Is it possible for women who have been abused to rebuild their sense of self boundaries?

We were about 30 women in a dark room, with no windows and a few dim lights. We were sitting on the floor. It was a feminist self-defense workshop, part of the program of the Jineolojî GynCamp, the Women's Science in development by the revolutionary women in Rojava. "Self-defense", said Zilean, the Kurdish woman who came from Rojava to share information and learnings about their revolutionary process with us, "is one of the pillars of the revolution women are making".

What is feminist self-defense?

Our instructor was a lesbian woman from Italy, and she began by asking us what we meant by "self-defense" and what we were expecting to learn in the workshop. After some of us shared our ideas about it, Zilean replied: "It's the safety on being".

Self-defense has always been a pillar for radical feminism as well. Self-defense groups were massively organized by the feminist movements of the 1970s, which recognized the male violence and the need for women to be able to defend themselves. But until that moment, I had never ever thought on what that "feminist" in the "feminist self-defense" meant and what it implied. Listening to the women in that room opened my eyes.

I always thought about self-defense as something physical, a set of practical techniques that we could use to defend ourselves. I entered that room expecting to twist some arms approaching from my back, probably some kicks and punches as well. Probably because I've always practiced martial arts like karate, judo, and jiu-jitsu when I was younger, always in mixed groups in which I fought side-by-side with men and, as a woman, I used to feel this need to "stand my ground". In this context, I was constantly proving myself and self-affirming not to be considered "weaker", or an easy opponent due to our obvious physical difference or because I was female. Thus, whenever I was thinking about fighting, it was all about sport or techniques. But when you look from the woman's perspective, from the feminist perspective - which means being aware of the male violence pattern, recognizing that every space is conditioned to the power relations, starting from the very life experiences of women - then everything changes. Then it is exactly that what Zilean had said: "it is the safety on being".

From this perspective, feminist self-defense is much more about breaking up with the image - externally built, but internally rooted in a very profound way - that makes us look at ourselves as preys in the world (and I really mean "world", because when it comes to sexual violence there is no such a thing as public or private for women).

Being aware of male violence, and the fact that most of us have a story of sexual harassment and/or abuse to tell, to a greater or lesser level, places us in that shrinking, tying position, constantly expecting for a sneak attack wherever we are. This ever-going vigilance makes us not only to police ourselves all the time: our clothes, our behavior, our choices; but mostly makes us feel like we were a piece of meat hanging at the butchers' window or at the tigers' cage. This is normally something that we are aware of, but more often not. This shows, in fact, how deep the fear and the totalitarian presence of sexual violence have become in us.

After that first round of reflections, it was our instructor's turn. As a butch lesbian, self-defense was an emergency need for her. She had been doing it for a few years now, and a few months ago she had started to give free workshops for the women of her feminist collective in the city. But she still didn't feel safe walking alone on the street. The acknowledgment of her own vulnerability was always there.

Our instructor, together with another woman, arranged a "cute corner" in that dark room. They put two chairs side-by-side, covered them with a pink blanket so it looked like a small sofa, and placed a pillow and a teddy bear on it.

"These workshops often bring up many feelings and experiences," she said. "If any of you feel the need to withdraw for some reason, then you can take a break on the "cute corner". Have a glass of water, lie down, do whatever you need to be ok again. One of us can stay on your side, or perhaps we can give you a hug if you feel like hugging."

I must confess that I had a very arrogant thought at that moment. Looking around, going from face to face, I wondered who would be the first to cry. "Who will be the woman with unresolved issues who will cry and need to recur to the cute corner?", I thought.

It is essential to speak briefly about the exercises we had so that you can understand everything I've outlined above. As I said, I was expecting for punches, kicks, some arm wrists. It was not the case.

In our first exercise, we split into two rows, one facing the other from the edges of the room. One of us should stand in place while the other had to head towards her pair. The standing woman would have to make it clear, using her eyes only – just a gaze, no gestures nor words –when her woman peer should stop. This was about standing our ground and setting boundaries.

My peer was our Kurdish guest, Zilean, at the opposite side of the room. She started, coming towards my direction, striding but not running. When she was nearly on top of me, Zilean started to giggle. "She won't tell me to stop," she said to the woman on my side. I said, "Wait… what? I thought I had made it very clear". Zilean tried again, this time she rushed towards me. Same. She laughed because "I was not telling her to stop", and I laughed and denied it "Yes, I DID!”.

Second exercise. We had to say something to stop our peers when we didn't want them to advance towards ourselves anymore. In the third exercise, we had to gesticulate. These last two exercises were easier, there were no misunderstandings. To wrap it up, we did some punching sessions - but, to be very honest, this was the less important part of the day.

