Believing Louise Nicholas

I've decided I'm going to write a review of Louise Nicholas's book, and then. But before I do that I want to comment on Louise Nicholas's interview on Nine to Noon on Monday (available by download here)
I usually like Kathryn Ryan, but I thought she did a really awful, and somewhat inexplicable, job.

The fundamental problem was the position Kathryn Ryan took, which was that she was giving Louise Nicholas the opportunity to explain herself to this huge mass of public who didn't understand, or believe her.

Do those people exist? I'm not talking about raging misogynists, or members of the rapists' immediate family. I mean otherwise decent people who say things like "I don't understand how that could happen." Kathryn Ryan was talking as if there were vast numbers of people who thought like that out there.

I don't think that's true. I think most people believe Louise Nicholas and know exactly how it happened. I've been paying attention, in all sorts of ways to the discussion around this issue. People know that I care, so they tell me what their parents say, how it gets discussed at work, or what they overhear at the pub. I know that support for Louise Nicholas extends well outside my own social circle. In my experience anyone who has a smidgeon feminist analysis, or any experience of being powerless knows exactly what happened.

But worse than that was Kathryn Ryan's tone near the end of the interview - where she implied that Louise Nicholas should at some stage put this behind her. That what she was doing at the moment wasn't putting it behind her, and therefore a problem.

The strongest, most generous, thing any of us an do with our pain, oppression, and trauma, is what Louise Nicholas has done. She has fought so hard for the women coming next. She can't change what happened to her, but she can fight to make today's thirteen year old girls safer than she was. To look away, to try and avoid, is understandable, but it's also leaving generations of girls on their own.

If Louise Nicholas had 'put it behind her', Clint Rickards would still be Assistant Commissioner of police, Brad Shipton would still be a Tauranga city councillor, Brad Shipton would be free and raping still more women, there would have been no commission of inquiry and there would have been much less discussion about the meaning of consent around the country these last few years. Every woman, every person, in this country has reason to be grateful that she didn't run from what had happened to her, but fought for us instead.