Telling stories of rape,revenge and redemption in the age of the TED talk

Introduction

Sexual violence has in recent years become widely spoken about in mainstream public discourse in North America and elsewhere, with high profile cases like Bill Cosby, Jian Ghomeshi, the Steubenville rapes and the Stanford victim’s impact statement going viral in 2016, and the wave of revelations of sexual harassment and assault committed within the entertainment industry, media, politics and the arts in 2017, in the #MeToo campaign. The right to speak, a form of wealth, is being redistributed (Solnit, 2017). The terms of mainstream public discourse have shifted towards acknowledging a greater need to listen to and believe survivors’ stories of rape, and increased awareness of the layered and ongoing dimensions of trauma. Discussions in the media and online have highlighted the damaging impact of rape myths, and the structural causes of rape, including ‘rape culture’ and ‘toxic masculinity’. At the same time, there is growing recognition that decades of feminist-inspired law reform in western democracies have done little to change the systemic impediments to rape justice within the state system, which are that the conviction rates for sexual offences have always been notoriously low, and the process re-traumatizing to the survivor of violence (McSharry et al., 2009; Postmus, 2012).

Frustrated with the shortcomings of the criminal justice system which ‘leave[s] the harm caused by wrongdoing unrepaired’, legal scholars and practitioners have long explored alternative ways of coming to terms with a survivor’s stories and achieving justice outside of the criminal law framework (Johnstone and Van Ness, 2007: xxi; O’Mahony and Doak, 2017; Simic, 2014). This article considers an unusual activist and ‘restorative justice’ project by Thordis Elva and Tom Stranger, who, 20 years after Stranger raped Elva, produced a TED talk (2016) watched by over 3 million people, and a jointly written book, South of Forgiveness (2017), detailing their story of forgiveness and redemption. In 1996, when he was 18 years old, Stranger, an Australian, went to Iceland on an international exchange programme. Elva was 16 at the time when she met Stranger and fell in love with him. They had been dating for a month when they went together to a Christmas dance. Elva became ill after drinking rum, drifting in and out of consciousness and convulsively vomiting. Stranger, her boyfriend, put her into a taxi and brought her to her home. Elva’s gratitude for his taking care of her quickly turned into horror when Stranger laid her on the bed, removed her clothes and raped her. The ordeal lasted two hours, with Elva unable to move and fight back, and as she recalls during the TED talk: ‘the pain was blinding. I thought I’d be severed in two’ (Elva and Stranger, 2016). She limped for days. A few days later, Stranger broke off the relationship, and they only saw each other a couple of times at a distance before he left to go home to Australia.

Elva’s experience reflects many of the features of rape as a form of intimate partner violence, including its traumatic violation of the language of intimacy, and its challenge to a sense of identity and personal integrity (Bennice et al., 2003; Mechanic et al., 2008). Her story and her narrative of the trauma afterwards confirm the continued long-term trauma and its impact on the well-being of those primarily young women who suffer from this crime (Chambliss, 2011: 76; Flowers, 2006: 62; MacKinnon, 1989: 245). Studies have shown the tremendous formative effect on the young psyche of a violation of trust and the profound physical injury, and sexual, psychological and emotional effects of such exposure to violence, which predisposes sufferers to experience further violence (Douglas and Chapple, 2017; Flood and Fergus, 2017; Moylan et al., 2010). ¹ Elva’s tale of her experience as a teenager trying to deal with what had happened to her reflects this trajectory, as she spiraled into self-destructive behaviour and struggled to establish trusting intimate relationships (ABC Radio, 2017). However, in an arc typical of survivor narratives that surface in public forums, Elva turned her life around. Spurred into action by her outrage over a controversial 2007 case in the Reykjavik District Court acquitting a rapist because his victim did not fight back hard enough (Elva and Stranger, 2017: 15–16), Elva, a ‘chain-smoking thespian playwright’ (ABC Radio, 2017), began writing in the media about sexual violence. In the process she became a well-known and sought-after speaker on the issues of violence against women, gender equality and gender-based discrimination, and for this work was named Icelandic Woman of the Year in 2015. ²

