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Evening Standard
January 28 2002
The cost of rape
by Ewan Sargent
A Manawatu rape victim tells Ewan Sargent that those who
condemn the return of lump-sum payments wouldn't be so harsh if they had
lived her life.
The first rape came when Rhonda took her
eight-month baby girl on a visit to see the father. She'd split from the man
because of his drinking and violence.
"I wasn't in the door five minutes and he held
me down and raped me. Because I wasn't involved with anybody, I wasn't on
contraception and I got pregnant," she says.
Rhonda didn't tell the police.
"What's the point? You've called in to visit
him. He could say anything. He's a very intelligent man."
She had the boy and the father returned to the
family, winning his way back by promising he'd finished drinking and drugs.
He told her he wanted to be a proper father.
"He said he still loved me. I was single
parenting and it's hard, and I thought it was worth a crack."
But old problems soon reappeared.
He started drinking and the abuse returned. They
were heading for another split, but before they did, he left her a little
present.
Rhonda was using natural planning for
contraception. The man chose the moment she was ovulating to overpower and
rape her.
"Afterwards he said, This is my revenge for
you not wanting to live with me," Rhonda says.
She had another son and the man left.
She realises now she was a battered woman who lived
in a world of denial and made continual excuses for a man addicted to alcohol
and drugs. She married him after the second rape, after he was released from
a jail sentence, "to get his name, so the kids could grow up knowing I
had married their father".
But there came a point when she had to end it. That,
too, she did for her children.
The moment came one night when her husband, so
drunk he could barely stand, was trying to punch her with an uppercut and she
was cowering against a wall with her arms up around her face. She peered
through the hole her arms made and saw the children standing at the end of
the hallway, staring.
"I'd made excuses for him. I'd believed he
wanted to do the right thing with the children, but then, at that moment, I
knew he had to go and I had to do it alone."
The relationship left her with nightmares,
depression, relationship and sexual difficulties and panic attacks whenever
she saw someone who reminded her of him. But she's never laid a complaint,
because she knows he'd get to her eventually and pay her back.
She's still hiding from him and has changed her
name (Rhonda isn't her real name) so he can't find her. The last she heard of
him was when he contacted friends up north to try to find her. He told them
he was going to kill her for taking his children away.
She believes it.
Once he held the point of a butcher's knife to her
neck and said he might as well kill her because he had nothing to live for.
In late 1997, she sought counselling after the
panic attacks became too bad. Counselling helped, but also uncovered dark memories.
"I started having nightmares. I had this dream
that he came to my place and said, I still love you. And I said, Yeah, I
still love you, but we can't live together. And he said, Sometimes love
hurts, and stubbed a cigarette out on me."
Rhonda says she woke and remembered he used to do
that to her. She still has faint scars on her shoulder, but it was something
she had shut out.
The counselling also led to an ACC claim for
compensation. Lump-sum payments ended in 1995 and after a questionnaire assessment
by an ACC-approved doctor, she was granted $21 a week for her
"impairment".
"I think the lump sum should have never been
stopped or the weekly payment should be more realistic," Rhonda says.
Lump-sum repayments are to resume from April 1.
There has been widespread condemnation, including comments from a Rotorua
counsellor who says they are no good to many beneficiaries because they tend
to squander them. This angers Rhonda, who says a lump sum would have made a
huge difference to bringing up two boys to be good and to not follow their
father's path.
It still would. She says she's done a good job and
is proud of them, but she can't afford such things as club memberships,
fishing licences and golf fees, which would help them be part of normal society.
ACC has said any acts of abuse before April 1
aren't eligible for new lump-sum payments, but might be eligible for back
payments of various allowances. Rhonda intends to look into a new claim.
She won't use a law firm that has been advertising
it will put in claims on behalf of sex-abuse sufferers. The firm offers to
lodge a claim for lump-sum compensation in return for 25 percent of the
result.
"I don't want them to have 25 percent of my
pain and suffering. I'm prepared to wait and see what the system comes up
with."
She has a simple answer to those who say it's not a
money issue.
"Become a victim of this type of abuse, then
tell me money doesn't help."
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