I wanted to share a few thoughts on how I recovered after being attacked on 15th November 2021 because so many women and girls have been attacked. As this isn’t my specialist area, I was unfamiliar with statistics in this field so I googled, How many women are attacked in the USA annually, and this is what I found on April 29th, 2024:
“According to the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, women experience about 4.8 million intimate partner-related physical assaults and rapes every year. Less than 20 percent of battered women sought medical treatment following an injury.”
I paused for thought as here was an alleged statistic but did it actually mean anything? Knowing that so many women had been attacked didn’t make me feel better. In fact, I worried about how they managed what they’d been through. Did they get the after care they needed, and was someone watching out for them? Did they know where to go? Did they know that no one else had a right to, or should change their story? Did they know how to manage what they were feeling, or what they wanted to do? So many questions, few answers.
The women that have been harmed are the front line of where life experiences destruction.
A destruction that cannot ever be fully addressed or understood. No one realizes the impact on the families or, the damage to the emotional, psychological, and spiritual connections of the woman or girl being attacked. How she doubts every belief she has, how the most intimate relationships of her life are impacted, her husband, her children, her parents, and many more besides.
She may or may not ever be able to speak about what was done to her, and the flashbacks will damn near destroy her.
I remember my first feeling when I was attacked from behind was, ‘death, I’m going to die’. I also thought, ‘my daughters are at home in bed, they might not ever see me again’. Can you imagine how devastating an attack is for your mind to go into feeling that this is the end of your life?
I’m sharing my experience because I had worked in the criminal justice system (CJS) in England as a probation officer and can tell you first hand that we MUST ALL take care of our emotional and psychological wellbeing ourselves. If justice is served and the outcome is in your favor, you are still left with having to manage all your feelings of confusion, from anxiety and stress, to why me, all on your own.
Stand in YOUR TRUTH
I’m here to tell you to stand in your truth. Trust in yourself, your feelings, whatever your body is trying to tell you that you cannot hear right now or cannot make sense of. By validating yourself, you will arrive at your truth. The fact that your story keeps changing is also part of that truth and a critical part of your healing process.
If like me, you forgot some essential facts, but stood in your truth, you will have realized that you forgot because your body was trying to protect you. You couldn’t understand some aspects because they were too great a burden on top of everything else you experienced, for you to make sense of it at that time.
Let’s see if we can eliminate a few of the issues, here we go … After Attack
After being attacked, I managed to walk home across Westminster Bridge in London. I had spoken to the policeman inside the Houses of Parliament. The journey home began a sequence of events I didn’t see coming. My mind wandered toward cases I had managed in the criminal justice system in England and Wales.
For those of you that know anything about adrenalin, you’ll also understand, you don’t get to control it, it controls you and it does it when it feels like. One of my irrational behaviors was becoming hypervigilant. This state is easily identifiable, as everything seems like a red flag. For me, every time I saw a younger man, that signaled danger. My attacker was someone 15 years younger than myself. I didn’t realize that I was feeling danger or that I was under threat, what I do remember vividly was that somehow, if there was a young man with a bag, I stopped because something said, ‘danger - elevated risk - protect yourself’.
Do you know what’s crazy about this sentiment? The guy that attacked me didn’t have a bag but my psyche recognised the bag to be of relevance. Whether it was signaling that I was in danger, I’m not sure I’ll ever know but after being attacked, any guy with a bag, triggered my alert mode.
Another important aspect was that none of the guys I saw with a bag were anywhere near me. I’d say the closest was 100 - 150 yards away from me.
Does this make sense to any of you?
What I was sure about was that I wasn’t crazy and that what was happening was not consistent with who I was. My mind was foggy. I couldn’t explain certain things and other things that happened made no sense. It felt as though I couldn’t differentiate one thing from another. Again, it was part of what my mind, body and soul needed to do to heal, in its time not in my time. My body needed to reset, re-align.
While I was walking home, countless cases I’d worked on ran through my mind, cases where children had been the victims of sexual abuse. I remembered their witness statements. One young person, under sixteen, had stated how he still woke up frightened, sweating and with his heart racing so fast that it scared him, but he wanted to make sure the guy who messed with him would never do that to anyone else.
A little girl under four years of age had told her mother that her step-uncle had messed with her fu-fu. My mind raced through how courageous these two young people were. When I thought of the mother of the little girl, I wondered how she managed to make sense of it all and get her little girl the help she needed and get the information to the right people? The thought that really haunted me was, will this little girl be able to make sense of the confusion she may suffer in her life because of what her step-uncle had done to her at such a tender age, and how would this affect and impact her life? How would she view boys/men?
The same question haunts me for women and girls who are attacked. How do we deal with it?
Anyway, the cases I’d managed as a domestic violence trainer/interventions worker coupled with probation and youth offending were enough for me to decide that I would try to do something about this, so I will write a book to empower women to take their power back after such an incident. I’d also like to bring attention to a program I deliver now, it’s the same program I attended to manage my own trauma of being attacked (see www.inshiraa.com/programmes).
The reason for this is that one of the good things about the program was that it gave essential information and provided exercises that women can do. Secondly, it teaches you to understand how your body is responding and how to listen to it. The program does not encourage medicines, it seeks to reduce use of antidepressants.
I’m writing this article first and foremost to let women who have been attacked under any circumstances to know, they were not to blame. Not only were they not to blame, they MUST, repeat MUST, remember how important they are and that what was done to them, cannot define them if they are able to find a way to tell their stories in the way they feel and experienced them at the time.
To know that their story may change, as their body allows them more access to what happened to them because our bodies are our best political and personal allies. What we experience and how we experience is for us to share in the way we want to share it, or can share it.
I remembered stories women had shared about how this millisecond of a moment changed the axis on which they lived. Their relationships were never the same again. Movies documented these sentiments showing how women could not let their husbands near them resulting in broken relationships but somehow the women’s experiences never really came through.
In 2021 I had been a probation officer for over a decade so I knew how the criminal justice system (CJS) worked in England and Wales. As a result of this, I wasn’t looking for justice, I was going to make sure women knew how to stand up and own their experiences. The CJS was written and created for men, by men. When a prosecutor examines women in court, he’s there to win a case. From my perspective, he couldn’t care less what women go through so you need to understand that after he has put you through the process, you need to be able to forget what he has subjected you to and Stand in YOUR TRUTH.
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Ruby is an author, a Certified Trauma facilitator and Domestic Violence Trainer/Facilitator.
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