years to realize
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that only one thing could have stopped me from being raped that night,
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and it wasn't my skirt,
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it wasn't my smile,
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it wasn't my childish trust.
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The only thing that could've stopped me from being raped that night
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is the man who raped me --
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had he stopped himself.
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TS: I have vague memories of the next day:
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the after effects of drinking,
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a certain hollowness that I tried to stifle.
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Nothing more.
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But I didn't show up at Thordis's door.
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It is important to now state
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that I didn't see my deed for what it was.
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The word "rape" didn't echo around my mind as it should've,
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and I wasn't crucifying myself with memories of the night before.
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It wasn't so much a conscious refusal,
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it was more like any acknowledgment of reality was forbidden.
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My definition of my actions completely refuted any recognition
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of the immense trauma I caused Thordis.
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To be honest,
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I repudiated the entire act in the days afterwards
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and when I was committing it.
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I disavowed the truth by convincing myself it was sex and not rape.
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And this is a lie I've felt spine-bending guilt for.
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I broke up with Thordis a couple of days later,
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and then saw her a number of times
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during the remainder of my year in Iceland,
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feeling a sharp stab of heavyheartedness each time.
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Deep down, I knew I'd done something immeasurably wrong.
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But without planning it, I sunk the memories deep,
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and then I tied a rock to them.
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What followed is a nine-year period
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that can best be titled as "Denial and Running."
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When I got a chance to identify the real torment that I caused,
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I didn't stand still long enough to do so.
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Whether it be via distraction,
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substance use,
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thrill-seeking
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or the scrupulous policing of my inner speak,
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I refused to be static and silent.
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And with this noise,
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I also drew heavily upon other parts of my life
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to construct a picture of who I was.
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I was a surfer,
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a social science student,
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a friend to good people,
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a loved brother and son,
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an outdoor recreation guide,
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and eventually, a youth worker.
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I gripped tight to the simple notion that I wasn't a bad person.
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I didn't think I had this in my bones.
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I thought I was made up of something else.
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In my nurtured upbringing,
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my loving extended family and role models,
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people close to me were warm and genuine
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in their respect shown towards women.
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It took me a long time to stare down this dark corner of myself,
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and to ask it questions.
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TE: Nine years after the Christmas dance,
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I was 25 years old,
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and headed straight for a nervous breakdown.
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My self-worth was buried under a soul-crushing load of silence
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that isolated me from everyone that I cared about,
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and I was consumed with misplaced hatred and anger
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that I took out on myself.
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One day, I stormed out of the door in tears
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after a fight with a loved one,
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and I wandered into a café,
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where I asked the waitress for a pen.
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I always had a notebook with me,
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claiming that it was to jot down ideas in moments of inspiration,
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but the truth was that I needed to be constantly fidgeting,
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because in moments of stillness,
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I found myself counting seconds again.
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But that day, I watched in wonder as the words streamed out of my pen,
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forming the most pivotal letter I've ever written,
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addressed to Tom.
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Along with an account of the violence that he subjected me to,
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the words, "I want to find forgiveness"
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stared back at me,
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surprising nobody more than myself.
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But deep down I realized that this was my way out of my suffering,
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because regardless of whether or not he deserved my forgiveness,
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I deserved peace.
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My era of shame was over.
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Before sending the letter,
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I prepared myself for all kinds of negative responses,
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or what I found likeliest: no response whatsoever.
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The only outcome that I didn't prepare myself for
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was the one that I then got --
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a typed confession from Tom, full of disarming regret.
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As it turns out, he, too, had been imprisoned by silence.
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And this marked the start of an eight-year-long correspondence
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that God knows was never easy,
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but always honest.
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I relieved myself of the burdens that I'd wrongfully shouldered,
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and he, in turn, wholeheartedly owned up to what he'd done.
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Our written exchanges became a platform
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to dissect the consequences of that night,
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and they were everything from gut-wrenching
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to healing beyond words.
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And yet, it didn't bring about closure for me.
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Perhaps because the email format didn't feel personal enough,
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perhaps because it's easy to be brave
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when you're hiding behind a computer screen on the other side of the planet.
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But we'd begun a dialogue
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that I felt was necessary to explore to its fullest.
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So, after eight years of writing,
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and nearly 16 years after that dire night,
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I mustered the courage to propose a wild idea:
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that we'd meet up in person
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and face our past once and for all.
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TS: Iceland and Australia are geographically like this.
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In the middle of the two is South Africa.
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We decided upon the city of Cape Town,
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and there we met for one week.
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The city itself proved to be a stunningly powerful environment
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to focus on reconciliation and forgiveness.
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Nowhere else has healing and rapprochement been tested
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like it has in South Africa.
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As a nation, South Africa sought to sit within the truth of its past,
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and to listen to the details of its history.
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Knowing this only magnified the effect that Cape Town had on us.
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Over the course of this week,
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we literally spoke our life stories to each other,
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from start to finish.
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And this was about analyzing our own history.
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We followed a strict policy of being honest,
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and this also came with a certain exposure,
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an open-chested vulnerability.
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There were gutting confessions,
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and moments where we just absolutely couldn't fathom
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the other person's experience.
