Coolabah, No. 24&25, 2018, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis 
Australians i Transnacionals / Observatory: Australian and Transnational Studies 

Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 

 

 

 

 

The aftermath of rape: Innovative approaches to understanding sexual 

violence against Australian women and children 
 

 

 

Brenda Downing 

Edith Cowan University 

brendadowning747@gmail.com 

 

 
 

Copyright©2018 Brenda Downing. This text may be 

archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in 

hard copy, provided that the author and journal are 

properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our 

Creative Commons Licence. 

 

 

Abstract: More than 50 years after American feminist Susan Brownmiller (1976, p. 15, 

original italics) controversially claimed that rape is “nothing more or less than a 

conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear,” 

Australian girls and women continue to be raped, continue to suffer the consequences of 

rape in the aftermath, and continue to fear the possibility of being raped. In order to 

reimagine an Australia where the rape of women and children is socially and culturally 

unacceptable, we need to understand more fully the long-term and multiple impacts of 

violence of this nature. This paper reports on Australian research that uses innovative 

arts-based methodologies to shift the emphasis from the primacy of the psychological 

impact of childhood rape to the enduring, though less understood, multiple and 

embodied impact of childhood rape. The research holds important insights for women’s 

and children’s health professionals, for women who have experienced, and continue to 

experience the trauma of childhood rape, and for the discursive construction of a 

country where acts of sexual violence are unthinkable. 

 

Keywords: rape trauma; somatic symptoms; arts-based methodologies. 

 

 

Introduction 
 

 

In Australia, we’re proud of our endless blue skies and crystal clear oceans, our white 

sandy beaches, our sweeping bays, our clean rivers, the tall forests, the bushland and the 

red dust deserts, the oxygen-laden air we breathe. We’re proud of our modern glossy 

cities, our neat suburbs, our large, air-conditioned homes, our fast freeways, and our 

glinting four-wheel drive cars. We’re proud of our sporting heroes and our 

internationally recognised artists. We tell our daughters and sons to dream big and 

mailto:brendadowning747@gmail.com


   
 

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wide—because anything’s possible. We have vast horizons in Australia. The sun shines 

on us. We all feel its warmth on our upturned faces.  

 

And yet. 

 

I’m tired of the superficiality and complacency of this idealised facade of comfort and 

opportunity. And I find the endless sunshine deeply unsettling because beneath the 

surface, Australia is not all it seems: Australia harbours a dark and toxic secret obscured 

and muted by its projected image of pride, comfort and opportunity, a shameful and 

festering secret, a secret it should not be proud of. This paper reveals that shameful 

secret and discusses its profound implications because I’m tired of the facade and 

secrets are no longer secrets if they’re shared. 

 

 

The great Australian ‘secret’ 

 

 
Australia has grown to become a country with one of the highest rates of reported 

sexual assault in the world (ABS, 2015). In 2015 alone there were 21,380 reported 

incidents of sexual assault with four out of five of those incidents committed by male 

perpetrators against girls or women. The figure represents a 3 per cent increase on the 

previous year (ABS, 2015) and a staggering 51 per cent increase since 1995 (AIC, 

2007).  

 

The number of people directly impacted by sexual assault in Australia in 2015 would 

fill the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall to capacity—three and a half times over. 

While this number is alarming, it is crucial to understand that the figure is a highly 

conservative one, given that the majority of sexual assaults in Australia go unreported to 

police (AIC, 2007). 

 

In the 1970s, American feminist Susan Brownmiller (1976, p. 15, original italics) 

controversially claimed that rape is “nothing more or less than a conscious process of 

intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.” Whether you agree 

with this statement or not, almost 50 years on, in Australia the fear remains: girls and 

women continue to be raped, continue to suffer the consequences of rape in the 

aftermath, and continue to fear the possibility of being raped (O’Donovan, Devilly, & 

Rapee, 2007). There can be no doubt that the spectre and reality of rape limits women’s 

lives and shapes our movement through the world. As rape victim and feminist 

philosopher Susan Brison (2002, p. 18) states: “the fact that all women’s lives are 

restricted by sexual violence is indisputable.” This is the shameful and toxic secret that 

quietly pollutes our oceans, rivers and harbours, stains our cities and suburbs, and 

poisons the air we breathe.  

