1.

In the beginning, there were only victims.  A raped woman was a worthless one – robbed of her virginity, stripped of her dignity, mentally and physically scarred and possibly even pregnant outside of wedlock, the rapist could alter the woman’s life for the worse in a matter of moments.

Today, in the West, we think of rape primarily as a psychological trauma. But traditionally, the consequences of rape have had less to do with the woman recovering from the event — certainly no small task in itself - and more to do with the fact that her entire social circle was affected. Someone’s daughter would no longer be eligible, and considered damaged, broken, cheap – a blow to the family’s reputation, finances and social standing. It was thus emotionally difficult, but also practically impossible for a woman to move on after such an event.

It is no surprise, then, that rape is employed strategically during wartime – it has the power to affect a community for generations after a political or military conflict ends. And rape, like all military tactics, aims to make victims of its enemy. The Greeks and Romans routinely rape their enemies; as early as 1797, upon noticing the widespread nature of rape warfare in his Egyptian Expedition, Napoleon Bonaparte declared that every man accused of rape must be “shot” for his crimes. More recent examples can be found in the conflicts in Eastern Congo (NY Times columnist Nick Kristof claims that in some area, three-quarters of women have been raped) and Darfur, where women are not only raped, but physically branded afterwards. Systematic rape in conflict is considered a crime against humanity, and in 1998 the Rwanda Tribunal determined that rape is part of genocide - “sexual assault formed an integral part of the process of destroying the Tutsi ethnic group and that the rape was systematic and had been perpetrated against Tutsi women only, manifesting the specific intent required for those acts to constitute genocide.” With the added dangers of HIV/AIDS, the risks of rape are greater today than ever, but the stigma surrounding sex makes it difficult for many sex crimes to be reported.

Conservative views on chastity and virginity are still widely held, particularly in religious countries. In Pakistan, for example, the law currently requires 4 witnesses for a rapist to be convicted; if no such witnesses are to be found, the rape victim is found guilty of adultery and punished. But in societies that exhibit more of a commitment to gender equality and human rights, considerable efforts have been made to better understand and cope with rape and its effects. In the U.S and Europe, rape does not have the same structural consequences: it is not a family affair linked to questions of honor, money and marriage, but a personal, individual trauma. This in itself allows for, at least some semblance of normalcy in external life after the rape happens. But there remain challenges in helping the individual overcome the event, and more broadly speaking, taking away from rapists the power of forever defining their subjects. And out of support groups, counseling sessions, feminist theory and first-hand accounts of recovery, an important semantic distinction arises: rape “victims” are victims no longer, but “survivors.”

2.

In 2002, Susan Jacoby wrote an essay entitled “Thank women for rape reforms” for the Baltimore Sun. She noted that even though feminist movements in the past century have brought about considerable structural reforms (say, women’s suffrage, or equal voting rights) “the most important change brought about by the women’s movement is abandonment of the antediluvian notion than rape is a ‘fate worse than death.’ Nothing is worse than death.” Without addressing the question directly, Jacoby’s article sums up why rape is such a big issue for women, and why there has been a strong movement to ditch the term “rape victim” in favor of the more forward-thinking “rape survivor.” The article implicitly makes the connection between the semantic shift (victim/survivor) and the (slowly) increasing amount of attention sexual abuse is receiving in the media.

But are the semantics of rape comparable, say, to the “American Indian” vs. “Native American” debate? Is it derogatory, even sexist to refer to a raped woman as a victim? And who decided this in the first place?

90% of all rape cases have women as targets, it is no surprise that feminist organizations have taken up sexual violence – and its semantics - as a major cause of concern. It’s a touchy subject (no pun intended), as to talk about rape means to take on a variety of difficult questions, including those of sexual health, domestic abuse, gender discrimination, violence, and societal power dynamics. The idea of referring to the raped person as a “survivor” is that a woman (or in rare cases, man) is able to move on from such an event without letting it control her life entirely. It is a means of regaining a sense of self that was quite literally – and non-consensually – overpowered by an invading body. It is no coincidence that on many American college campuses, the march that is organized yearly to raise rape awareness is called “Take Back the Night”. Nicole Landry Sault writes, in Many Mirrors:

“When others learn about a rape, some may view the person who has been attacked as a rape victim and interpret the term in a way that defines the person’s whole identity and all his or her actions as those of a victim….for others, a person who has been raped is a rape survivor, someone who has experienced rape but moved beyond the role as victim to the role of an actor or an activist who redefines what has happened and how this affects a sense of identity.” (237)

The roots of the survivor rhetoric are difficult to trace. A representative from Barnard College’s Rape Crisis Center was unsure about the details, but said that adopting the word ‘survivor’ in rape crisis centers “started in the 70s during the feminist movement, with the main goal of taking away part of the victim blaming that happens with rape cases.” And the following statement, published by the London Rape Crisis Center in 1984, is among the first to explicitly challenge the use of the term “rape victim”: “There is not a separate category for women called victims, just as there is no category for men who are not ‘rapists’ – ‘ victim’ takes away on power and contributes to the idea that men can ‘prey on’ women.”