No tears until here.

Sharing

We sat in a circle again to share our thoughts about the exercises, our opinions, learnings, etc. Most women said they felt it was been very hard to execute the first exercise (not allowing someone to cross the line using nothing but your eyes), and how meaningful was it. At my side, a friend confessed she didn't know how to make it clear when she didn't want someone else to invade her space without using gestures or explicitly saying it. She also said something that surprised me – I was surprised about her statement and surprised about being surprised! She said she had always been very loud and always used it to defend herself. Whenever she felt uncomfortable or threatened, she would shout; but that there were certain contexts - for instance, in public transports - where it is "not cool" to shout and being loud.

Another woman said she enjoyed the first exercise because she was able to feel that there was clearly a "space" around her, a safety bubble. Also, she said that she had always "felt" this space, like a bubble all around her, even when she was walking on the streets. For this very reason, for acknowledging the existence of this "safety bubble", even if unconsciously, it was much more aggressive and violent when someone would challenge and try to intentionally break into this safe space.

"On the other hand," she continued, "I had some trouble trying to figure it out when I should tell her to stop. I guess that, for we are friends, as I trust her, it seems that this boundary is more malleable, harder to define. It's as if this boundary were mobile, I don't know… moldable. Less rigid."

Other women expressed feeling the same: that their "boundaries" were malleable because they were dealing with a friend, a sister with whom they lived with or with whom they shared their activism. And that's the reason why they didn't feel threatened, and sometimes didn't even feel that space really existed.

I listened to everything with a poker face. But my mind was blowing up. Flashes of my daily life were coming up along with the writings of many feminists, Andrea Dworkin in particular. Suddenly, everything fitted like a complex jigsaw puzzle. Not harmoniously, but painfully. That's when I decided to share my thoughts.

"While I listened to your stories," I said, "Many things came to my mind. I'll try to articulate my ideas. Bear with me, it can get confusing."

They were in silence, carefully listening to me.

"I also had a hard time with the first exercise. Zilean almost ran over me. Twice. She was laughing because, according to her, 'I didn't tell her to stop'. But I thought I did. I thought I made it clear that I said "stop". But, obviously, that was anything but clear, because she didn't get my message…"

One of the women was translating what we said for her. They laughed again.

"And this reminded me something… I mean, someone." I continued, "My sister's husband. He has always been the 'bully uncle' of the street where I grew up. Children were scared to death of him, even the ones from our own family. He is that guy nobody messes with, he's got a wick face. And he wasn't very talkative. He used to make us feel afraid without saying a single word, all he needed was to look at us. His dog, a very cute poodle, his home gatekeeper, never crossed the gates because she feared him so much. He had never beat her. He'd look at her, and she would lie down in a corner, tail between her legs. Not a word."

Arched eyebrows were facing me.

"I was thinking… this is something many men have in common, isn't it? Sometimes, they intimidated us in many ways and levels using nothing more than their eyes; whether we fear being beaten, or we are predicting being harassed, that look, the gaze that has the power to objectifies us… In so many ways."

Some heads agreed. I could see that some women had that epiphanic expression of who just realized something. Something we always knew, but we've never realized it until someone says it as it is.

"I was also surprised when she said about 'have always been loud'." I told them, "Because I know, from my own experience of being a victim of abuse, and I bet other women here probably have this experience as well, I know that I'm not like that. I can't speak."

My voice trembled. A knot stuck in my throat as if I had swallowed a shoe: uncomfortable, taking up space, unbreathable. The words were now harder and more painful to say.

"I suffered abuse for about 10 years, and whether it was in 'private spaces' or in 'public spaces', as transports, I was never able to speak. I couldn't say a word, I couldn't scream. I was never ever capable of doing it. From the common biological responses to fear and coercion (screaming, fighting, freezing or running away), I'd freeze every time. Completely. Like a stone."

I had to pause to swallow some saliva, trying to push that knot down my throat, which was making very difficult to speak and breathe at the same time. The tears I was holding down came up, flooding my cheeks.

"So, when you can't talk, and I know many women are just like me and have the same response in these situations, your eyes are very important. It's almost like it is the last resort you can count on in your body, and if you can't use it, it's damn difficult. I'm not saying this just because of the abuses I've experienced, but because I myself have also been able to help other women and girls who were feeling threatened or abused because I could see that in their eyes. Their look of despair; the look that seeks help and screams what the mouth can't say. We recognize; one recognizes herself in this look. And you need to know how to recognize it in order to act and help."