 

In 2002, Brison (p. 97) wrote: “Rape has, all too often and for all too long, been 

considered a private, personal matter, and thus not worthy of public, political concern.” 

This position on rape violence continues in contemporary Australia. If we are to begin 

to reimagine Australia as a country where the rape of girls and women is truly 

unthinkable, a country where rape is truly socially and culturally unacceptable, a 

country where boys and men value and respect girls and women, where girls and 

women can trust and respect boys and men, we need to open up a conversation about 



   
 

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the reality of gendered sexual violence. We need to appreciate that rape, and the 

profound and long-term associated consequences, is worthy of public, political concern. 

 

While useful for determining the scale of reported sexual assaults, the statistics I have 

provided above can only take us so far in our imagining. Indeed, Karyn L. Freedman 

(2006, p. 113) offers the following: “If the occurrence of rape were audible, its decibel 

level equal to its frequency, it would overpower our days and nights … an insistent jack 

hammer … we would demand an end to it … we would refuse to live under such 

conditions.” In order to render the statistics audible and to bring about real change in 

attitudes, I suggest that in Australia, we have an ethical and social responsibility to 

collectively open our senses and imaginations further.  

 

To do this, we need to be exposed to the jack hammer noise of rape; to the myriad ways 

trauma’s dense shadow darkens futures and colonises the bodies of countless numbers 

of Australian girls and women. In short, we need to acknowledge and understand the 

ramifications of both the prevalence rates and the lived and daily reality of the long-

term impacts of rape if we are to begin to comprehend how it is to live with the 

consequences of rape trauma and reimagine a different future.  

 

 

Contextualising my interest in sexual trauma research   
 

 

I write not only from a position as a feminist materialist researcher with a specific 

interest in the embodied impact of sexual trauma, but also from a position of 

experiential ‘knowing’: I endured the terror of rape violence on two separate occasions 

in 1971 and have lived with the evolving and multiple consequences ever since.  

 

Following the rapes, the shame and self-blame I felt was immediate, and because of 

this, I didn’t, or couldn’t tell my family. I chose instead to disclose to a school friend. 

She insisted I was lying. I insisted I was telling the truth. She won. I lost. I then resolved 

never to risk disclosure again, and the events of that year transformed into a shameful, 

yet grief-laden secret. I kept that secret tucked inside my body for almost 30 years, until 

its weight and the strain of years of self-censoring left me distraught, curled me into an 

immobilised foetal position on my kitchen floor.  

 

 

Personal consequences of rape 

 

 

Based on my experiential understandings, I know that rape, especially in childhood, has 

both immediate and profoundly complex lifelong consequences.  

 

In the immediate aftermath, I was left with a shattered sense of self, fragile self-esteem, 

a lack of personal boundaries, chronic hypervigilance, and a sense of deep mistrust of 

the world around me. As time went on, the list grew longer: terrifying nightmares; acute 

insomnia; paralysing and socially isolating anxiety; an exaggerated startle reflex; a 

sense of bodily dissonance; and a profound loathing of, and sense of detachment from, 

my body. I overfed my body in my teens and starved my body through my 20s. I 

developed physical illnesses in my early 30s and severe clinical depression in my late 



   
 

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30s. The latter diagnosis saw me swallowing anti-depressants for three years and 

attending weekly cognitive behavioural therapy sessions for five years. At the end of 

my therapy, my mental health was improved; however, the bodily dissonance, the 

nebulous physical complaints and the punitive relationship I had with my body 

remained unchanged.  

 

It was the experience of rape in 1971 and its catastrophic consequences that propelled 

me to undertake Honours research in 2007. Viewed through a broad sociocultural lens 

and set within a feminist framework of understanding, the arts-based and reflexive 

autoethnographic project examined the multiple ramifications of childhood rape.  

