What does a victim of gender violence look like? With this question, the journalist Lorena Álvarez began her TEDxTukuyWomen talk in 2020. She invited the public to do the following exercise: bring to mind the image of a victim of gender violence or sexual assault. How do we imagine it? She is probably a vulnerable, shy woman, without self-esteem, destroyed and even with some physical injury as a result of abuse. This image, which is already part of the collective imagination of how a victim is supposed to be and act, determines that anything that falls outside of this stereotype is not credible: after the attack, you can never have a good time again, because If you lead a “normal life,” public and legal opinion may consider that “you are not so affected.”
“The exercise has helped us realize that we share the same idea: that stereotype outlined around the victim,” commented Álvarez after throwing the question into the air. “I understood it that way too,” confesses the journalist. However, the moment she became a victim of gender violence, everything changed. Lorena Álvarez explains that she felt a short circuit: “I don't look anything like those women who appear on television. I am not submissive, I do not have low self-esteem, I have always seen myself beautiful in the mirror, I am 'big', I am taller than most women, I speak loudly..." The image of her did not coincide with that collective imagination built on how she is supposed to be a victim.
The actress and director Bàrbara Mestanza was also the victim of sexual assault in a massage center in Madrid. She recounts her aggression and her entire psychological process before and after it in the play Dirty, which she later turned into a book. She admits that “it has taken me many years to recognize myself as a victim.” For her, “one of the things that means that, when you are attacked, you do not label what is happening to you as an attack, is the aesthetics that have been given to the victim and the aggressor.” The aggressor is always described socially as a madman, a monster, a person who is not right in the head. “That image of the aggressor makes it seem that there are very few on this planet; They seem to live in the shadows; nobody knows them; Nobody knows who they are,” says Mestanza.
As for the victim, Mestanza adds, “it is always a young, defenseless, white, thin, pretty girl... And when you don't fit into this, the simple fact that that person has chosen you as a victim does not fit.” for the people; They make you think that either there is something that you have not done well and, therefore, you have asked for it, or that what you are saying is an exaggeration that is part of your structure as a hysterical and neurotic woman who sees problems where they do not. “There are.” Furthermore, she adds, “if you are a more or less feminist, politicized, intelligent, cultured and adult woman… It is difficult for them to understand that you have been subjected and have not done anything… It does not coincide with what has been socially described.”
The idea of the 'perfect victim' establishes that women who are 'really' attacked must behave in a certain way after the attack that matches the stereotype that has been socially constructed about how a victim should act after such a trauma. To demonstrate to society that they 'deserve' to be considered victims, they have to appear visibly destroyed, they must stop doing any social activity and, under no circumstances, smile or appear happy in public again. If not, they open themselves up to being questioned for not appearing as traumatized as they should.
This stereotypical story also assumes that sexual assaults only occur in very specific situations, the ones that everyone imagines: the victim was alone, at night, in a dark alley or at a party, the aggressor looks dangerous and, During the attack, she resists with all her strength, she does not remain blocked.
For Lorena Álvarez, the worst came when her case became a media topic: “My complaint reached the media, I became a trending topic.” At that moment, one of her greatest fears came true: “That short circuit that I had in my head, that of not seeing myself as a victim, was not only mine; the same thing happened to society; They said things like “it's impossible, if she has the same character” or “obviously this is a case of mutual aggression.” The journalist points out that they even said that it was impossible for her to be a victim of gender violence because she was “responsive on Twitter.”
“Why was it so easy not to believe me? –Álvarez lamented in the TED talk– “Because I don't look like a victim.” The stereotype that we have socially perpetuated around the victim makes it very difficult for us to recognize anyone who does not fit that pattern. As the journalist says, we have developed a kind of unconscious manual that marks the characteristics of that 'good victim'. “All the rest of us don't exist,” adds the journalist. “What do we do then?” We don't believe them. Do you know what the only woman is that no one ever doubts? Of the dead.”
This collective imagination about what a victim, an aggressor, and even what sexual assault should look like, draws on the story that has been given in movies, the media, and in education. “I was never sexually assaulted like it appears in the movies,” says Bàrbara Mestanza in her book, Sucia. She explains to La Vanguardia that fiction and stories in the media “have not represented us well as victims or as attacked people, and they have not represented well what an attack is like.”
“The ones who have always represented the attacks have always been them,” adds the actress, “it is a story made by them and for them; How are we going to see in the movies what abuse really looks like if they, who are the directors, have no idea what abuse is like? If they exercise it, how are they going to portray it fairly?” According to Mestanza, “those stories from the dark alley should also be told, but we should not fall into clichés or sugarcoat realities, because that is being negligent of all other experiences.”
For years, a painful question has been passing through different mouths, including his, every time he has raised his voice and recounted his attack: “Why didn't you do anything?” When the masseuse was attacking her, she had such a shock that she froze. “That you didn't do anything is strange. You are not a helpless person, you are a powerful woman, you have character,” people close to her told her. Since she is not a submissive woman, she does not fit the stereotype of a victim, therefore, they questioned her.
