I Spoke About a Rape Epidemic. There Were No Follow-Up Questions. Nevertheless, I persisted.

In 2013, I was invited to deliver a speech against the rise of neo-nazism at Capitol Hill. I was not a politician, not an heiress, not someone with a safety net. I was a working-class (or, simply put: poor) grassroots activist ringing the alarm regarding the rise of Golden Dawn in Greece - now convicted as a criminal organisation.

No expenses were covered beyond the flight. So, I found a host on CouchSurfing with good reviews, because that is what working-class women do: we make it work. This would be my first time being hosted after having hosted tens others.

/cw: brief testimonial of r***/

What happened to me there is what so commonly happens to women who travel, esp. alone - to the "voyageuse", as Giuliana Bruno illustrates in Atlas of Emotion (or the Vagabond), to- to poor women (or those seen as women, or those feminised), to women who rise above their circumstances to fight for everyone else. 

//end of cw//

I went on to write my MA thesis on Rape Culture in cinema at UCL. The bibliography (Brownmiller, Faludi, Valenti and more) alone almost broke me. When you study this subject, you are staring into an abyss. I do not recommend it.

You learn beyond any doubt that there is an undeclared war against women and specific others, so widespread and so normalised that our safety matters to no one but some of our sisters. I almost died, but I received a High Distinction. I also had to be put on antidepressants and beta-blockers to survive the process. The meds harmed me. I was miss-diagnosed: this was someone vulnerable trying to recover from a very traumatic event without support systems in place. This was the beginning of PTSD, not "anxiety & depression."

Then I got a position at Amnesty International - International Secretariat. Several hundreds of people had applied. I was "a wild card" from the start. Their "Icarus", as my boss called me: someone who might fly too high and burn. Not someone with a legal or other typical background, but a grassroots activist with a background in humanities and the arts.

It happened that I was there during Amnesty's six-year strategic planning. I stood up and proposed a new European project to tackle rape.

I was initially ignored. The discussion moved on to other topics immediately. 

So I took the microphone again.

"I spoke about a rape epidemic. There were no follow-up questions. Was the importance of the matter not clear, or is this considered not urgent? I am happy to clarify."

That project became a six-year European campaign that directly contributed to changing rape legislation in eight countries, and mainstreamed Consent Culture. In order to fight attrition, it moved the legal definition of rape from one rooted in force and proof of violence to one rooted in lack of consent—across borders, across legal traditions, across languages.

Today, the European Parliament is calling for an EU-wide consent-based rape law.

My role then changed to be Amnesty's EU thematic campaigner on gender-based violence (VAW/GBV/SOGI). And then, through a chain of events rooted in the same gendered violence I was fighting against, I had to resign from my role. 

But that is a story about systems failing us, not about the work failing.

The work did not fail.

/cw: brief testimonial of r***/

I want to say this clearly, because it matters: this law exists in small part because a young woman (a poor woman, an immigrant woman, a queer woman, someone who has both expanded womanhood and "exited" it in order to exist outside the binary) who had been raped refused to be silent about it, refused to be uneducated about it, and then refused to be ignored when she wasn't silent. This is what happens when one survivor's rage is pointed in the right direction, in the right room, at the right time, and when we are not willing to let the room - any room - look away.  

//end of cw// [Re the politics of 'disclosing', see here.]

To every woman or other victim of the same violence who has survived what many of us survived and wondered whether it was worth continuing to fight: it was. No means no. Silence means no. The absence of enthusiastic consent means no. Only "yes means yes". 

We stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, and those who come after.
More importantly: we honour the ones that did not survive this.

We take the microphone as many times as needed.

PS: Special thanks are due to my UCL mentor and supervisor, Prof. Jann Matlock - who held my hand, who guided me through the abyss, who kept me intellectually alive and rigorous.