I had to take breaks to keep the speech going. Swallowing and pushing the knot down the throat. I took a deep breath. The atmosphere was very tense, I couldn't say if it was the room or just my chest. We were all on the same level. Horizontality. They were all listening.

"And I found it curious to hear what she said about feeling or acknowledging this «space», this «bubble» around herself, which is supposed to be our safe space. It's curious because I don't feel it anymore".

"There was a moment in my life that I used to feel exactly like that, back when I was suffering abuse. I used to feel this space, it was huge, an enormous dimension. It was huge so it could keep people away from me. I know we can't tell how large it is, but I know that my safe space dimension, at that time, when the abuse was so real and omnipresent, was bigger than the normal. I just knew it. Because I didn't want people to get too close, I was afraid, and I wouldn't risk it. And I have always been a person ever surrounded by many friends. Being by myself was very rare. But some closenesses are closer than others, right?"

"I remember each detail of the first abuse experience I had. I was only 5. It was the first time I truly realized this space existed. And I realized it because, the moment it happened, I feel that there was a space, a completely invisible space that I couldn't even imagine or tell at 5, that was being broken. I felt that there were undefined boundaries… As she said, "malleable." But malleable because it was being pushed. Because the man who was broking my boundaries was supposed to be a trustworthy person, a person from my family, and therefore it was hard to understand where exactly it was being broken. After repeated years and repeated experiences of abuse, I felt this bubble no longer existed."

Vulnerability

What should we do when we can no longer feel our bubbles, our zone of protection? What then? I tell you what: we carry on as if we were simply exposed all the time, and we don't want to be. How do we protect ourselves once we lose our boundaries?

There are many ways to do (or to deal with) this. For a long time, I called it "personal style" (this is probably what some people choose to call as "gender expression" now).

Baggy clothes, huge sweaters, boots. Every piece of clothing I used to wear looked bigger than me and disproportional to my short height. The less feminine, the better – in that age when most girls around me were exhaling femininity and beauty standards we were socialized to embody. They were flirting and discovering relationships with other people. They wanted to stand out. I wanted to fade away.

I wanted to cover my body as much as possible so it wouldn't be visible. I felt that this would be a good way not to have my 38kg teenage thighs exposed to the heavy, calloused and disgusting hands of strangers, adult and older men, who would sit on my side in public transports and sneakily touch me. It was a way to hide my breasts that I actually didn't have, but I didn't want them to draw attention at all - because I had already woken up with a pedophile over me once, with his hands under my t-shirt, trying to touch nipples that wasn't even really breasts yet. I wanted to erase everything.

Of course, back then, I didn't know most of this the way I'm telling you now. Not consciously. I came to know it recently when I read about a 24-year-old girl who committed suicide in the news. Ana Luísa had been a victim of sexual abuse at 10. Her mom said to an interviewer:

"From that moment, she only went to school wearing boy's uniform, with clothing that didn't show her body off. One day, she told me that a college friend commented that boys didn't like girls who wear baggy clothing. So she started to use it. She didn't want to be noticed. With time, the black clothes came, and the discolored hair too, an attempt to erase the image of that 10-year-old joyful girl. Ana Luisa spent her life running away from herself."

Been there. It was a painful epiphany.

Boundaries

As I was thinking about the boundaries of our bodies, I recalled the true story of Jayne Steinem, which I've read in Andrea Dworkin's "Pornography: men possessing women": a woman was sentenced to 38 years in prison for hiring men to beat her husband. Jayne hired them because she wanted her husband to know what it was like to be beaten. She has been. Beaten, raped and tortured in different ways, consecutively. On this, Dworkin writes:

"Ironically, there are many women - and recently a teenager girl, a victim of incest - who have hired others to kill the men - husbands, fathers - who were torturing them because they could not bear to do it themselves. Or the woman pours gasoline on the bed when he sleeps and lights the fire. Jayne didn't hire the men to kill her husband; the real question may be, why not? why didn't she? Women don't understand self-defense the way men do - perhaps because sexual abuse destroys the self. We don't feel we have a right to kill just because we are being beaten, raped, tortured, and terrorized."

Dworkin calls it the "self". I call it «bubble», safety zone. But we are talking about the same thing.

In other words, my sense of total vulnerability, the "bubble" that was dissipated after being abused and made me aware, as a woman, that I am completely accessible to any man, is that what Andrea calls "self". She speaks from a perspective from within, mine is from the outside. This is the difference. We are both talking about the destruction of self-confidence, the notion of safety, the very notion of self, control, and power, which often means the destruction of the capacity for reaction. After all, only subjects can react. Only subjects take actions. Abuse destroys the ego – and through abuse, we are transformed into objects.

