Survivor Stories (pt. 2)

TW: Sexual violence

Every survivor has their own story, yet not every survivor feels heard. For a multitude of reasons, survivors fear speaking out. And even if they do speak out, that doesn’t mean someone will listen… or believe them.

From the start of my work with PAVE, I emphasized my desire to highlight survivor stories. I desired to create a space for survivors to share their voices, one that perseveres even after my time at PAVE.

The pieces below were submitted by survivors, some requesting to remain anonymous. Thank you to these survivors for your strength and vulnerability. We hear you. We believe you. We support you.

Compiled by Jessica Katz

Impact by Jennifer Sorensen

My name is Jennifer Sorensen. I spent three seasons in Antarctica (McMurdo Station and Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station) as a Steward. Seven years ago, on December 26, 2015, I was raped by my then-boyfriend in his dorm room while I was temporarily residing in McMurdo Station during my first season.

What began as a consensual encounter unlike any other resulted in a life-changing incident that left me torn and physically ill. As I ran into his attached bathroom and locked the door, I hastily weighed my options. I considered going to the medical center to get examined but had no idea if the facility had rape collection kits. On station, I had no advocate to speak on behalf of my needs and protection, no jail to protect me from my rapist, and no knowledge of any present law enforcement personnel. I feared the medical professionals who would examine me and the small-town rumor mill in McMurdo that could leave me vulnerable to victim-blaming or falsehoods about my character.

As a result, the emotional wound ran the deepest of all, the humiliation and blood-letting too intense for me to survive. My brain quickly pulled the most generous disappearing trick it had at its disposal: Traumatic amnesia. Psychologist Jennifer Freyd describes traumatic amnesia as, “having been fundamentally cheated or betrayed by another person [which] may significantly influence the individual’s cognitive encoding of the experience of trauma, the degree to which the event is easily accessible to awareness, and the psychological as well as behavioral responses” (Freyd, 1994).

Several minutes following the assault, a great smoke filled that bathroom, dulling my senses and clouding over the damage inflicted upon my body. Opening the door, I was silent as I put my clothes back on, the haze blurring any words that could possibly sum up the moment.

I went back to work as a Steward the next morning, the same haze continuing to follow me. A coworker chewed me out because I hadn’t changed over multiple containers of food that were now sitting empty. After work, my boyfriend broke up with me. He told me that he felt awful about the day before and that he wanted to spend the rest of his assignment alone. I told him numbly that that was for the best. Two months later, just before I was due to leave McMurdo, he revealed that he “really wanted to see me” in his room and that he “really missed” me. I swear I could feel myself evaporating.

Throughout the subsequent winter season I spent in McMurdo, a big white cloud enveloped me. I drifted as I moved, no trauma weighing down my steps, and I flirted heavily online with a new man I knew from the summer season. We made plans to meet in person after my time in Antarctica ended in November, and I floated into bed with him. Rather than eliciting a softness my touch-starved body needed, his physical presence set off alarms throughout my body. The fog vanished, leaving me exposed to piercing, visceral flashbacks to the rape. The abrupt dissolution of our encounter was brutal, our connection forever lost, and it broke me to have to tell him why my body was rejecting the love my heart desired. I spent the remainder of 2016 drowning in grief.

In September 2017, I came forward to several higher-ups in McMurdo, holding my breath given the lack of success that I had (and expected) in seeking legal action against my rapist in previous months. I was amazed and relieved to find that he was no longer allowed to come to McMurdo. After all the times I flagellated myself for coming forward long after the rape occurred, I felt a sense of resolution in doing so. Putting the matter behind me, I began an equally daunting therapy journey to unravel all the trauma that continued to smother me.

The thing you realize while unraveling trauma is that you can try so hard to find any shard of truth that will give you mastery over a shattering situation, even if it was completely out of your control. You want so much to grant yourself the grace the world would not grant you.