The most surprising part of her survivor story is what happened next. As she describes it, 10 years after the rape and reeling from an interpersonal conflict, Elva sat down to write an email to Stranger out of the blue, outlining what he had done to her and writing: ‘I want to find forgiveness’ (Elva and Stranger, 2016). And to her astonishment, Stranger replied, expressing ‘disarming regret’ (Elva and Stranger, 2016). After eight further years of email correspondence, and a week-long meeting in Cape Town where they met to process the experience, they appeared onstage together in a TED talk recorded in October 2016, in which they each recounted their part of the story in turn. Elva, a more practiced and polished performer than Stranger, narrates her experience with a keen awareness of the discourse surrounding sexual violence – she explicitly names and then speaks strongly against the damaging internalized narratives of a society that blames women for being victims of rape, and powerfully shifts the responsibility back onto the person who raped her:

I was raised in a world where girls are taught that they get raped for a reason. Their skirt was too short, their smile was too wide, their breath smelled of alcohol. And I was guilty of all those things, so the shame had to be mine. 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. (Elva and Stranger, 2016)

The audience is responsive to Elva’s and Stranger’s story and to Stranger himself, who acknowledges responsibility and announces that as it is males who overwhelmingly commit the crime of rape, they should accept responsibility for their acts:

… I am a part of the large and shockingly everyday group of men who have been sexually violent toward their partners. … Far too often the responsibility is attributed to female survivors of sexual violence and not the males who had enacted it. Far too often, the denial and running leaves all parties at a great distance from the truth … (Elva and Stranger, 2016)

Elva openly acknowledges ‘wanting to take revenge’, ³ but says that through the process of talking to Stranger she has ‘found a way out of the hatred and anger’. She argues for the value of hearing from Stranger and humanizing him, pointing out that:

once someone has been branded a rapist, it’s that much easier to call him a monster – inhuman. But how will we understand what it is in human societies that produces violence if we refuse to recognize the humanity of those who commit it? (Elva and Stranger, 2016)

The audience applauds.

Elva’s and Stranger’s joint performance went viral online and divided critics and viewers (ABC News, 2017; O’Connor, 2017). Some lauded it as an important step forward in anti-rape activism, but showed frustration that it took the rapist’s presence in the TED talk to capture the world’s attention and spark ethical debate about intimate partner rape (Achroft, 2017; Maguire, 2017). Many expressed discomfort with the idea of a rapist profiting from his crime: ‘the fact remains that he has bartered a publishing deal off the back of a rape; he gains an undeniable boost in social and cultural capital’ (Dixon-Smith, 2017). What was seen as objectionable is not just the possibility that Stranger may earn money – and he did later state that he was donating all proceeds to a woman’s shelter in Reykjavik (Dastagir, 2017) – but that he might garner status or social capital through his successful performance of a new kind of masculinity: one of rehabilitated and thoughtful (former) rapist. His public outing would not be a social death for him. His public performance, however, remains deeply unusual – although some former domestic abusers have come forward, after ‘rehabilitation’, to act as public advocates for ending domestic violence, including in the recent documentary Better Man (2017), to date there have been no other males who have announced themselves as rapists in a public platform. Those rapists and sexual abusers who have been outed by the #MeToo campaign have responded with varied and problematic ‘apologies’ at best, and denials at worst (Silva, 2017). A male attempting to take responsibility for sexual violence he has perpetrated is rare enough to warrant close analysis.

