‘Do you remember pictures you’ve seen of European cities during the plague?’ Andrea Dworkin asked in 1983. ‘There were wheelbarrows that would go along. They would just pick up corpses and throw them in.
‘That is what it is like knowing about rape…
‘Piles and piles and piles of bodies that have whole lives and human names and human faces. I speak for many feminists and not only myself, when I say I’m tired of what I know and sad beyond any words I have about what has already been done to women up to this point. Now. Here. In this place.
‘I want one day of respite,’ Andrea continued, as she addressed a room of 500 men, asking them to imagine the impossible: a single day without rape.
‘One day off. One day in which no new bodies are piled up. One day in which no new agony is added to the old. I’m asking you to give it to me. How could I ask for less? It is so little. How could you offer me less, it’s so little?’
The feminist’s words may be over 40 years old, yet the bodies are still piling up at an alarming rate. 6.5million women aged 16 or over in England and Wales have been raped. Globally, one in three women have been subject to sexual violence in their lifetime.
That’s why filmaker and acitivist Lorien Haynes has called on a host of celebrities – including Jason Isaacs, Dame Harriet Walter, Saffron Burrows, Nathan Fillion, Self Esteem, Lianne La Havas, and David Morrissey – to bring Andrea’s words to life again.
Released this week to mark International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and the start of 16 Days of Activism, Lorien’s powerful short film: I Want A 24-Hour Rape Truce, sees 120 voices – men, women, young, old, survivors, and non-survivors – take 10 minutes to recite the words of the 1980s radical feminist.
Talking about the project, Refuge champion Lorien tells Metro: ‘It’s such a simple idea, but it’s so fundamentally impactive, because I don’t think women have ever considered asking for a day without rape, or one day truce, or a ceasefire.
This Is Not Right
On November 25, 2024 Metro launched This Is Not Right, a year-long campaign to address the relentless epidemic of violence against women.
With the help of our partners at Women’s Aid, This Is Not Right aims to shine a light on the sheer scale of this national emergency.
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‘When you sort of consider the suggestion of actually asking for it, you realise that it’s completely impossible. It’s never going to happen. This is sort of your thought process. Then you go, well actually, you can’t ask one day. You’ve got to ask every day.
‘What I loved about Andrea Dawkins’ writing is it’s sort of critical thinking. It raises all the issues and makes you realise how sexual violence is so normalised.’
This is how Lorien came up with the idea for her project after looking for an inventive way to highlight an issue society has become so desensitised to.
Help is available
Refuge’s National Domestic Abuse Helpline is available on 0808 2000 247 for free, confidential support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
A live chat service is also available from 10am to 10pm, Monday to Friday, and from 10am to 6pm on weekends.
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‘I think that one of the ways to get people’s attention is not through the news and is not through documentary footage necessary,’ she explains.
‘It is through creative projects, it kind of tricking people into an environment where they feel relaxed, where they’re looking at something that might be potentially entertaining.
‘And in that space, you start raising those issues. I think you can also use comedy to do that. I don’t think it’s a question of necessarily hammering things down people’s throats.’
Just like YA novel The Perks of Being A Wallflower, which simultaneously entertained and broached the extremely tricky subject of a male teenager being sexually abused by a relative as the story unfolded. Or as recently demonstrated in Adolescence, which is now the benchmark of conversations surrounding early education and violence against women and girls.
Because most rapes aren’t confined to the unlikely world of police dramas, Nordic noirs, and grisly horrors. In real life, they can happen in the most ordinary of scenarios: rape doesn’t usually take place in isolated incidents of stranger danger. For some women, being raped is a numb, daily horror.
It’s in the statistics: six in seven rapes are carried out by someone known to the survivor, with half committed by a current or ex partner. In 2023 an average of 24 rapes were reported to the Metropolitan Police every day. Five in six women don’t report rape. In short: it’s everywhere. Women are suffering in the silence of everyday life.
That’s why it was important for Lorien to get a variety voices involved in the film. ‘The wonderful thing is that everybody came together for the same reasons,’ she says.
‘When we were asking people to do it, it was really noticeable that women in particular couldn’t get through it without breaking down, because it’s really true. It’s speaking the truth.’
In one particularly poignant moment, Esther McGregor can be seen crying through the words: ‘For myself, I just want to experience one day of freedom before I die.’
While getting celebrities on board for their broad reaching platforms was important, they were no more important than regular survivors, insists Lorien.
‘There are survivors in this film, there are celebrities, there are non-survivors. I think it was really important. There’s no hierarchy here,’ she explains.
‘What I loved about it was that Esther McGregor does it with her mum, Lenny James is doing it with his twin girls, Celine and Georgia. My daughter Lilac is in the film, and it’s multi-generational. It’s everybody coming together because they’ve cared. I do think that’s positive. I do think that’s hopeful.’
Misconceptions about rape
The Crown Prosecution service found in a survey:
- Just 39% of people accurately identified that most rapists know their victim
- Only half recognised that it can still be rape if a victim doesn’t resist or fight back (53% got this right)
- Only a third of respondents correctly identified women rarely make up rape allegations (just 0.6% of rape reports are false allegations, and women are unlikely to come forward as less than 3% of reported rapes end in conviction, anyway)
Most importantly, the film required men – and getting them on board wasn’t difficult, says Lorien.
‘It was an opportunity for men to do something, and they all said yes. I don’t think any man I asked said no.
‘David Morrissey, for example, he turns up to everything that I’ve ever been involved with that Refuge has done,’ she explains, adding that Harry Potter actor Jason Isaacs is ‘a real doer’ when it comes to ‘stepping in and sorting out’.
‘It’s hard for men to know how to advocate, because often they don’t feel worthy, and they’re thinking, well, how do I say anything? How do I do anything?
‘This is about education,’ Lorien explains. ‘We know how to change things. We know what the issues are. So I think for me personally, it always comes back to trying to integrate that knowledge into early education.’
If not, in 20 years’ time – an estimated 14,000,000 rapes later – the filmmaker will sadly be able to answer her question she asks today: ‘How the hell have we got here?’
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