But no grace was to be found. I learned in January 2020 that a first-year Steward like me had been sexually assaulted by someone in the galley. When she came forward, she was told to “talk it out” with the perpetrator, then she was fired. Any temporary sentiment of triumph I felt in coming forward was obliterated, for I knew now with stomach-dropping certainty what would have happened to me had I come forward on station, and how little we as a whole had advanced in the name of justice.

In my despondency, I heard whispers of “Ice Allies”: community members who took great lengths to protect people caught in compromising situations on station as well as hold assailants accountable. This gave me enough hope to return to station for five months in the austral summer of 2021, eager to contribute to an ongoing trend of advocacy.

While confined to my quarantine hotel room in Christchurch, New Zealand during online onboarding, I detected a shift. I noticed how many new faces were coming to McMurdo for the first time, exuberant and wide-eyed. How eerily hypothetical, even far-fetched, all of the sexual harassment scenarios were being presented, despite everything that had happened over the last year. Almost as if it could never happen here.

I knew nothing would ever be the same as before, but in a way…it was like nothing had changed.

Days after I arrived in McMurdo, I had to warn my roommate, eager in her first deployment, about a man I had found out was assaulting women on station at their most vulnerable moments. Six years after my own rape, one year after the gathering of the Ice Allies, I had to warn another woman about a predator. I was overcome with guilt and rage knowing that it was my responsibility to give her a lifeline when no one else would. The same day, I filled out a survey that would contribute to the recently-published Sexual Assault and Harassment Prevention and Response (SAHPR) Report.

I experienced vivid emotional flashbacks as time crawled closer to my rape anniversary, barely soothed by the one month we had an on-station counselor. However, few things will impose the chill of familiarity upon me the way these SAHPR excerpts did:

“Every woman I knew down there had an assault or harassment experience that had occurred on ice” (32).

“People on station fear, and rightfully so, that if they are harassed or assaulted and report it, they will be the ones who will be going home. When things happened on ice, the number one thing I heard was ‘don't report it or you will go home and be blacklisted from the program'” (47).

“[W]hat they experience as an inadequate screening of applicants reflects the contractors’ payment system. They view the current system, which they describe as contractors receiving a bonus for achieving their hiring allotment, leading them to sometimes hire ‘any warm body’ with limited regard for the prospective employee’s background or suitability” (75).

“Men who occupy essential and hard to replace roles can rape someone and be hired back. USAP [United States Antarctic Program] will treat women who have been assaulted and raped and targeted by these men with suspicion and try to blame the fact they were assaulted on their own behavior” (50).

”NSF [National Science Foundation] is unaware of incidents of sexual assault and harassment because there is attrition at every juncture: victim reporting, supervisor response, investigation, and offender sanctions…NSF does not require contractors and subcontractors to provide full and accurate reports” (59).

I am telling you all of this today, in light of recent Congressional testimony by Leidos and the National Science Foundation. Because given the evasive and copacetic picture painted by these agencies, I want them - and the rest of the world—to know the name and story of at least one person whose life was changed profoundly by their inaction, which helped bring forth the horrific actions of my rapist and greatly exacerbated the resulting trauma I experienced. I came to Antarctica as a young woman hungry for adventure and community, and I deserved to leave that continent with memories of nothing more than that.

If there is any consolation I could possibly obtain from the SAHPR Report, it is this—as notable explorers such as Scott and Shackleton have done before, I have discovered an uncharted land. It is far from isolated turf, however, for I have come upon a multitudinous yet reluctant clan living here, keeping each other at a distance as we tend to interminable wounds. We share a common horror but have yet to witness our collective strength. For we are a village of shame.

A shame that never belonged to us.

Sources:

Freyd, J. (1994). Betrayal trauma: Traumatic amnesia as an adaptive response to childhood abuse. Ethics and Behavior, 4(4), 307-329. 10.1207/s15327019eb0404_1

Sexual Assault/Harassment Prevention and Response (SAHPR) FINAL REPORT. (2022, June 22). National Science Foundation