While it appears that Elva is testifying to a serious crime, and Stranger confessing to one, their accounts corroborating each other, the criminal law is unspoken and unaddressed by the TED talk. Elva explains in the Q&A that the statute of limitations has now passed, and in any event, by the time she realized that what had happened to her was rape, he was gone and her physical injuries had faded. Yet despite taking place outside the scope of the criminal law, the TED talk and the accompanying book South of Forgiveness are saturated in questions that are intimate to the criminal law, as well as to accountability frameworks operating outside formal law: responsibility, redemption and revenge. For this reason, we analyze Elva’s and Stranger’s project in order to engage broader critical questions about the criminal law and alternative justice responses to sexual violence. The first part of this article situates this unprecedented victim-rapist enterprise within the history of feminist anti-rape politics and men’s involvement in that politics. The dominant form of appealing to men in anti-rape activism, that Messner terms the good man/bystander approach, installs a binary between the good man who does not have to listen, and the bad man. We argue that Elva’s and Stranger’s project does go some way to challenge that binary by emphasizing that ‘your rapist could be anyone’, but the format of their performance ultimately ends up reinforcing a partial and privileged narrative of self-transformation over and above addressing the structural causes of rape. The second part of this article analyzes the book South of Forgiveness as a survivor story that is more complex than the highly reductive format of a TED talk allows, and shows how its uneasy fit within the putative frameworks of ‘restorative’ or informal justice (as Elva and others claim it to be) is a function of the unacknowledged dimension to the performance in the form of revenge. The third part of the article turns to Elva’s and Stranger’s public performances that began with the TED talk and book tour, which we attended in March 2017, to show how this function of revenge played out theatrically and implicates the spectator as bystander and witness. We conclude by reflecting upon the implications of listening to male perpetrators speak against sexual violence against women and our responsibility towards these questions as feminist legal academics.

Preaching to the good man/bystander

Listening to survivors’ stories is a central plank of both activism and restorative justice. Anti-rape politics has been fuelled by testimonials and survivor stories, which have in turn been relied upon by the feminist movement to achieve law reforms (Petrak and Hedge, 2002: 9). ⁴ Strategies and practices of storytelling have therefore long formed an essential part of anti-rape activism among survivors, theorists and activists. As Tanya Serisier points out, the need to be recognized as the source of stories has resulted in a granting of epistemological primacy to stories of women’s experience or personal statements, and this commitment to the epistemological primacy of women’s experiences has been an important feature of the development of feminist theory and activism about rape (Serisier, 2007). From Reclaim the Night marches to feminist testimonials, feminist anti-rape activism has been primarily and fundamentally concerned with women’s storytelling. The politics of early consciousness-raising sessions and speak-outs have continued in the form of published testimonials and other activist practices, and personal accounts continue to form the basis and the centre of political and academic work around rape. Similarly, key feminist reforms and campaigns have focused on increasing the ability of women to speak out about violence in various forums, whether highlighting obstacles to women’s testimony in the legal domain or attempting to remove the social stigma of ‘coming out’ as a victim of sexual assault.

The emergence of anti-rape politics in the United States in the 1970s was built around consciousness-raising, in which personal testimony to each other was the basis of collective feminist politics. For Serisier, ‘(t)he feminist understanding of rape as a politically important, universal aspect of women’s lives is seen to have arisen spontaneously and inevitably through this process of collective story-telling’ (Serisier, 2007: 86). Anti-rape activism developed around women speaking out and telling their stories; facilitating such storytelling remained the political priority of feminism. Discovering ‘the truth and meaning’ of women’s victimization had become the feminist quest (Brownmiller, 1975: 12). As Serisier notes, the underlying logic and value of many feminist interventions and actions around rape continue to be expressed in these terms. And the epistemological primacy of experience remains crucial to the history and truth produced by anti-rape feminism, while also forming the basis of political and academic work around rape (Breckenridge and Carmody, 1992: 220; Serisier, 2007: 87).

