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Karyn L. Freedman Biography

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“Shame is an emotion that many rape survivors struggle with for reasons that can be more complicated than we might think. It is a distinctly insidious form of humiliation, the result of a serious injury to our self-esteem, which can be exacerbated by the feeling that we’ve done something wrong. Humiliation is par for the course when your body is used sexually against your will—that part of the aftermath of sexual violence is pretty well understood. Less well appreciated is why rape survivors may end up feeling responsible for what has happened to them. A common assumption is that women blame themselves because of low self-esteem: if only I had dressed differently, if only I had not looked at him that way, if only I had made better decisions for myself. While a woman’s self-image may play a role in how she comes to understand what has happened to her, the sense of responsibility held by many rape survivors is at least partly driven by a dominant worldview regarding personal safety and harm. Although this picture is slowly changing, historically, at least in the West, girls have been taught from a young age that the world is basically a safe place and that so long as you are sufficiently careful and intelligent, you can protect yourself from any serious harm. Underscoring this narrative is the fact that in our entertainment-saturated media culture, the everydayness of sexual violence against women is overlooked in favour of sensationalized stories of extreme violence. And because rape is typically experienced in private, unlike other traumatic experiences, like combat fighting in war, for instance, the clear evidence of its pervasiveness is obscured from our collective vision. This further reinforces the mistaken notion that the world is a benign place for women—and worse, it makes incidents of sexual violence against women look like a series of unrelated, isolated events when in fact they are the systematic consequence of patriarchal social structures. So how does the rape survivor reconcile this dominant worldview with what has happened to her? After all, it cannot be true both that the world is a safe place and that you were raped, unless, of course, the rape was your fault. The other alternative is to reject the dominant worldview, but this means accepting the fact that we live in a world where women, by virtue of being women, are at risk. For a variety of reasons, it can be easier and less painful to believe instead that being raped was a result of your own poor choices.”

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Book:One Hour in Paris: A True Story of Rape and Recovery
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“The problem with statistics is that they are easy to ignore. There is anonymity in number, which can make it hard to hold on to the facts - the people - behind them. Statistics are by definition impersonal. In order to make the problem of violence against women palpable we need to know the stories behind the numbers,..”

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Book:One Hour in Paris: A True Story of Rape and Recovery
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“But freedom from an interfering state is no guarantee of individual autonomy; something more is needed for that. Genuine autonomy demands that we act deliberately, that our beliefs, values, and decisions are really are own, and this means that we need to have a handle on the reasons that shape our behaviour. But this is no easy task. Our reasons for acting are not always transparent, even to us. Self-knowledge is not a given, but it is not out of reach, either. It is something that we can work at, and with understanding comes options. Knowing why we behave the way we do can help us to see choices where we previously saw none.”

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Author:Karyn L. Freedman
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“.... freedom from an interfering government is not the only barrier to genuine autonomy. The right to reflect is not universal. It is a privilege afforded to those of us in affluent societies who have time to spare, and who are not otherwise burdened by fundamental problems, like poverty, malnutrition or ill health, problems that, at least in male-dominated societies, women suffer disproportionately. Add to this women’s lack of equality under the law in those same societies, as well as their lack of equal access to education and basic social institutions of welfare, and it becomes clear that it is not just women’s bodies but their basic human rights that are under attack in male-dominated societies.”

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Book:One Hour in Paris: A True Story of Rape and Recovery
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“When we recount our own tales we focus on the features that to us loom large and omit the ones that to us seem irrelevant. Studies show that it is likely that we do this early on, when we first give linguistic shape to our narrative, such that over time we don’t even see ourselves as exaggerating or minimizing.”

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Book:One Hour in Paris: A True Story of Rape and Recovery
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“Thus, unless we actively seek out this information, it can remain below our radar. Or perhaps we conceal the truth because we want to protect our children from the harsh realities of gender-based violence. One could argue that protecting children in this way as a means of instilling in them a robust sense of security is an important aspect of early childhood development. But at some point, sticking to this story becomes counterproductive, for as long as we are taught that the world is a benign place for women, when harm comes to us the most reasonable conclusion to draw is that it is our fault.”

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Book:One Hour in Paris: A True Story of Rape and Recovery
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