Project Xan

 Leigh Sales' 7.30 show on Thursday night caught me as I was sitting at my PC. I'd previously listened to it rather than watching it, but when I saw Xan Fraser I had to stop typing on my PC and sit and watch and listen. This show was something I could relate to.

Rape.

Xan Fraser was raped in 1981 when she was 12. I didn't know anything about her until Thursday night, but I felt, during the 7.30 show, that she was so similar to me way back then. My rape had happened in 1973, 8 years before Xan was raped. She was 5 years younger than I had been when I was raped. After my own ordeal I had felt so much like Xan said she had felt, but I didn't get pregnant straight after that. I built a wall within my mind to forget about it. At the end of 2012, suffering PTSD, I wrote the website which is still online, www.itsokaytobeangry.com.

Watching the 7.30 report on Hellie Turner's project play was something which sent a shiver down my spine. This play is difficult. It tells women's rights, but also tells how young girls / young women / adult women don't have rights if a court will not find for them. Xan was a child. She did not have any adult ability to consent to what happened to her. The court found the three men guilty, but only gave them probation. Not jail. Let's go a step further... if she had been an adult then she would still not have consented when she was unconscious, so any man who did this to her when she was a child or when she was an adult must be found guilty and must be sent to jail.

My other blog, http://itsokaytobeangry.blogspot.com.au/, talks about rape, and this is where this blog should have been, but today I feel so angry about how rape is "forgiven", how too many women can't get justice, and how too many women can't get over what happened too many years ago. Like me. I chose to put the rape and the current play with Xan Fraser on this blog so that anyone who reads this - who might not ever read the other blog - understands what rape is, and why it is extremely wrong not to send a man who did this to jail. Read my last post on that other blog - it's entitled "Rape - against the law but it still happens".

This legal bullshit which lets a rapist off with no jail must be changed. Women have rights. Women should never be raped. Men should never think they can get away with this.

Well done, Xan Fraser and Hellie Turner. Such a good, such a sad play.