Part of the necessary shift in understanding rape that was enabled by this emerging feminist consciousness was an understanding that rape was not committed by ‘bad men’ but was endemic or structural to a system of patriarchy. Michael Messner’s history of male participation in United States campaigns against sexual violence against women is instructive (Messner, 2016). In the 1960s and 1970s, Messner writes, the notion that rape was committed by ‘bad men’ – often ‘racialised’ ‘monsters’ – was put under pressure by a feminist consciousness that stressed that rape was not deviant but rather a normal manifestation of patriarchal masculinity (Messner, 2016). As Elva’s testimony demonstrates, this ‘monster myth’ was part of her upbringing. She points to the continuous need to ‘paint this picture of the knife-wielding monster in the alleyway … (when) the reality is [that] people like Tom can be sexually violent and that’s a hard fact to look in the eye’ (Lehmann 2017).

The radical feminist paradigm shift was to reframe men’s violence against women not as an isolated anomaly but as part of an ‘over-conformity with a culturally honored definition of masculinity that rewarded the successful use of violence to achieve domination over others’ (Messner, 2016: 59). However, these radical feminist approaches were apparently often experienced by men and boys as ‘guilt-imposing, anti-male monologues that shut off conversation, rather than as openings for dialogue to engage and ask men to change themselves and their communities’ (Messner, 2016: 60; Messner et al., 2015). So, in the 1990s, activists began to develop anti-rape pedagogies intended to appeal to – rather than alienate – boys and men (Flood, 2011, 2015). Since the early 2000s, the hegemonic approach to rape prevention has recast ‘violence against women’ as ‘gender-based violence’, opening space for thinking about the connections between violence against women, and violence against sexual minorities, sexual assaults of boys and men and gender-based bullying and stereotypes. This new language of gender may enable new lines of inquiry about the construction – and reformation – of masculinity, but this development has in turn been critiqued for its tendency to eclipse the feminist language of collective social transformation by decentring women, who are of course still the major victims of gender-based violence and also still the major source of activist response to it.

So these developments have ushered in a profound shift in how we think about who rapes and how to prevent rape. ‘No longer is the rapist theorized as an over-conformist with the dominant conceptions of masculinity. Instead, he is recast as someone who is poorly socialized about healthy relationships founded on respectful communication about consent’ (Messner, 2016: 60). This has ushered in what Messner, Greenberg and Peretz have named ‘the good man/bystander approach’ to rape prevention, dominant since the 2000s (Messner et al., 2015: 121–123). Their key example is the ‘My Strength Is Not for Hurting’ education campaign in US schools (Murphy, 2009). Messner explains this as follows:

The pedagogy of the ‘good man’ side of this approach hails young men to use their masculine strength to act ethically, including respecting their sexual partners as full sexual subjects; meanwhile, the ‘bystander’ side of this approach challenges men to step up to prevent other men’s acts of violence (for instance, acting when seeing the potential for a gang rape at a fraternity party). The originators of the bystander approach viewed it as a strategic intervention that pulls away from the conventional perpetrator– victim focus on individuals, instead recasting men’s attentions to confronting the everyday dynamics of a rape culture in male groups and organizations. (Messner, 2016: 62)

Parts of this shift in discourse are obviously welcome; it certainly represents a significant advance over discourses of victim-blaming or the essentialist minimization of ‘boys will be boys’. The good man/bystander approach to rape prevention appeals to the boys and young men who are its targets by drawing them in with positive appeals to masculine responsibility and honour, instead of guilt and demonization. For instance, Jackson Katz’s (2012) TED talk, ‘Violence Against Women: It’s a Men’s Issue’ appeals to men to use their ‘honour and strength’ to intervene when other men are abusing women. It is an outreach approach that aims to empower men to act – and thereby appeals to and reinforces their sense of having power and control. ‘The entreaty is to the presumably good young men who have absorbed equality values but are still silently complicit with the rape culture dynamics of male groups’ (Messner, 2016: 63). This approach has been helpful in broadening the field of antiviolence work and in drawing in more male involvement.

