Today’s Guest Author is Puff, the Magic Dragon. Thank you so much for your contribution, my dear friend. My apologies for the delay – it’s taken me several days to get into the “guest author” persona but at last I’ve managed! (And I’ve written down the password …)

Rape never heals is the basis of any discussion about rape.

There is no passage of time, no therapy, and no medicine to reverse it.

There is no way to return to being un-raped.

The trauma may reduce, but it can never unhappen.

You could protest that any violent attack does the same. But there’s a fundamental difference: rape is an invasion. Why do countries spend so much energy and resources to repel invasion? Let that thought linger a while and consider it.

The perpetrators may have many reasons or none.

A perpetrator, or to say it plainly, a rapist, always has an excuse, usually founded on a false belief of the lesser humanity of women. But unlike non-human mammals, a female human has a menstrual cycle, not an oestrus cycle. The permission needed to engage with a male human comes from her consciousness, as it does for any human to engage sexually with another.

Unlike animals, human mammals have choice, and they exercise it. Female humans exercise the choice all the time – to accept, reject, or just not be interested – all their lives. It is why we as females are not animals in heat. We are not there for the taking. No human is there for the taking. We have the fundamental human right to decide with whom we have sexual relations, and when and how.

So when this human right is broken, it is not we who become less than human.

We do not revert to the animal instincts of a species needing to propagate to survive. There are too many humans anyway, we passed that point millenniums ago.

The rapist is the one who has chosen to revert, to treat other humans as mere objects, and to betray humanity.

Rapists violate the human rights of others for their own sub-human excuses.

This is not just the violent assault, the sudden attack.

When a person does not or cannot give consent, it is rape. If you are not invited into the house, it is trespass. If permission is revoke and you do not leave, it is trespass.

With the body of a human both are rape.

A rapist can believe what they are doing is not rape: “You can’t call rape” is a common phrase.

It is rape even when a person has to put up with the act to relieve the pressure to give-in, to “get it over and done with”, or to keep the rapist from hurting others in the family.

So how should we react to rapists?

As humans who briefly lost their way, with the usual excuse of its being the victims fault?

Or as perpetrators of a crime against humanity: unfit for the freedom of human society, or any role in which they have authority over any other human being?

Society can only work on trust. When that trust is broken, it must be mended.

Rape is a fundamental breach of trust and cannot be mended.

When a person is raped, society itself is raped.

As a human society, it is up to us to determine if we will accept this, excuse it, cover up for it, deny its existence, collude and, ultimately  betray our humanity and each other.

Just remember, the victim, and us, can never, ever be un-raped.