“Not being recognized as a victim is very painful, because if you are not a victim but you have experienced something like this, it means that you are responsible for what happened, that you are guilty,” explains Mestanza. “I felt responsible for my own abuse,” she says in the book. After the attack, she looked for a way to reaffirm her guilt "through absolute self-destruction," she explains. "bad daughter... It has taken me many years and changes in my life to cut off everything that led me to automatic guilt and responsibility for all my pain."
Reconciling with the label of victim has been difficult for her. This is how he tells it in the book Sucia: “After years of trying to avoid that word, of feeling like vomiting when hearing it, I have decided to occupy it with all the dignity in the world and legitimize it. This is not all we are, but it is something that makes us up. I am Bàrbara Mestanza, I am an actress, director, I write, sing, I dub, I like beer, potato omelette (...) and, furthermore, I am a victim of sexual assault. How hard it has been for me to accept this! That word is not everything I am, it is something that has happened to me, it is something that someone has done to me. Until I start to feel comfortable with that word, with that label, I will not fully accept what happened, and until I do that, it will be impossible to heal.”
In his book, Mestanza dismantles the stereotype of the victim: “We are not defenseless people, we are not mute, prim, victims have character, or we are submissive, we make mistakes, we scream, or we are too silent, we screw up, we are afraid, we smoke, We fuck, we drink, we take drugs, we work, we have low defenses, we have terrible thyroids, we are self-confident, we are bad at times, we are violent, we have power, we have no power, we collect unemployment, we have money, we are poor. Victims are not victims because we have a character that makes us prone to it.”
“It is important to remember that victims are victims because someone made us victims – she commented at the presentation of her book – and that reconciling with this label and occupying it is the best way to be annoying to aggressors: “They are afraid that you show the world as a victim, because that makes them aggressors.”
The idea of the 'perfect victim' penalizes those women who try to rebuild their lives after the assault. “Even the prosecutors, those in charge of defending you, are affected by whether you heal,” Álvarez points out in his TED talk, “because it is easier to defend a case when the victim is destroyed, but if you don't look bad, your case seems irrelevant. "It knows little." The journalist adds that, in addition, the system punishes your resilience: “Getting ahead ends up being penalized by justice, because it needs you frozen in time. It requires that you remain the same woman at the police station for the years that your case lasts.” “Justice ends up condemning you for continuing with your life,” Álvarez concludes.
“When a person who has gone through something like this puts on a smile and goes out to party, it is a way of trying to leave the pain behind and not connect with oneself,” Mestanza points out. She says that she has also seen how several people have questioned her management of the trauma: “but there are many ways to manage it, and one of them is to dissociate from yourself, although that does not mean that as long as we have a good time after being violated we are dissociated; It is also because we have the right to live – the actress clarifies – and because if this man took my body, what I am going to do is try to get it back, because he is not going to come and give it back to me. "Either I go out into the street and get it again on my own or I'm not going to make it."
But not only does society investigate the victim thoroughly, so does justice: “Two psychologists asked me about the relationship I had with my parents, what the relationship between them was like, what my sexual relationships had been like, how many boyfriends I had had… They even asked me what grades I got at school,” explains Bàrbara Mestanza: “I had to talk for almost three hours about what problems I did or did not have with my father, as if this justified the fact that, years later, I could have been attacked.” At that moment, she explains, she felt “a terrible urge to cry, I left there feeling terrible, I stayed in bed for a week and since then, I have had to reactivate my therapy more frequently.”
“Just as society does not believe us, justice does the same,” says Lorena Álvarez, “because justice is part of society. They are people who make it up: the police, the experts, the prosecutors, the judges... They share the stereotypes, the lack of gender focus, they lack empathy, they share machismo. Justice intends for the victim to fit into what they understand that she is a victim.” In her TED talk, the journalist explains that in her psychological examination they noted that she was “dressed appropriately,” and she laments: “Can someone tell me what the dress code is to go to an examination? What would have happened if it came out that I dressed badly?”
Of the assaulted women, only a portion come to file a complaint, and of this portion, only a small portion make it to court (some regret it during the judicial process and abandon it). And why do they abandon it? According to Álvarez, “because the system re-victimizes you: it forces you to tell in great detail what happened to you countless times. It ends up being a torturous, violent, slow and frustrating process, because it makes you feel guilty all the time.” Reporting, he explains, means having to beg to be believed and observe the support and closing of ranks that a large part of society gives to the aggressors. “Why, voluntarily, are you going to risk speaking and subjecting yourself to all this ridicule, to having your present, your past, your family, your existence questioned?”, reflects Lorena Álvarez.
“There comes when Coronado [actor José Coronado] makes the comment that women have to report immediately because we have already moved forward and it makes no sense for them to be afraid,” remembers Bàrbara Mestanza. The actress emphasizes that “no one really knows what you go through when you report: not even what you spend financially and on mental health.” Furthermore, she adds: “when you report, you are not on an equal footing; That man has had to testify only once and I have had to go through five psychological reports; “You have to fight for equality in the world and then fight for equality in justice, which is much more serious, because that implies that you are not safe.”
The Minister of Equality, Ana Redondo, also declared that one of the problems of sexist violence is that "women do not report everything they should report." There is a lack of understanding about what it really means to experience sexual assault and to dare to report it knowing that they are exposing themselves to scrutiny of their entire past and future, to being questioned for “not appearing so traumatized” to questions about their past or their way of dressing, as if their responses justified the aggression.