Yet, there are significant consequences of this kind of approach to rape prevention. By absorbing (and potentially diluting) the issue of violence against women within a larger public health agenda, the good man/bystander approach to violence prevention tends to re-individualize and largely depoliticize the understanding of the causes of gender-based violence, and thus the interventions to stop it. Within the public health paradigm, this devolves into a focus on encouraging individual men to ‘make healthy choices’, diverting attention away from a critical analysis of institutionalized power relations. In this paradigm, masculinity becomes the saviour of women, rather than something that is seen as the root cause of violence and inequality, and thus in need of transformation. This represents a significant move away from radical feminist ideas that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. As Messner writes, ‘(t)oday’s antiviolence pedagogy deploys dominant forms of masculinity, rather than arguing for masculinity’s eradication or radical transformation’ (Messner, 2016: 62). In other words, while radical feminists might have said that combating violence against women involves refusing to be a man, today’s pedagogies implore their addressees to step up and be a good man. An example of this is the Australian ‘Real Men Don’t Hit Women’ campaign. As Michael Salter has sagely observed:

Male violence is not simply a behaviour that can be turned on or off, but rather an entire complex of norms, values and practices with deep connections to the social, political and economic order. For men and boys, abandoning violence implies a significant break with the broader patriarchal context, to the point of imperilling masculine identity altogether … the compromise offered by the ‘real man’ approach to violence prevention is to call for only a partial cessation of violence. Male aggression is re-envisioned as a potentially emancipatory force that can be directed against perpetrators of violence against women. This risks transforming violence prevention efforts into a platform for performances of aggressive masculinity. (Salter, 2016)

Salter’s observations resonate with feminist activists’ critiques of White Ribbon Day, which arguably serves as a forum for politicians and celebrities to parade their commitment to stopping violence against women, while simultaneously denying funding for women’s shelters, legal aid programmes and frontline services. Many countries are cutting back and undermining the services that are essential for women’s safety, which will make it harder for women to leave violent relationships and to seek protection (Carmona, 2014: 36; Hill and Cohen, 2015; Sharaz, 2017). In Nina Funnell’s influential call to stop donating to White Ribbon, she points out the proliferation of ‘awareness raising’ as an end in itself, a series of token gestures that become a cheap substitute for real action (Funnell, 2016). She quotes Sarah Moore’s book Ribbon Culture: Charity, Compassion and Public Awareness, which describes awareness-raising ribbons as ‘a symbol that represents awareness, yet requires no knowledge of the cause; it appears to signal concern for others, but in fact prioritises self-expression’ (Moore, 2008: 2). Funnell writes that White Ribbon events function to reassure men that they are not part of the problem and to offer them a vehicle for absolution. This good man/bystander approach works on the assumption that everyone in the room is a ‘good man’, and the violent men, or the rapists, are elsewhere.

The objective of Elva’s project is to counter that myth by bringing her rapist on the stage with her, effectively showing the audience that the perpetrator is ‘among us’ (ABC Radio, 2017). As Elva points out:

I’ve heard from people that find it very uncomfortable to see Tom on stage and to hear from him, and I really understand and respect that. At the same time, I feel the need to point out that we are seeing and hearing from perpetrators of sexual violence on a daily basis …. They are the people that direct the movies we watch, they are the athletes that we cheer for, they are people in our family, they are people that run entire countries and they live right next door. (ABC Radio, 2017)

The language that Stranger uses to talk about his violence – indeed, his crime – is carefully chosen and performs responsible neoliberal subjectivity (in which transformation is within grasp of the self) by downplaying structural causes. He mentions harmful social stereotypes about women as objects and men as deserving of sex, but also stresses that he was a responsible agent who made a choice to do what he did:

From what I’ve now learnt, my actions that night in 1996 were a self-centred taking. I felt deserving of Thordis’ body. I’ve had primarily positive social influences and examples of equitable behaviour around me. But on that occasion, I chose to draw upon the negative ones. The ones that see women as having less intrinsic worth, and of men having some unspoken and symbolic claim to their bodies. These influences I speak of are external to me, though. And it was only me in that room making choices, nobody else. (Elva and Stranger, 2016)

