One in Three Women

“A crime against women, a crime against wives. When the one you love commits an act of sexual violence against you, the scars lie deep and buried.”

BY LOUISE MCORMOND-PLUMMER

In 1987, I became free of a relationship that almost cost me my life. For two years, I had lived with a man who thought love equaled ownership, and who retaliated brutally when challenged. He had beaten me, threatened me with weapons, and terrorized me in other ways. Other things had happened in that relationship, too. This man forced sex on me many times, as punishment for his jealousy, when he needed to assert power, or just because I said no. Though it was the threats to my life that seemed most frightening at the time, I was not to realize until years later the severe damage inflicted by the sexual abuses. And I knew that even had I wanted to admit what happened or say that it hurt, I would get little empathy. It couldn't have done me any real harm - hadn't I willingly been in his bed? And didn't that imply unlimited consent? No, it was not real rape and my pain was not real pain. I had internalized the myth that "real" rape is committed by men with hairy palms and glazed expressions lurking in alleyways.

Nevertheless, some time after leaving, I began to seek new ways of making sense of my experiences. In studying partner rape, I found out how shockingly prevalent it is. Researchers have been telling us this for twenty years:

“A 1985 study estimated that 10 to 14 per cent of married women have been or will be raped by their spouses.¹

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Cambodian Acid Violence against Women

By

William Grut, MD, Rose Charities

Acid violence defies any bounds of comprehension. It is a violation born and nurtured in hell itself, a pitiless, hideous evil. It takes away both skin and flesh and the very soul of the victim. And it does so with finality that is often absolute.

As a physician, I saw my first acid violence injury around 10 years ago. I had set up Rose charities as an extension of my previous organization, Project Iris. Iris dealt with eye injury and sight restoration but so many injuries extended beyond the eye to the face and torso. Rose went beyond the eye to facial and other injuries. Word had gone around that there were “foreign doctors” helping the injured and had set up a simple operative and treatment clinic on the outskirts of Phnom Penh.

My First Case of Acid Violence Against Women:

My first experience with this heinous manifestation of violence against women remains seared in my memory. I came in in the morning and she was there in the waiting area, brought in by a friend. She sat there on the hard wooden bench. I took her hand. She could not cry, she had no tear ducts since the skin fused tightly over where here eyes may or may not lie underneath. She just gazed forward; her skin mottled leather membrane, shrink-wrapped; her face no longer with any elasticity or ability to display any expression. Her name is Vanna.

Vanna had been beautiful, and for many poor, oppressed Cambodian women it is their only possession of value. Before becoming a victim, she had a low paying job in a restaurant. She had a boyfriend. The story goes: One day Vanna refused the advances of a much older man, a government official of some importance. Later that evening two men were waiting for her. They held her down and slowly poured the acid on her beautiful face. And then they continued to hold her while it did its work.

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