In 1989, the National Coalition Against Sexual Assault’s “victim” caucus was renamed the “victim-survivor” caucus. In colleges, anti-rape and sexual violence awareness literature (handouts, posters, etc) tend to use the term “survivor” too. But while the term is acknowledged widely, especially in academic and activist circles, very few institutions have a set policy on what term to use. Major newspapers like the New York Times use “survivor” and “victim” interchangeably within the same article (probably due to a lack of synonyms, rather than politics) and even RAINN (Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network) use both terms on their website.

Still, there are indications that “survivor” is catching on. Perhaps the most well-known rape case of the past couple of decades was the case of Trisha Meili, a.k.a the Central Park Jogger, who, after being brutally raped and left for dead, would not reveal her identity for a long time. In 2003, she published a memoir about what had happened to her, and spoke to various newspapers about her experience. She told the Daily News:

“Although I was a victim of a horrific crime, I always considered myself a survivor. The difference between victim and survivor is more that semantic. Being a survivor is an attitude, it’s a mindset. Seeing myself as a survivor means taking responsibility - not for the beating and rape, but for where I put my energy each day going forward. Seeing myself as a survivor helped me to heal.”

It is significant is that her statement on the term  – which does not differ much from feminist and activist accounts - was approached not in the New York Review of Books, but in the Daily News, a local paper read by thousands of people in the subway.

3.

Susan Faludi famously wrote, “a backlash against women’s rights… is a recurring phenomenon: it returns every time women begin to make some headway towards equality, a seemingly inevitable early frost to the brief flowerings of feminism.” The argument over the semantics of sexual abuse are no exception to her theory, but interestingly, opposition to the survivor rhetoric has come from both the extreme right and the far left. At the time the aforementioned London Rape Crisis Center pamphlet was printed, a British doctor felt compelled to mention that “the predominant role of the Rape Crisis Centres should be supportive. Unfortunately they are often used as a feminist political tools using rape and rape victims in the general cause of women’s lib rather than vice versa.” The usual suspects – right wing media, for starters – have also given predictable rebuttals. Conservative commentator Roger Kimball called this use of “survivor” a “mis-description”: “victim”, he wrote, “is an accurate description of someone who has suffered a rape. To describe him or her as a `rape survivor’ is to mis-describe the person and the situation. It is, in fact, to lie in order to endow the situation with an aura of political virtue.” He then added that it is a perversion of the English language.

From the other side of the political spectrum, the late feminist writer Andrea Dworkin made her own point for the use of the term “victim”:

“It’s a true word. If you were raped, you were victimized. You damned well were. You

were a victim. It doesn’t mean that you are a victim in the metaphysical sense, in your

state of being, as an intrinsic part of your essence and existence. It means somebody

hurt you. They injured you. And if it happens to you systematically because you are born a woman, it means that you live in a political system that uses pain and humiliation to control and to hurt you.” (Woman-Hating Right and Left, in The Sexual Liberals and Attack on Feminism, 38 (Dorchen Leidholdt & Janice G. Raymond eds., 1990).

It is worth noting that Dworkin saw all intercourse as coercive in some way – her view of power dynamics is a radical one, to say the least. But her point is interesting if looked at from the perspective of the raped individual. Is it always helpful to be told to move on, to deal with what happened, to not let it affect your self-worth and future relationships when it probably will? And is it fair to ask women to not only move on, but to stop feeling like they were victimized?

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To call somebody a rape victim is not politically incorrect in the same way using the word “retard” to call someone stupid is – the term is not out of context, vilified, or used in a derogative manner, and it would hardly make sense to bleep out every time someone said “rape victim” on television. It has also been pointed out that it makes no sense to be a survivor of something which is not fatal (unless it becomes violent, of course) – cancer survivors have survived a life-threatening illness, but victims of the common cold are hardly referred to as “cold survivors.” But it is important to think beyond petty technicalities and linguistic minutiae and consider what such a term can do for the mentality surrounding rape – especially when thinking of rape as a global phenomenon. As stated earlier, in the West, overcoming rape is today, in the long run, a predominantly mental and personal battle, and to recognize that a happy, fulfilled inner life is possible after rape is the first step towards recovering. I would also argue that such a mentality is particularly relevant in parts of the world in which rape systematically stands in for murder – thus giving the idea of survival almost literal significance. When rape is used as a weapon, it is unlike traditional warfare in that it is impossible to retaliate in quite the same way: you can shoot back, fire back, bomb back, but you can’t rape your rapist back. One of the driving ideas in abandoning the term ‘victim’ is that ‘survivor’ carries with it the mindset that allows the so-called victim to refuse the rapist’s power. In this case, living well is not the best but the only revenge.

Atossa is a writer and translator living in Paris.