It’s time to break the culture of silence surrounding sexual violence.

Cyra Perry Dougherty is the Editor of upcoming Red Press anthology, The Anatomy of Silence. Here, Perry discusses how this project began, and why we all need to tackle the culture of silence surrounding sexual violence together.

CW: rape, sexual assault, violence.

In October 2016, following the release of the video of Donald Trump and Billy Bush’s “locker room” chat about grabbing women by the “pussy,” I was confronted with a familiar boiling, burning, body-held-to-the-fire feeling coursing through my body — a trauma trigger that brought up the pain of my past experiences with sexual violence.

I could hear the truth in Trump’s candor.

There was no doubt in my mind that he had abused women in the ways he described.

I spent the better part of a day crafting a Facebook post that would explain my disgust, call out the culture of violence Trump had been cultivating in his campaign, and make me feel empowered in a moment of torturous memories and pain.

I was overcome by the sense that all of those behaviors I had worked so hard in therapy to identify as abusive, manipulative, and major red flags in relationships were present in this man running for the highest office.

I was pained by the knowledge that the millions of traumatized people in our country would be held hostage to his tactics. Trump was appearing as a real live case study of the way the cycle of shame and violence works in cases of sexual violence.

Fast forward a few months, I was in the hospital holding my newborn baby girl, Trump’s inauguration and the women’s resistance march close on the horizon, and I realized that there was something bigger than Trump at play for me. As a woman, as a mother, I was desperate to understand how so many in our country could look away from the stark reality of Trump’s hate and violence; how it could simply be a non-issue; how it could cease to exist as a factor in their analysis of his suitability for leadership. This desperation mirrored my post traumatic obsession with trying to understand why and how people had looked away from me in the moments before being raped, why people did not notice or wilfully ignored the warning signs of sexual violence playing out in front of them.

Months later, as #METOO caught on like wildfire in my social media feeds, it became clear I was not alone. Far too many of us have lived our lives in silence, ruminating on these same questions of how people could look away, ignore our suffering, coerce us to stop talking, and solve their own discomfort by shaming and blaming us.

I said #METOO — but I was scared that once again we’d be heard in the moment and then promptly ignored — that our voices would have a fleeting impact and then people would return to their lives without revisiting the issue.

Moved by something inexplicable, I posted, again on Facebook, that I was soliciting proposals for essays that could speak to the culture of silence surrounding sexual violence. With that, The Anatomy of Silence was conceived.

The energy, ideas, and connections that stemmed from that post held me accountable to moving forward with the project. As people’s stories trickled in, it became clear that embedded in the tangled mess of our stories about silence surrounding sexual violence were the keys, the insights, into understanding how our collective silences operate within a larger culture of shame.

Along the way, I’ve had to accept how much fear I still carry: fear of judgment, victim blamers, minimizers, and other critics; fear of those who are simply unable to bear listening to our stories and to hearing the ways that their beliefs, actions, or comments may have silenced people; and fear of those who will see the need to change their behavior but who will fight tooth and nail to avoid doing so.

But in acknowledging these fears, I have returned to my goal of finding pathways to collective healing, not just for survivors but also for our global society caught in the grips of cycles of shame and violence that thrive on the fuel of our silences.

Our stories teach us that collective healing will require us all to be vulnerable to one another, to connect to our pains, and to trust in others — to do the very things that trauma has made most difficult — all of which will insist that we find ways of breaking our silences for good.

I believe that in making meaning out of the stories in this collection, we will be able listen more deeply for the wounds others carry. We will be able to hear silences differently. We will learn how to respond to suffering. How to not to look away. We will have the opportunity to listen to our shame, to our anger. We will be given the chance to talk more freely about sex, feelings, intimacy, and our bodies. And if we rise to the occasion, I believe we can begin to heal together.

The Anatomy of Silence will launch on Kickstarter in October 2018. Please sign up to our newsletter for updates. We are currently accepting submissions for the anthology— writers will be paid, and the deadline is 23/08/2018. More details here.