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The seismic effects of sexual violence were spoken aloud and felt,
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face to face.
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At other times, though,
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we found a soaring clarity,
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and even some totally unexpected but liberating laughter.
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When it came down to it,
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we did out best to listen to each other intently.
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And our individual realities were aired with an unfiltered purity
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that couldn't do any less than lighten the soul.
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TE: Wanting to take revenge is a very human emotion --
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instinctual, even.
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And all I wanted to do for years
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was to hurt Tom back as deeply as he had hurt me.
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But had I not found a way out of the hatred and anger,
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I'm not sure I'd be standing here today.
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That isn't to say that I didn't have my doubts along the way.
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When the plane bounced on that landing strip in Cape Town,
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I remember thinking,
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"Why did I not just get myself a therapist and a bottle of vodka
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like a normal person would do?"
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(Laughter)
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At times, our search for understanding in Cape Town
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felt like an impossible quest,
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and all I wanted to do was to give up
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and go home to my loving husband, Vidir,
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and our son.
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But despite our difficulties,
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this journey did result in a victorious feeling
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that light had triumphed over darkness,
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that something constructive could be built out of the ruins.
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I read somewhere
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that you should try and be the person that you needed when you were younger.
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And back when I was a teenager,
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I would have needed to know that the shame wasn't mine,
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that there's hope after rape,
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that you can even find happiness,
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like I share with my husband today.
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Which is why I started writing feverishly upon my return from Cape Town,
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resulting in a book co-authored by Tom,
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that we hope can be of use to people from both ends
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of the perpetrator-survivor scale.
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If nothing else,
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it's a story that we would've needed to hear when we were younger.
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Given the nature of our story,
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I know the words that inevitably accompany it --
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victim, rapist --
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and labels are a way to organize concepts,
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but they can also be dehumanizing in their connotations.
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Once someone's been deemed a victim,
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it's that much easier to file them away as someone damaged,
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dishonored,
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less than.
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And likewise, once someone has been branded a rapist,
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it's that much easier to call him a monster --
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inhuman.
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But how will we understand what it is in human societies
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that produces violence
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if we refuse to recognize the humanity of those who commit it?
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And how --
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(Applause)
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And how can we empower survivors if we're making them feel less than?
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How can we discuss solutions to one of the biggest threats
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to the lives of women and children around the world,
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if the very words we use are part of the problem?
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TS: From what I've now learnt,
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my actions that night in 1996 were a self-centered taking.
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I felt deserving of Thordis's body.
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I've had primarily positive social influences
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and examples of equitable behavior around me.
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But on that occasion,
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I chose to draw upon the negative ones.
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The ones that see women as having less intrinsic worth,
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and of men having some unspoken and symbolic claim to their bodies.
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These influences I speak of are external to me, though.
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And it was only me in that room making choices,
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nobody else.
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When you own something
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and really square up to your culpability,
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I do think a surprising thing can happen.
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It's what I call a paradox of ownership.
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I thought I'd buckle under the weight of responsibility.
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I thought my certificate of humanity would be burnt.
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Instead, I was offered to really own what I did,
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and found that it didn't possess the entirety of who I am.
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Put simply,
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something you've done doesn't have to constitute the sum of who you are.
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The noise in my head abated.
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The indulgent self-pity was starved of oxygen,
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and it was replaced with the clean air of acceptance --
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an acceptance that I did hurt this wonderful person standing next to me;
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an acceptance that I am part of a large and shockingly everyday grouping of men
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who have been sexually violent toward their partners.
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Don't underestimate the power of words.
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Saying to Thordis that I raped her changed my accord with myself,
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as well as with her.
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But most importantly,
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the blame transferred from Thordis to me.
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Far too often,
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the responsibility is attributed to female survivors of sexual violence,
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and not to the males who enact it.
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Far too often,
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the denial and running leaves all parties at a great distance from the truth.
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There's definitely a public conversation happening now,
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and like a lot of people,
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we're heartened that there's less retreating
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from this difficult but important discussion.
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I feel a real responsibility to add our voices to it.
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TE: What we did is not a formula that we're prescribing for others.
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Nobody has the right to tell anyone else how to handle their deepest pain
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or their greatest error.
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Breaking your silence is never easy,
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and depending on where you are in the world,
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it can even be deadly to speak out about rape.
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I realize that even the most traumatic event of my life
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is still a testament to my privilege,
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because I can talk about it without getting ostracized,
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or even killed.
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But with that privilege of having a voice
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comes the responsibility of using it.
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That's the least I owe my fellow survivors who can't.
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The story we've just relayed is unique,
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and yet it is so common with sexual violence being a global pandemic.
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But it doesn't have to be that way.
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One of the things that I found useful on my own healing journey
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is educating myself about sexual violence.
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And as a result, I've been reading, writing
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and speaking about this issue for over a decade now,
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going to conferences around the world.
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And in my experience,
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the attendees of such events are almost exclusively women.
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But it's about time that we stop treating sexual violence as a women's issue.
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(Applause)
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A majority of sexual violence against women and men
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is perpetrated by men.
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And yet their voices are sorely underrepresented in this discussion.
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But all of us are needed here.
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Just imagine all the suffering we could alleviate
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if we dared to face this issue together.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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