 

The trauma literature I immersed myself in during the project was abundant, interesting 

and to some extent affirming. However, I increasingly became concerned that the 

research gave precedence to psychological expressions of post-rape trauma—very little 

attention appeared to be given to the somatic or body-based manifestations I had 

experienced in my youth and continued to experience as a mature-aged woman. At the 

end of the project, my interests in the long-term somatic aftermath of childhood rape, 

the material states of the human body under stress and the uniqueness of embodied 

memory were sharpened. These interests came together with my lifelong interest in 

creative writing and performance and in 2009, I began an arts-based doctoral project at 

Edith Cowan University in Western Australia. The paper will now shift its focus to this 

project to discuss the innovative arts-based methodology I employed as well as the 

insights and outcomes that emerged from the research. 

 

 

“Feeling the fleshed body” (PhD 2009-2014) 

 
 

My doctoral research examined the trauma of childhood rape as it specifically manifests 

in and is expressed through the adult female body. The work was primarily 

autoethnographic although it also included significant data gathered from other 

Australian women also raped in childhood. As previously stated, the work chiefly grew 

out of earlier research that had refined my interests in body-based trauma. But it was 

also a response to my feeling inadequately attended to by a range of healthcare 

professionals across a number of decades, some of whom specialised in women’s 

health, who never questioned me about a possible history of rape trauma. The doctoral 

project, then, was initiated by my experiential understandings of the somatic aftermath 

of childhood rape and my feeling of being ‘let down’ by healthcare professionals, and 

was propelled by the following research questions: Do women who have endured 

childhood rape make links between their body and the experience? How do women who 

have endured childhood rape read their own body-based responses? How might these 

responses be similar or different to my own? Where and how does the trauma of rape 

reside in the body? What are our cultural understandings of body-based post-rape 

trauma? What broader understandings of rape trauma might healthcare professionals 

need to know in order to adequately respond to female patients who may be unable to 

articulate their rape history?  

 

All of these research questions honoured the materiality and reality of embodied 

experience. The feminist, arts-based and multi-modal methodology I designed to 

support these questions was a reflection of my desire to uphold the integrity of my 



   
 

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living, breathing, fleshed and raped body. As such, the methodology also acknowledged 

the central role experiential understandings play in knowledge making practices. The 

paper will now move to the background behind the methodological design of the project 

and discuss the insights and outcomes. 

 

 

Arts-based embodied methodology 

 

 

I have been a creative writer since I could grasp a pencil, and my interest in performing 

and performance has been life-long. Engaging writing and performance making as 

forms of embodied inquiry, then, was as natural as breathing. But I also wanted to 

engage my body in other ways. More specifically, I wanted to engage methods of 

inquiry that would help me understand why I continued to hold a profound sense of 

detachment from my body, despite five years of weekly psychotherapy in my late 30s 

and early 40s. I wanted to understand why I still felt that the trauma of my experience 

haunted my body because surely five years of talk-based therapy should have laid this to 

rest. Shouldn’t it? 

 

The final methodological framework grew organically from these questions. Described 

by examiners as “pioneering,” “methodologically provocative” and “innovative,” it was 

multidimensional in nature, experimental and, as a result, full of risk. The four methods 

of inquiry I engaged were: autoethnography; somatic inquiry; writing-as-inquiry; and 

performance-making-as-inquiry. The paper will now discuss each of these methods.  

 

 
Autoethnography 

 

 

The primary focus of the research was my own experience of childhood rape. The role I 

took up then, was dual: I occupied the autoethnographic position of both researcher and 

research participant. As an autoethnographer, the method facilitated the development of 

an intimate space within which the particularity of my experience could resonate. The 

critical reflection and reflexivity that is a feature of autoethnographic research (Spry, 

2011), however, enabled “a dance with different partners” (Downing, 2016, p. 186) as I 

moved within the inquiry space, back and forth, across and between not only my own 

story, but “the stories of other women, and the broader sociocultural storying of sexual 

violence” (Downing, 2016, p. 186). To have simply given an account of my aftermath 

story alone would have given the reader only one view or perspective, as any 

autobiographical writing or memoir does. The beauty and strength of autoethnography, 

however, lies in its complexity and dynamism: the method allows a range of narratives 

to be drawn together and reflexively interrogated, while inviting an exchange with 

different conceptual and theoretical frameworks. Norman Denzin (1997) understands 

the potency of autoethnography to be its ability to facilitate introspection and self-

reflectivity while simultaneously enabling space for the uniqueness of personal context 

to move within broader sociocultural narratives. Stacy Holman Jones (2008, p. 207) 

concurs, noting that “[a]utoethnography works to hold self and culture together.” My 

choice of autoethnography as a starting point for the organic development of my 

methodological framework enabled the eventual production of a rich, multilayered and 

multidimensional reading of the topic.  