In the book tour, he echoed these words: ‘I was under this understanding that when a boy goes out partying on a night with his girlfriend that he is entitled to sex. And I took that to a horrible place’ (ABC Radio, 2017). When the male moderator asked him if this was a commonly understood idea among his peer group at the time, Stranger replied: ‘I think it can be a myth, a story, a culturally perpetuated assumption, but I don’t lean on that as an excuse. I don’t offer any excuses. I made choices’ (ABC Radio, 2017). He acknowledges structural influences only to finally disavow them by emphasizing personal responsibility, which in turn makes his confession more powerful and inspiring of sympathy. His articulation of his actions privileges the idea that rape is about sex rather than about power and dominance, against core feminist understandings of the politics of sexual assault.

This language of acknowledging influences but emphasizing personal responsibility for the choices made performs a particular kind of masculinity: a masculinity forged through the hardship of internal turmoil. The project of a TED talk and a book locates itself firmly within the dominant discourse of self-help and personal transformation that is part of our contemporary culture’s logic of confession, evidenced through talk shows and memoirs (Crawley and Manderson, 2018). This discourse works through elevating narratives of individual hardship and redemption over histories of racial and gendered violence, ultimately directing the focus of public conversation towards individual choices rather than structural inequalities.

Do-it-yourself restorative justice?

This part evaluates Elva’s claim, in interviews and the book South of Forgiveness, that she is doing ‘restorative justice’, and suggests that the project has a much more uncertain status than this. Elva herself pre-empts and refuses any and all criticism of what she is doing, and she repeatedly stresses in follow-up interviews that ‘whatever’ the victim wants is the right thing to do. This position is both ethically questionable and legally impossible (can victims kill their perpetrator or do violence to his enablers?), and fundamentally sabotages her project’s capacity to influence the conversation about the law’s obligations to redress and prevent sexual violence. The risk posed here is that such individual forms of activism, resistive politics and claims for redress can usurp less spectacular grassroots attempts at collective action, diverting attention from broader and engrained systems of oppression that restorative justice measures try to acknowledge.

Restorative justice within the criminal law is typically only used for youth offenders, indigenous sentencing circles or property crimes. It is not used in sexual assault cases because of their complexity and the capacity for retraumatization (although in Melbourne, adult victims of sexual assault have faced their perpetrators at a world-first restorative programme in a long-standing informal practice which is only now being evaluated). ⁵ Due to the lack of criminal law’s capability to deal with such crimes, there is much academic interest in alternative forms of justice for survivors of sexual assault, and these alternatives are bound up in this long history of activism on the part of survivors telling their stories. Victims of rape most often want to feel heard and seek an acknowledgment of the harm caused to them (McGlynn et al., 2012; Phillips, 2017: 2; Zinsstag and Keenan, 2017).

This has led to the rise of online awareness campaigns and what is called ‘hashtag activism’ in the form of rape survivors telling their stories, and projecting narratives of strength rather than victimization (Rentschler, 2014). Anastasia Powell examines these online practices as community-driven action that might signal a new justice environment that intersects with the state, arguing that these counter-public engagements represent the development of new technosocial practices of informal justice (Powell, 2014, 2015). She suggests: ‘(i)n the people’s courts of new and social media it is possible for women victims to be heard and supported … in a way not currently offered by formal criminal justice processes’ (Powell, 2015: 581). Kathleen Daly and Clare McGlynn have likewise suggested that a victim-centred approach is needed to conceive of justice in approaches including restorative justice, and forms of community or informal justice outside the state (Daly, 2014; McGlynn, 2011).

