“I am one of many And when I found out I stopped feeling small.” Clara Casanovas, high school english teacher and 65 years old, suffered a gang rape when I was 20. It was in 1978. The rest of his life has been marked by this fact.. Since then it has dragged deep depressions and posttraumatic stress. The movement MeToo, as well as entering in 2018 in the collective in favor of mental health Obertament Catalunya, helped her get over it “stigma” What is around this reality? “I no longer have depression since then. And thanks to Obertament I have this level of liberation and well-being”, account from his flat in Vallcarca, overlooking the city.
The evening light The way Clara talks to journalists is clear. The rain The heat has turned down. She talk calmly. Forty-five years after that, You need to keep telling what happened. “I was kidnapped and raped by three very, very young boys. I she was traveling alone and he was going along a lost road between Burgos and Santo Domingo de los Hilos. He passed a car and stopped, I thought there was a girl inside. I got on, but I saw that there were actually three men. There I knew I was in danger. They were armed with knives and shotguns.” Explain.
It is difficult to survive something like this, but it is more to do it without rancor and from forgiveness. The same ones that she demonstrates when the journalist blurts out a “sons of bitches.” “They are not sons of bitches Clara replies, and the ‘Magic case’ of Badalona reverberates in everyone’s head. They are children, humans who have grown up in an environment that has not guided them, and that they have not received the love, the affection and the correct direction. This is the big thing.”
With ‘Me too’ and Obertament Catalunya I understood that we were millions [las mujeres violadas]
Clara claims to have forgiven “completely”, years ago, to his attackers. “What does not mean – he specifies – that he exempts them from their responsibility”. This woman considers it a mistake to place the men who rape in the category of “irrational and impulsive beings”. “No, they are men who have grown up in a macho environment where there is no respect for women or for the humblest. It has to do with a question of power”, think. Here, in the education of the people and in the actions of the different administrations, is where Clara believes that you have to focus at a time when the violations produced in the Màgic de Badalona shopping center, perpetrated by minors, are so recent. “When news like this comes out, I get sick. I spend 48 hours in bed. But not only girls are victims, so are those boys. If they don’t have their brains formed and they’re doing those things, What are they victims of?” reflect.
Talk, your salvation
Clara’s case makes it clear that gang rapes by men against women they are not a recent phenomenon. But now there is more talk, and she defends that his recovery has gone through talking about what happened. It’s something he didn’t do then, when it happened to him. Not because she didn’t want to, but because no one heard her. “A friend He told me what I was complaining about, that I was alive. I called one feminist that he knew and told me that at that moment he had a job. My boyfriend from then on he began to talk about himself. And the gynecologist who visited me said: ‘Ah, have you made love yet? Next time do it like this, like this, and like this,'” she recalls. Just a psychiatrist told him that what had happened to him was something very serious that I would remove it from the inside for many years. So it was.
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“It was there, not feeling heard when the depression started I asked for help but nobody helped me”. Although she has spoken privately about her rape all her life, it wasn’t until she joined Obertament that she began to do so in public as well. “Understood why did i feel so alone in this depression And in this trauma. None of my therapists had been able to explain the general framework of all this: the stigma. With MeToo and Obertament I understood that we were millions That I am a grain of sand on a very large beach”, Clare explains. Throughout her life, she estimates that she has left between 80,000 and 90,000 euros in psychological therapy.
[Los agresores del Màgic de Badalona] If their brains are not formed and they are doing these things, what are they victims of?
In addition, Clara had to put distance in between. In 1984, he moved to USA. “I saw that there was much calmer. I left and I didn’t want to come back,” says Clara, who returned to Catalonia in 2003, as a result of a deep depression that she had after the fall of the Twin Towers, where she had worked. “I wanted to die, Yes, but I never had any suicidal ideation. I couldn’t live with so much mental pain, but I decided never to do that to my family. And I’m So glad I didn’t.” smile. The “shame” and “guilt” she has felt all her life from him recede further and further away. “I am a gang rape survivor he says openly from the living room of his house, while offering tea and cookies to his guests. And, before finishing, she sends a message to those who have gone through the same thing as her: “Speak up. The silence is devastating.”