This article and its audio feature descriptions of rape and may be distressing. If you feel you need to talk to somebody, The Dublin Rape Crisis Centre runs a 24-hour helpline at 1 800 778 888 or you can speak with The Samaritans at 116 123.
Mia Döring is a psychotherapist and a survivor of rape. Last year she delivered a TedX talk titled “Break the Silence and Build a New World”. She joined Ryan Tubridy to share her story.
Mia explained that she and some friends were drinking in a local park on the night she was raped. She was 16.
“I’d never had any sort of sexual encounters with anybody before at all. Like, kissing and stuff like that. But nothing else.“
Some boys about Mia’s age arrived at the park and she remembers talking with one boy before moving away from the rest of the group. They kissed for a while before he became “much more physical”.
“He was like touching me and stuff and I like, let this happen. I didn't like it but…It was like, I don’t want him to think…I’ve never done this before. It wasn’t even a cognitive ‘I don't want him to think that’. It was instinctive, this is what you do.”
Mia remembers losing consciousness for a time.
“I woke up and he was raping me. It was so surreal because…I felt this pain that I’ve never felt before since. It was like being stabbed, you know? It was horrific. And I was incapable of protecting myself. I wasn’t able to move…I instantly disassociated from my body so I didn’t even feel the pain anymore…everything just shut off and I don’t remember what happened then.”
Mia didn’t tell anybody what had happened for a year. She told Ryan she has “no memory” of the days following the assault.
“It was very confusing because I didn't realise that what had happened was rape.”
This confusion about how to define what had happened to her led her to google “rape porn”, an attempt to figure out if that was she had experienced.
“I was trying to find myself in it and trying to see what does rape look like. Did I look like her? Did I say things like she’s saying? Did I make noises like she’s making?“
Ryan asked if she could explain the reasons for not reporting the rape to listeners who might not understand. She said that she worried about “disrupting” her family and how they might react.
“You hold it and you take it on and then it’s like a heavy blanket around you. And you're so afraid that, if I share this, will they be able to carry a bit of this blanket? And what if they can’t?”
Shame played a part in her reluctance to tell anybody, Mia said.
“Just feeling so dirty and so embarrassed and so like, this is not how your first time is supposed to be. Your first time, you know, is supposed to be nice and someone who loves you or whatever. The socially acceptable way of losing your virginity. It’s not supposed to be, like, gross in a field with some person you never met before.”
When Mia was 17, she told her older sister what had happened when she found her crying. She told Ryan that “nothing was said about it” afterwards. Mia attempted suicide at 18, prompting her sister to tell her parents what had happened. But it wasn’t a magic salve.
“Then it wasn’t talked about either...The option of reporting it didn’t come up at all…it just wasn’t in the air. It wasn’t spoken about in general anyway. Sex wasn’t spoken about in general. Consent and all this, like we’re talking about now, finally, wasn’t talked about them at all. And rape was definitely not talked about.”
Coming from that place to speaking about it on a public level was a big change. Mia gives a lot of credit to her habit of writing things down as a way of processing things as a factor in her becoming “more and more open about it”.
“The silence around it is still there but I can handle it now...I realised that with writing I was kind of owning what happened to me a bit and I was able to articulate things way better than just chatting…I felt the injustice of it very much and I felt the injustice of all women who had survived sexual violence. And I wanted to do something to help.”
Mia and Ryan spoke about the perception that there are different “shades” of rape. Mia believes that this is a defence mechanism against the reality that most rapes are committed by people the victim trusts.
“I think people don't want to be uncomfortable. They don't want to feel like ‘Oh, this is way more prevalent than I thought it was’. And they don't want to feel like it could be people that we know that commit these crimes. It’s much more unsettling when it’s not that ‘stranger’ thing.“
One problem, Mia pointed out, is that rape is still considered a “women’s issue”. She encouraged men to use peer influence, “the nice side of peer pressure” to call out behaviour they feel is unacceptable.
“They can interject if they see something happening. They can say something if somebody says something really gross about somebody…that you won’t just let it go because you don't want to wreck the buzz.”
As for how she is doing now, Mia told Ryan that she is in a good place in her life and enjoys the work she is doing.
“I’m okay. I’m writing a book and I’m being a therapist. I’m making sure my life is nice. So, I’m okay.”
When asked what single message she would like listeners to take away from the conversation today, Mia stressed the importance of open conversations.
“We all need to be talking about everything. Because I have a feeling that that boy who raped me didn't even know that he did that.”
Listen back to the full interview with Mia Döring on The Ryan Tubridy Show here.