   
 

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Somatic inquiry 

 

 

At the time of writing, I remain unable to locate other studies in the field of sexual 

trauma research that have engaged a corporeal, experiential and autoethnographic 

method of inquiry. Consequently, while I was in the midst of this component of my 

research, I had no precedent to guide me. This inevitably led to the method evolving 

organically as the research went along (Downing, 2016). I knew from the outset though 

that if I were to immerse myself in the deeply held cellular states of my trauma 

experience, I would need to engage a research method that fully supported this 

exploration.  

 

Across a period of four and a half years in both Perth and Melbourne, I immersed 

myself in the experiential body-based practice of Body-Mind Centering. I worked 

closely with Alice Cummins, a Body-Mind Centering practitioner and dance artist, as a 

workshop participant, private client and intensive program participant to forensically 

examine my trauma story at a cellular level. Body-Mind Centering is a body-based 

experiential approach to “movement and learning” (Bainbridge Cohen, 2008, p. 2) that 

begins from the premise that body and mind are not separate but are each part of a 

whole and integrated entity. The approach is grounded in a philosophy that honours the 

intelligence of the cellular body-mind, and is an “integrated and embodied approach to 

movement, the body and consciousness” (BMC, 2012). The approach engages 

techniques such as hands-on (touch), movement, embodied imagination, and 

experiential anatomy to promote self-awareness and help facilitate change (Bainbridge 

Cohen, 2008).  

 

While immersed in this phase of the research, I drew heavily on the work of Hélène 

Cixous (Cixous, 1976, 1990, 1991a, 1991b, 1993, 1997, 1998). I was, and remain, 

enchanted by her sense of presence, her eye for detail, and her insistence on the 

connections between the body, writing and feeling: “I do not write to keep. I write to 

feel. I write to touch the body of the instant with the tips of the words” (Cixous, 1998, p. 

195). She talks of wanting to cultivate presence to enable her to live “[…] in the present 

absolute. In the happening of the instant” (Cixous, 1991b, p. 104). And she talked of 

holding a myopic view of the world around her which allowed her to see the detail of 

her existence yet, through her writings, simultaneously demonstrating her deep 

connection to broader social, cultural and philsophical considerations: “Details are my 

kingdoms,” she says (Cixous, 1991b, p. 109). Cixous’ approach also reflected my desire 

as a researcher:  

 

[because] her close and evocative attention to detail mirrors the attention to 

detail that was necessary during my autoethnographic somatic inquiry. Her 

simultaneous sweep into broader realms of consideration echoes the 

reflexivity present at every level in this research project, particularly this 

autoethnographic component. In order to first uncover the subtlety and 

nuance of my autoethnographic somatic inquiry and then illuminate this 

through evocative language with as much exactitude as possible and with 

reflexivity, it was essential that I maintain a myopic or forensic awareness 

of my body at a cellular level while simultaneously holding my experience 



   
 

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within a wider cultural context, filtering this through an aesthetic lens. 

(Downing, 2016, p. 191)  

 

Engaging in the practice and techniques of Body-Mind Centering, the somatic inquiry 

work also cultivated presence, enabling me to remain present to and feel my unresolved 

body states. It slowly validated those body states and enabled a process of re-

integration. And as part of that re-integration, it brought clarity where there was 

confusion and a sense of reconnection with my body where there was acute detachment 

(Downing, 2016). 

