Jennifer O’Connell: Is rape culture real? Ask Ciara Mangan

More than one in two women in Ireland and 28 per cent of men will experience sexual violence in their lifetime. Women are more likely to suffer violence because of their gender than blood pressure or cancer. If this was a new virus, we would shut society down to curb its spread. There would be public health campaigns urging people to stop the spread of rape culture.

Instead, we choose to carry on as though it is rare, an anomaly. We report rape statistics, but there is no data on all the joy robbed from the victim; the peace and potential they’ll never realise; the relationships they’ll pull back from; the things they’ll be too busy looking over their shoulder to accomplish. We profess shock at the statistics in one breath and in the next we wonder aloud whether rape culture is real.

Ask Ciara Mangan whether rape culture is real. She was raped on the floor of an upstairs bathroom at a house party in Castlebar, Co Mayo, on May 11th, 2013, two months before her Leaving Cert. And since then, it was as if “I was raped every day. It wasn’t just one night of my life. Like, it just doesn’t go away”.

Her rapist, Shane Noonan (28), pleaded guilty, and was sentenced this week to seven years’ imprisonment for what the judge called a “cold, predatory and premeditated rape”. Mangan delivered a victim impact statement that pierced right through our wilful blindness about the impact of rape and rape culture. “It was like a branding. I felt like he took part of me with him, if not all of me. It’s like you get stamped. I still feel tarnished. I have to carry it with me forever,” she says over the phone in the days afterwards, the pain still audible in her voice.

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She remembers trying to confide in a friend in the weeks afterwards, who told her just to “be glad you didn’t get pregnant. Just get over it”.

[ Rape survivor Ciara Mangan: ‘Everybody in work knew I was raped and it was the joke of the day’ ]

In Mangan’s victim impact statement she described how everyone at the place where she and her rapist both worked knew about the rape immediately, even though she told no one. Co-workers would change the lyrics of chart songs to insert references to the rape or the fact that he was rapist. People would make jibes like: “Be careful, Shane, you don’t want to rape her again.” She found herself “brainwashed” into the idea that, really, it was all a bit of a joke. “It destroyed me, one inch at a time.”

Rape culture did its work. It took ten months before she finally told her family. Five more years before she felt ready to report it; lonely, dark years during which she suffered from depression and thoughts of suicide, could barely eat, didn’t want to see anyone. Noonan took her whole 20s, she said this week. “My whole personality changed. I was so close to just giving up.”

The Indian American writer Sohaila Abdulali catalogues the hidden costs of rape, the whole “dreary list” of what happens to a person in the aftermath of a rape. “Flashbacks, secret-keeping, suicidal thoughts, low self-esteem, crippling fear of ... everything. Imagine the fantastic, the amazing, the mind-boggling things so many rape survivors could do, say, create or be if they didn’t have to waste time being traumatised and stymied and made small.” Why are we not furious about this “wholesale waste of potential”?

Slowly, and with lots of help, Mangan pieced herself back together. Reporting it and then going to court was terrifying, but she told herself that “even if I just get this far, that he was arrested, and he knows he did wrong, I might be at least still a bit proud of myself”.

Waiving her anonymity was a signal to others “that you’re believed. It’s never too late. I got my justice ten years later. Other people get it 20 years later. Do it in your own time.”

She has found her voice and she plans to use it now to carry on tackling rape culture. She wants young men to start noticing the impact of their words. You have to start with the basics, the rape jokes, the way that young men say “I’d rape her” as though it’s a compliment.

She’s right. But why are we leaving this to her and others like her? Survivors have enough to do just surviving. This isn’t an issue just for the Rape Crisis Centre, or Women’s Aid, or schools. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating often: we need to stop treating male sexual violence against women (and men) as a women’s issue. Until we treat it as an issue for men, nothing will change. Rape, as Abdulali says, is “terrible but survivable”. Mangan says, more than once when we speak, that she is lucky to be here. But we all deserve more than merely surviving.

Noonan’s guilty plea was something for which Mangan had not dared to hope. “It was just unimaginable. I felt lighter. He said, from his own mouth, that ‘I did this to her’. The shame and the guilt left my body and I gave it over to him, and he took it off into prison with him.”

Maybe his long sentence – eight years, with one suspended – will be a deterrent, she suggests, both of us appalled by the idea that jail time might be the only thing that stops some men raping women. And yes, now she can move on and she has taken her power back, and all the other platitudes people offer to make themselves feel better. But there is no point at which this will ever be over. Even now, “I think about the fact that I was raped every day”.

Help is available. The national 24-hour Rape Crisis Helpline is at 1800 77 8888