Then I remembered the first text from Andrea Dworkin I have ever read, "Prostitution and Male Supremacy". It was the first time I heard about the link between prostitution and incest. Year after year, numerous studies have pointed to a strong correlation between childhood sexual abuse and later prostitution - on girls, of course.

For example, in 1981, a study with 200 prostituted women and girls found that two-thirds of them have been abused by fathers in childhood. In 1989, a comparative analysis of the data available so far stated that the link is not so much that child abuse leads girls to prostitution later, but rather to run away (from home). However, 90% of children who run away from their homes do it to escape sexual abuse. Evidentially a direct correlation, as another study would show again in 1991. In 1995, still another study found that "Sexually abused children are 28 times more likely to be arrested later for prostitution than those who have not been abused." Another study, from 2009, showed that 79% of prostituted women were sexually abused in childhood. Its summary reads:

"Comparison with control subjects indicated the severity of sexual abuse in childhood was a significant contributor to the currently poor mental health and diminished self-esteem of the former prostitutes."

That is, for more than 30 years researchers have pointed out such an evident link. But it was Andrea Dworkin - who has also been there - who summed up this link so clearly, going back to what I mentioned above about our destruction, the destruction of our notion of self, our notion of a safety zone for us and us only:

"Incest is boot camp. Incest is where you send the girl to learn how to do it. So you don't, obviously, have to send her anywhere, she's already there and she's got nowhere else to go. She's trained. And the training is specific, and it is important: not to have any real boundaries to her own body; to know that she's valued only for sex; to learn about men what the offender, the sex offender, is teaching her." (my emphasis)

The puzzle was now complete.

Yes, abuse and incest are the preparation of girls to be the women men want them to be. Accessible. Vulnerable. Boundaryless. Because then, any sense of self-protection, privacy, self-preservation, boundaries, and limits of your own body are destroyed. In the beginning, it's like a wall: our walls, being gradually broken. Not brick to brick, it's worse. They are huge, aggressive and violent blows destroying large parts at a time. They open huge holes in your protection. Holes that leave us vulnerable. One can see us through them, they can sneak through them, they can touch us through them. After successive attacks, there is no wall anymore. There's nothing. It's like it has never been there, in a way that you're publicly exposed wherever you are, wherever you go.

I am 28 now. More than half of my life was lived under abuse - at least 10 under a sexual abuse routine. My main question now is whether it is possible, at some point in our lives, to rebuild this sense of self-protection, self-preservation, to rebuild a safety zone that has been destroyed? And how do we do that? At what cost is it done?

Because abuse is, for most of us, the biggest slice of our lives. Far beyond a shadow of the past that creeps disgustingly over our stride, it is an always-there presence. When it isn't happening, its presence is as incorporeal: it is the possibility of happening. A presence that accompanies us everywhere because we are too aware of male violence and its patterns to lower our guard. Because abuse becomes part of us, and if it does not constitute us intrinsically, it at least shapes our identities. At the age of 13, I could not differentiate nor identify what was "my cool rocker style" and what was "self-erasure as harassment protection". And I only did it 10 years later (and it does make one think about how gender identity disguise girls' suffering, but this is another story).

Meeting the real feminist political theory, so-called radical feminism, has helped me in many ways to regain a sense of self-belonging, for I became aware of the dynamics of power, sex-gender relations, how it is perpetuated in our society through sexual violence and terrorism against women. I learned to identify the pattern. And if, on the one hand, it is scary, on the other hand, it is strengthening as well. It is easier to fight when you can name what is the cause of your fear and violence if you can identify it and face it. This strengthens us, but first, it hurts. First, it causes pain. First, it will touch your open wound.

But if we do not face our open wounds, we can't recover from them - even less to heal them.

I still don't know whether it's possible to rebuild the bubble, but I'm trying, I'm on the process. And I believe this may be the key to find out how to help other women who, like me, have been broken-in their own "selves" and their "bubbles". Especially those who are right now having their body boundaries continually broken in prostitution, pornography, rape, child marriage, genital mutilation or trivialized harassments.

Aline Rossi is a Brazilian radical feminist, founder of the blog Feminismo Com Classe, and co-founder member of the digital magazine QG Feminista. Currently living and campaigning in Portugal, where she helped to found the Lisbon Feminist Assembly, the abolitionist collective Generation Abolition Portugal, and actively participates in the antifascist movement.