Restorative justice practices focus on the offence and the offender; they are concerned with censuring past behaviour and with changing future behaviour; they are concerned with sanctions or outcomes that are proportionate and that ‘make things right’ in individual cases (Daly, 2000: 37). The underlying assumption in restorative justice is that physical, psychological and social damage must be acknowledged and addressed in order to heal and reconcile (Vanfraechem et al., 2015). The role of storytelling in these approaches is crucial. Victim-centred approaches such as these conceptualize justice in response to sexual violence by emphasizing the participation of the victim, hearing and validating her story, vindicating her suffering and holding the offender accountable. Elva uses an online platform, a TED talk, to tell her story but she also allows her perpetrator to vindicate himself by giving him space to speak up, to show true repentance. Survivor stories and confessionals are both part of a codified agenda. Elva’s story trades on the stock motifs of this canon – a narrative arc of overcoming trauma, of the absolute privileging of the transformative self and the self’s capacity for personal transformation, for a life lived entirely in narrative form – a life lived in order to be written. Elva explains that she wanted to finally take matters into her own hands, ‘to ensure that justice would be served on my terms’ (Elva and Stranger, 2017: 146). In the vision of redress and reparation being offered here, the survivor’s own act of forgiveness replaces the possibility of systemic justice. Forgiving becomes ritualized, achievable through confession. Such a premium on forgiveness as transformative of the self appeals to the register of the individual, not the social/structural.

Their book South of Forgiveness, considered through a restorative justice lens, raises important questions about the gendered standards of justice and how therapeutic culture interacts with, or in this case supplants, law. Elva designed her restorative justice project with attention to formal boundaries between herself and her perpetrator. The email correspondence between Stranger and Elva was hemmed by formal constraints:

Having no desire to become his pen-pal, I always set a rigid frame for our exchanges, keeping them strictly analytical and focusing exclusively on that fateful night in the hope that dissecting our past would help us better understand our present. (Elva and Stranger, 2017: 21)

She presents this as a bold experiment from someone who is aware of the destructive risks of continued connection between perpetrator and victim in most cases, and sets herself as a figure of exception engaging in a business transaction. ⁶ The book details her dramatic proposal to Stranger via email:

I propose that in six months’ time, we meet up with the intention of reaching forgiveness, once and for all. In person. It is the only proper way for me to do it, I feel. No letter can ever compare with face to face communication. And after all we’ve been through, I think it is the most dignified and honest way to finish this chapter of our story. (Elva and Stranger, 2017: 29)

The story captured in the book unfolds over the seven days they spent in Cape Town, with each day featuring Elva’s recollections of their conversation, followed by Stranger’s shorter reflections. After several years of emailing each other they decided to meet face-to-face and work through Elva’s recollection of her life-changing experience of rape. They chose Cape Town, South Africa, for their bold experiment in ‘restorative justice’: geographic middle ground but also symbolic. Elva writes:

The ‘rape capital of the world’ would surely be the ultimate testing ground when it came to conquering a fear related to sexual violence. And where better to exercise forgiveness than in a country that built an entire institution around truth and reconciliation? Where the nation’s leader, Nelson Mandela, forgave his tormentors after twenty-seven years of captivity and made peace with them in order to build a better society? (Elva and Stranger, 2017: 18)

Describing a site on which European racial imperial violence played itself out as a ‘testing ground’ for one’s own personal narrative of overcoming trauma is an act of extreme privilege. Her father accused her of making a ‘big pretentious drama’ (quoted in Lehmann, 2017: 14), and reportedly called her project ‘ridiculous’, which was narrated by Elva as yet another obstacle she had to overcome.

