Thordis Elva was 16 years old when she was raped by the man she thought was her ‘knight in shining armour’.
20 years later, she shares stage with her perpetrator and co authors a book with him, titled ‘South of forgiveness’.
At a Ted talk which was published last week, Elva, an Icelandic native tells her story and the aftermath of the torture of rape she went through as a victim and Tom Stranger shares his account of the denial and guilt he went through as her perpetrator.
Thordis Elva and Tom Stranger were in a ‘fairy tale’ like relationship in the early years of their lives. Tom was then 18 years old and Elva , 16. The couple had gone for a dance together and after a few drinks, Elva got drunk and was taken home by tom.
“It was like a fairy tale, his strong arms around me, laying me in the safety of my bed,” she said. “But the gratitude that I felt towards him soon turned to horror as he proceeded to take off my clothes and get on top of me. My head had cleared up, but my body was still too weak to fight back, and the pain was blinding," she added. "I thought I'd be severed in two. In order to stay sane, I silently counted the seconds on my alarm clock. And ever since that night, I've known that there are 7,200 seconds in two hours.”
It took a long time for her to classify the attack and the ‘blinding pain’ she went through in her own room by a boy she was dating, as ‘rape’ as it did not fit into her media influenced idea of the crime. “Tom wasn’t an armed lunatic; he was my boyfriend. And it didn’t happen in a seedy alleyway, it happened in my own bed,” Elva says. “And besides, it had to have been my fault, somehow.”
Societal attitude to rape had silenced Elva and she began to blame herself for the atrocities she went through.
Short skirts, wide smiles, smell of alcohol in breath- girls are told they are raped for a reason, she says “And I was guilty of all of those things, so the shame had to be mine,” Elva says during the Ted Talk. “It took me years to realize that only one thing could have stopped me from being raped that night, and it wasn’t my skirt, it wasn’t my smile, it wasn’t my childish trust. The only thing that could’ve stopped me from being raped that night is the man who raped me—had he stopped himself.”
Tom, sharing stage with her, said “Far too often, the responsibility is attributed to female survivors of sexual violence, and not to the males who enact it. Far too often, the denial and running leaves all parties at a great distance from the truth. There’s definitely a public conversation happening now, and like a lot of people, we’re heartened that there’s less retreating from this difficult but important discussion. I feel a real responsibility to add our voices to it.”
After 9 years of going through that ‘dire night’, Elva decided to write to Tom but the letter was not just an account of what she had been feeling all these years and the emotional turmoil she had gone through. “The words, ‘I want to find forgiveness’ stared back at me, surprising nobody more than myself,” Elva says. “But deep down I realized that this was my way out of my suffering, because regardless of whether or not he deserved my forgiveness, I deserved peace. My era of shame was over.”
Unexpectedly, she received a response, an acknowledgement of the crime committed, a confession by Tom. “As it turns out, he, too, had been imprisoned by silence. And this marked the start of an eight-year-long correspondence that God knows was never easy, but always honest,”
After 8 years of writing letters to each other, Elva “mustered the courage to propose a wild idea: that we’d meet up in person and face our past once and for all.”
They met in Cape Town and further conversations led to them co authoring a book ‘South Of Forgiveness’
Elva and Tom hoped to reach to people and help in eliminating the shame attributed to the victim. Rape is “often perceived as a women’s issue when it’s really a human issue”, says Elva
“Saying to Thordis that I raped her changed my accord with myself, as well as with her. But most importantly, the blame transferred from Thordis to me.” said Tom Stranger, stressing on the power of words.
