Is Sexual Assault A Write-able Theme?
Read the previous post in the Behind The Scenes series: The Story Behind The Story.
More often than not, sexual assault as a topic to write on is riddled with mines. You usually elicit strong opinions that teeter on either side of the zero reading, but rarely do you get a muted response. And most often, it is a subject where the discussion remains shackled to the here and the now, the physical and mental, the societal and the moral, and so on.
But, what if there were intangible implications of this act? What if the perpetrator were not from this physical world? What if the act didn’t constrain itself to the physical laws of cause and effect that we so damn always take for granted?
In effect, if you remove the logical, the physical and the understandable elements from this theme, you enter a world where the only thing that stands between victim and perpetrator is the fact that there are only two outcomes: either the perpetrator’s psychic lust is fulfilled and continues to get fulfilled, or the victim lives on to fight another day.
For the character that undergoes the sexual assault , it becomes a matter of surviving one more night and living in the hope of seeing the next. When she realizes that her assaulter is a ghoul from the past, it becomes a matter of preserving her sanity, and not just her dignity, before and after every assault.
Of course, my first question to myself when I was brooding over my book’s theme was not whether sexual assault was a good topic to write on.
Far from it, the topic of choice was a story where there is a conflict that defied the human ability to understand the magnitude of the conflict or the motive behind it. A conflict where time ceased to be the master it usually is in most events involving human mortals. A conflict that could pit paranormal force against human grit and hardiness.
This led me to the subject of past life, a topic that has as many misgivings about it as there are naysayers. This only meant that I had the perfect foil for my wild, sometimes over-the-top, imagination.
Add to this one eccentricity of a sexual assault that misses no one’s eyes: while any human mortal has to contend with physical harm and mental agony as major sources of peril, a third dimension of psychological trauma enters the picture if the human mortal happens to be a woman. A woman who has to face or has faced sexual assault.
Even this does not explain why the act of sexual assault, albeit a subordinate theme in the narrative, has found a place in my book. No, the motive for writing about this theme has derived from another long-cherished dream of mine: to write about a conflict with historical bearings. More about this in future posts.
So, what do you think? Is sexual assault a topic worthy of being written about in mainstream publication? Are you conversant with any historical events that have been equally mired in trauma and controversy?
Coming soon: the next post in the Behind The Scenes series.