 

 
Participant somatic inquiry  

 

 

To add a final dimension to my research, I also recruited nine other women from across 

Australia, all of whom had experienced at least one rape event in childhood (under the 

age of eighteen years). Recruitment took place via flyers, posters and email to women’s 

health and sexual assault centres. My interest in other women’s experiences was 

multiple. I wanted to: gain a sense of how the women viewed their bodies across time; 

discover their interpretation of their bodily responses since being raped; determine if the 

women made links between their physical health across time and their rape experiences; 

see if disclosure to health care professionals had taken place and whether they had 

discussed their physical symptoms; and discover if any of the women attended 

therapeutic bodywork sessions and how this impacted on them (Downing, 2016). 

 

The findings from this phase of the research, arrived at through a thematic analysis of 

material collected from the women via electronic surveys and interviews, revealed that 

the women experienced a suite of symptoms that echoed, and added to, my own. Some 

of these included: headaches and migraine; insomnia; pain; eating, digestive and weight 

concerns; anxiety and tension; gynaecological and sexual concerns; depression; Post 

Traumatic Stress Disorder—which has significant physical attributes (Rothschild, 

2000); exaggerated startle reflex; hypervigilance; and claustrophobia (Downing, 2016). 

All of these symptoms are consistent with the post-rape literature (Boyd, 2011; Martin, 

Young, Billings, & Bross, 2007; Waldinger, Schulz, Barsky, & Ahern, 2006). 

Additionally, and almost without exception, the women, like me, had held extreme 

negative attitudes towards their bodies in the years and decades since being raped, and 

had carried intense feelings of self-blame and shame well into adulthood (Downing, 

2016). 

 

The rape trauma literature supports these findings. It notes that women who experience 

rape and other forms of sexual violence more often report compromised overall health 

(Golding, 1994) and/or a range of chronic illnesses compared with those who have not 

experienced sexual violence (Koss & Boeschen, 2000); self-blame and shame are often 

linked (Koss & Boeschen, 2000; Vidal & Petrak, 2007; Weiss, 2010), with shame 

playing a key in role in determining whether a victim will disclose or whether a victim 

will self-silence (Feiring & Taska, 2005; Lee & James, 2013; Lievore, 2003). 

 

Concluding this section, and to further amplify how it is to live with the profound and 

long-term consequences of childhood rape, I include extracts from the survey and 

interview material I gathered from the women participants (Downing, 2016). In line 



   
 

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with Edith Cowan University’s ethics protocols, pseudonyms have been used. It should 

be noted that although some of the women did not feel ashamed of their experience and 

felt the use of a pseudonym unnecessary, they all agreed to their use. 

 

Kate: “I felt disconnected from my body when I was growing up, it felt like a stranger’s 

body. I used to feel like I was here for sex, here to be used. I didn’t have a sense of my 

body separate from how an abuser might view and value my body. It was something I 

blamed for what was done to me.” 

 

Monica: “My first sexual assault was washed under the carpet […] one little girl was 

not important […]. When I was raped [again], at 18 I scrubbed and scrubbed with a 

scrubbing brush but I could not get clean […].The first time I spoke to a health care 

professional about being raped as a child was 16 years later. A social worker (male) said 

he didn’t believe my story and that I didn’t have my facts straight. I love massage but 

am not good with trust so have found the chairs in shopping centres to be the best 

alternative/compromise. After the childhood experience, I wanted to never have breasts 

so I bound them for a long time. I couldn't stand touching my own skin directly, and 

after my son was born I found it really hard to wash him because of my own fear that I 

would somehow tarnish him with my own filth. It took decades to be ok within my own 

skin.” 

 

Nancy: “There are many things I realised over time that were the result of the 

Childhood Sexual Abuse.” 

 

Philipa: “I only remember trying to tell my GP once, & being totally discounted, & 

being told not to make up silly stories. […] I’m not very good at describing how my 

body responds—sorry.” 

  

Felicity: “[I] Push thought [to the] back of [my] mind. Never think about it.” 

  

Ros: “On one of the rare occasions that I have discussed the childhood rape with a 

health care professional, it was at my antenatal booking appointment and I received a 

pamphlet about childhood abuse and was advised to seek professional counselling, no 

personal interest was shown.”  

 

Carol: “I can’t breathe if I watch people in confined spaces […] I can’t have my face 

underwater or held under a blanket. […] I cannot eat tapioca or the other dessert which 

is similar without wanting to physically throw up because the texture and flavour is 

reminiscent of semen. I don’t sleep longer than 2 hours ever. I am hypervigilant to 

sound and my environment. I notice everything. I cannot make noise of any kind during 

sexual activity; I fear being heard.” 

 

Nina: “[I have] fear about their [healthcare professionals] responses, fear I’d be forced 

to report the abuse.” 

 

Patricia: “Flashbacks can induce a sense as though somebody is painfully entering my 

body. [I] truly hated my body with a passion and imagined that it was dirty—

particularly my sexual parts and my backside. I actually felt sick if I contemplated it for 

too long. [I once] considered having a sexual body was disgusting or dangerous.” 

 



   
 

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Writing-as-inquiry 

 

 

My thesis, and the book that emerged from it (Downing, 2016), includes many extracts 

from my PhD journal. Journal writing was my “aesthetic/epistemic praxis” (Spry, 2009, 

p. 604) and my way of coming to knowing through what Tami Spry calls “embodied 

theorizing” (Spry, 2009, p. 604). I turned to my journal writing for critical reflection on 

the work of others, to explore kernels of ideas, develop slender thoughts, delve into 

intuitive hunches, struggle with difficulty and experiment with creative form—

especially poetry. The privacy of my journal enabled me to berate myself, wrestle with 

and shout at the world, give in to grief, rejoice in pleasure, rest, gather myself, stretch, 

yawn, re-energise. It was also where I found my voice as a researcher. Every word in my 

journal helped me negotiate my way through the personal, sociocultural, political and 

historical landscapes and complexities of my research. My journal held just over 

138,000 words (Downing, 2016). 

 

While writing was a principal mode of inquiry, it was, at times, also problematic. More 

specifically, I found the task of bringing symbolic language to what was a process of 

interrogation of semiotic or bodily signs and sensations highly challenging. The work I 

engaged with in the autoethnographic somatic inquiry phase of the research was so 

deeply embodied that I often struggled to frame this within a system of language that 

often felt masculinist, overly analytical, and clumsy, and therefore inadequate to the 

task. I overcame this by lapsing into metaphor and poetry. Lori Neilsen Glenn (Neilsen, 

2008, p. 98) argues that writing that engages poetic language “can be a transgressive and 

powerful tool, especially for women and others who prefer to write outside rationalist 

forms of language.” I argue that “by writing my way into knowing through language that 

engages deeply with metaphor to reach new meaning subjectively and tangentially, I am 

honouring the embodied process that supports this kind of arrival at understanding” 

(Downing, 2016, p. 243). By beginning from a position of valuing metaphor and poetic 

language for its groundedness in embodied states, I gave myself permission to unfold 

my somatic knowing through its use. Metaphor and poetic language were 

 

a means of grasping hold of wisps of elusive experience, a way to hold 

myself in feeling that sometimes refused to linger. It reminded me that as 

we rub shoulders with experience and try to link arms with language, the 

beauty of metaphor is in its constantly evolving shape, in the certainty that 

the relationship we have to the words one day can be, will be, different to 

the next. (Downing, 2016, p. 244)   

 

Metaphor was also “a device of memory” (Cook, 2000, p. 18) useful for animating 

embodied trauma memory through language “more connected to my body than more 

conventional forms” (Downing, 2016, p. 245). However, not all of my writing was 

poetic and laden with metaphor. Many passages were spare, stripped back to reveal the 

rawness of my experience. Overall, though, the practice of writing was, and remains an 

embodied process, not simply an act of cognitively arranging words together on a page. 

It is also, without any doubt, a way for me to come to knowing. In the embodied “doing” 

and “feeling” of writing, the contemplation, the movement of feeling responses, ideas, 

thoughts, and images through my body (Downing, 2016), I am enabled to through a 

range of writing forms to “make the world make sense” (Mairs, 1994, p. 36).    

 



   
 

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Performance-making-as-inquiry  

 

 

I brought into my research a life-long interest in performing and the performance arts as 

well as a desire to give my thesis a three-dimensional embodied and performative 

companion. Spry (2011, pp. 28-29) argues that “performance is not an added scholarly 

bonus. It does not operate as an interesting feature or entertaining option […] 

performance does not ‘illuminate’ the text, rather it assists in the creation of the text; it 

is in itself performative.” Although I welcomed the opportunity to make a creative 

work, like Spry, the inclusion of a performance piece was not an added scholarly bonus. 

Nor was it an act of self-indulgent entertainment. For me, the making of a performance 

work was essential in order to engage an audience in the reality of sexual trauma in 

multiple ways.  

 

Della Pollock (2005, p. 2) notes: “Performance is a promissory act. Not because it can 

promise possible change but because it catches its participants—often by surprise—in a 

contract with possibility: with imagining what might be, could be, should be.” To bring 

the stark consequences of rape into the public realm, to begin to find ways for the public 

imagination to engage with the topic of rape violence at a personal and cultural level, to 

enable uncensored public discussion, I felt performance was a means to explore 

Pollock’s notion of contracting others within the realm of possibility.  

 

As a response, building on the emergent journal writing and drawing on the 

autoethnographic somatic inquiry work, I co-devised the solo theatre piece, aperture.  

Working alongside, and with the artistic guidance of Alice Cummins, I performed 

aperture in 2012. The critical reflection necessary for the making of this work, gave the 

bones of the written language of my explorations a heartbeat. Through rigorous creative 

interrogation, aperture draped muscle and flesh on the words of my written inquiry and 

pumped blood through its sentences (Downing, 2016). 

 

During the creative development phases of aperture, my experiential knowing 

percolated through me in the studio and was spontaneously expressed through my body. 

The movement this generated enabled the multidimensionality of my silenced 

experience to “move and sweat, collapse and stand—rather than remain in stasis” 

(Downing, 2016, p. 258). The work also gave me another level of creative freedom 

when “the semiotic was given precedence over the semantic” (Downing, 2016, p. 260). 

In its final form, aperture became a multi-layered and multidimensional embodied 

conduit for the dissemination of knowledge to those who had not experienced sexual 

violence and a means of holding up a mirror to those who had; because aperture didn’t 

just evoke my story. It also creatively opened up a reflexive space for the wider story of 

rape to resonate against my own.   

 

Aperture additionally enabled feminist theory and discourse, and ontological reality to 

co-mingle, grounding the work in an embodied materialist ethics and making it both 

culturally challenging and epistemologically relevant. By relying on my moving and, 

for the most part, non-verbal body and the capacity for experience and story to be 

evoked without reliance on symbolic language, the work also challenged the 

poststructuralist positioning of discourse and language as the primary means of identity 

construction, knowledge making and information dissemination.  

  



   
 

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Karen Barad (2008, p. 120) states unequivocally that “language has been granted too 

much power” and that matter, or the biological and fleshed body, has been diminished 

as a result. While Elizabeth Grosz (2008) notes that to interrogate the role and influence 

of discourse, there needs to be greater clarity around understandings of the complex 

interplay between biology and discourse. She suggests that if we are to assume that 

humans are biological, then it is necessary to formulate a sophisticated and nuanced 

interpretation of our biological basis that holds the capacity to offer an adequate 

explanation for the diversity that exists within our sociocultural and political lives.  

 

I argue that the performative nature of aperture enabled insight to be gained into the 

complexity of rape trauma and its social, cultural and political ramifications through the 

nuance of embodied performance and the complex voice of bodily narrative.  

 

 

Key insights and outcomes 

 

 

Within therapeutic discourse and rape trauma research, there remains a tendency to 

hierarchically privilege psychological expressions of post-rape trauma over those that 

manifest in the body (Wilson, 2004), suggesting that the trauma of rape begins in the 

psyche.  

 

My research revealed key insights that challenge the dominant psychological and 

discursive construction of rape trauma. Firstly, the damage of rape begins, in the first 

instance, with the sensing and feeling body, and psychological damage develops 

subsequently as the cognitive brain begins to process the sensory event. And secondly, 

the raped and traumatised body is not passive or inert and is instead agentic, often 

refusing to be silenced in the long-term aftermath (Downing, 2016). Finally, my 

autoethnographic somatic inquiry revealed that to fully attend to my trauma, talk-based 

therapy alone was not enough. The re-integration of the sensory elements of my 

childhood experience—‘frozen’ in my body since childhood—and a concomitant 

change in attitude towards my traumatised body was, I believe, only possible through an 

engagement with my body.  

 

 

A call for change 
 

 

With these insights in mind, I argue that psychological interpretations of rape trauma 

offer one perspective only and that the cellular body with its capacity for storing 

embodied memory, cannot be overlooked, diminished or ignored. Even if, for some rape 

victims, the trauma they carry in their bodies cannot be articulated in other ways, even if 

some rape victims do not make links between bodily symptoms and their rape history, 

and even if girls and women are silenced by their experience of rape and rendered 

incapable of disclosure, “it does not mean the symptoms do not exist” (Downing, 2016, 

p. 283). It is imperative, therefore, that somatic symptoms are treated alongside and 

with the same level of respect and gravitas as symptoms that manifest or are expressed 

psychologically (Downing, 2016). 

 



   
 

333 
 

In terms of therapeutic options, for me, the benefits of body-based work cannot be 

underestimated. In a reimagined Australia, I would like to see body-focused therapies 

included in all post-rape care and treatment, not as an aside or afterthought, but 

centrally, to augment talk-based therapies and help create more appropriate holistic and 

multidimensional therapeutic treatment programs. 

 

Therefore, I call for a wider understanding of post-rape trauma within rape trauma 

research and women’s healthcare practice, one that acknowledges all dimensions and 

expressions of trauma, including, and especially, those that manifest in and through the 

female body. 

 

 

And finally … 
 

 

The misplaced shame that victims so often feel in the aftermath of rape is just another 

violation. In a reimagined Australia, I posit that the shame carried by countless girls and 

women be transformed into the country’s shame, and, as citizens, we would consciously 

share the responsibility for creating cultural change in order to reduce or eliminate the 

incidence of gendered sexual violence. 

 

We all have the potential to initiate change through action, however small or large that 

action may be. Change is possible on many levels and in many ways. Within academia, 

researchers can be bold and creative with their methodologies. They can ask difficult 

questions of themselves and of others. They can make themselves vulnerable and they 

can take risks. But beyond academia, all of us—not just those directly impacted by the 

violence of rape, or family and friends of victims, or those who fear being raped—all of 

us can begin by recognising and publicly acknowledging that Australia’s global ranking 

as a country with one of the highest rates of sexual violence, particularly against girls 

and women, is a shameful one.  

 

Action for change comes in many forms. As individuals, we can equip ourselves with 

knowledge and be alert to the possibility of rape trauma in those closest to us. We can 

make empathic space for victims to talk about the many dimensions of their lived 

experience, even if it makes us feel uncomfortable personally, and even if it challenges 

us professionally. Collectively, we can make room for the voices of rape victims and the 

narratives of rape violence and its consequences. We can expose ourselves to, and learn 

from, those narratives. We can discuss and accumulate and build on existing 

knowledge. We can critically reflect on, and take steps towards challenging the sorts of 

power structures, entrenched discourses, and social attitudes that fail rape victims and 

serve to support the status quo.  

 

In time, if we are individually and collectively able to achieve these possibilities, we 

will truly begin to understand the reality of rape trauma and Australia’s shameful status 

as a country with increasing rates of sexual violence will have a chance of receding into 

history. And if this happens, our children, especially our daughters, will be able to 

dream big and wide because they will not have to fear being raped, and they will not 

have to suffer the lifelong consequences of rape, nor carry their trauma in shame, in 

silence, and in their bodies.  

 



   
 

334 
 

 

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Brenda Downing is a feminist researcher and writer with specific interests in sexual 

trauma and embodied memory, autoethnography, and arts-based inquiry. Brenda is 

especially interested in exploring the material conditions of the traumatised female body 

by engaging with forms of inquiry that move beyond abstract theorising into rigorous 

methodological investigation and theoretical insight. Her PhD thesis, Feeling the 

fleshed body: The aftermath of childhood rape, won the Edith Cowan University 

Faculty Research Medal, 2014 and, jointly won the Magdalena Prize in Feminist 

Research, 2014. In 2016, her thesis was published by Peter Lang, Bern.