It’s commonly believed that if it’s your boyfriend or your spouse, if you’re sharing a bed, if you’re naked, if you consented earlier, then it can’t be rape. “Rape myths are still incredibly pervasive. “There isn’t a lot of research into the multiple ways women experience violence from known men, but we do know the numbers are so much higher than any official statistics,” she says. K atie Russell, spokesperson for Rape Crisis, says she was “not massively surprised” by the findings. Other comments included, “Only chance I get!” and “the other half was OK with it!” “It’s why I now jerk awake if someone even gently brushes against me while I’m sleeping, 13 years later,” wrote another. “This was extremely validating for me after years of thinking, ‘Am I being raped?’ I’m not alone”, tweeted one woman. The results sparked a predictably polarised online response. For this reason, it’s hard to extrapolate from the findings. This was not randomised sampling – the survey was widely shared online and participants were self-selected. It also asked respondents if they had ever woken to their male partner having sex with them or performing sex acts on them while they slept. Naming specific acts, rather than using broad – and loaded – terms such as “abuse” or “rape”, her survey asked more than 22,000 women if, for example, they had ever been spat at, or strangled, kicked or bitten. In April, Dr Jessica Taylor, founder of VictimFocus, an independent consultancy and research firm working in forensic psychology, feminism and mental health, released a report on a study that had set out to gauge the extent of violence against women. It’s impossible to know how many women have been raped or sexually assaulted by their partners while they slept, although a recent piece of research has suggested the number might be far, far higher than we’d like to think. Photograph: Rafia Elias/Getty Images (posed by model)/Guardian Design That’s rape.’ At that point, I couldn’t go there. I told her that Magnus had been having sex with me in my sleep and she said: ‘That’s not ‘sex’. “I left as soon as I knew there’d be a cafe open and my friend came to meet me. It was 3am, I had nowhere to go, I didn’t know what to do. “I now know the physical reasons for that response, but at the time, I’d never experienced anything like that. “I sat there heaving into a bucket,” says Ní Dhomhnaill. “He told me he’d been doing this on average three times a week ever since we’d been together.” “I said, ‘You’ve done it again – I felt it,’ and then I asked: ‘Have you been doing this regularly?’” “The whole time,” was Hustveit’s devastating reply. Don’t ever do that again.’”īut two weeks later, Ní Dhomhnaill awoke at 3am just knowing he had. I said: ‘I can’t give consent when I’m asleep. How could I not have known? I felt really ill, too, I was trying to figure it all out. “I asked him: ‘Did you have sex with me while I was asleep?’ and he said, ‘Yes.’ I was so shocked and really confused. When she did wake, she was no longer wearing her pyjama bottoms and had semen on her body.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |