Four women, from Pakistan, the US, Britain and Germany, sit quietly on a panel at a festival as the audience assembles and the hubbub of voices dies away. Silence falls.
Then they speak. The Pakistani woman was 8 years old, possibly younger she says, when her 15 year old cousin began to sexually abuse her. The British woman has never spoken in public before. Her written testimony is simultaneously matter of fact, poetic and searingly affecting. She is shaking as she reads: ‘From the age of 14, I was raped and sexually assaulted 7 times over an 11 year period by 12 different men in 4 countries.’ The American woman says: ‘I was raped 8 years ago when I was 29. It was the classic stranger rape that makes the headlines, and it did.’ The German woman reads a poem then says: ‘It was an older cousin. I was 5 when it started. Actually I don’t know when it started. I can’t remember when the grooming phase ended.’
For two hours the women give their testimony and talk with others in the audience who have had similar experiences. They have been brought together by Jude Kelly, the artistic director of London’s South Bank Centre, as part of the annual Women of the World Festival (WOW). Kelly is chairing. She has created a space to talk, but not the usual space. This is not a therapy room, where a progression from taboo, secrecy, pain, guilt, and shame towards healing might be hoped for. This is a public, cultural space where the women’s stories and their manner of telling them expand their particular narratives into the universal and political.