Stranger’s narrative in the book shares some of the key tropes of survivor testimony, notably the sense of having been shaped by trauma, and the experience of interference in interpersonal relationships and destructive behaviour:

You asked me how I coped with what I did to you. I think I’ve done my best to detach myself. Unsuccessfully. Evidenced, I think, by my periods of drinking and constant movement from place to place. Also in my relationships, I’ve never let a partnership evolve into something committed or stable. The longest I have lived with a girlfriend is two months. (Elva and Stranger, 2017: 22)

Stranger goes on to present himself, rather romantically, ‘as somebody who once did something horrific to somebody they later found out they loved’ (Elva and Stranger, 2017: 23) This story of self-revelation repeats the structure of disavowal, as though he is a victim discovering something that he himself did. As both Elva and Stranger acknowledge, Stranger takes joy in self-flagellation; his narcissism takes the form of a desire to utterly surrender to an external process. On their first meeting in Cape Town, he writes of Elva’s physical response to him that ‘I was violent with her, and her body remembered me’ (Elva and Stranger, 2017: 55), and upon this realization, he writes, tellingly, ‘I momentarily fall out of love for myself’ (Elva and Stranger, 2017: 55).

Elva, however, was keen to avoid one of Stranger’s dynamics that she had picked up on over the course of the email correspondence, namely his tendency to engage in self-pity, evident in his initial extreme reaction to the word ‘rapist’, which found him ‘treading the murky waters of shame with me watching from the shore’ (Elva and Stranger, 2017: 85), and claiming the abased position in which ‘he is in the dirt and me up on a pedestal I’ve repeatedly tried to climb down from’ (Elva and Stranger, 2017: 85). Elva’s acute observation suggests something beyond the masochism of the vulnerable narcissist; Stranger’s self-abasement depends on a logic in which males are either heroes or villains, an all-or-nothing understanding of men who commit violence that does nothing to combat rape and sexist or misogynistic violence generally. This logic, on the contrary, depends on the silence and shame and unspeakability generally of men admitting to rape. Unmasking this logic can only be a good thing.

The fuller account of Stranger’s and Elva’s continuing relationship is avoided in the TED talk and public engagement, and is found only by reading the book, no doubt because their story would very easily become subject to reductive and simplistic victim-blaming tropes. The fuller picture is that Elva and Stranger did see each other again in the intervening years between the rape and that ‘fateful’ email. As she recounts onstage in the TED talk, Stranger broke off the relationship, and then she contacted him eight years later, not even knowing if the email address was right. But as the book reveals, Stranger and Elva remained in intermittent email contact during this time. Although the two had broken off their relationship without talking about the rape, four years later, Stranger rang up Elva to tell her he was coming back for the summer. Elva explains in language reflecting the need for victims to be heard and responsibility attributed:

Could this be our chance to confront the past? That hope seeded a twisted, broken interaction between us. My rationale muzzled my rage, because I wanted to get it right. I wanted a chance to explain in grueling detail how he’d hurt me and what the consequences had been, placing the responsibility squarely on his shoulders where it belonged. My own personal trial, of sorts. (Elva and Stranger, 2017: 26)

On Stranger’s return, she ‘waited, planned, and calculated’, wanting to be cold and rational when she confronted him with his crime; she then explains that instead, she had an outburst of ‘thundering fury’ (Elva and Stranger, 2017: 28) and spat in his face. She initiated sexual contact with Stranger, ‘going for power in a calculated, emotionally detached manner’ in order ‘to reclaim the control he’d stolen from me’ (Elva and Stranger, 2017: 127). She wanted to use sex to hurt Stranger – and thus she writes, in a pivotal moment of self-realization, ‘I wasn’t above revenge’ (Elva and Stranger, 2017: 128). The book suggests that this realization allowed her to let go of any doubt over her ability to ‘forgive’ Stranger – she’s realized she is like him in that way, or else he is like her: ‘I can feel how I wanted to hurt Tom as deeply as he hurt me’ (Elva and Stranger, 2017: 128). ⁷ She tells him: ‘I may not have raped another person, but I surely know what it’s like to be self-centered and egotistical and take from others’ (Elva and Stranger, 2017: 157). This is a much more complicated and realistic portrait of violence within human relationships that would have muddied the cleaner narrative being promoted in the TED talk and book tour. This is the narrative, in fact, of the ideal victim (Christie, 1986) who does not contact her rapist afterwards and who does not have any kind of ongoing relationship with him. That the book’s fuller account of Elva’s relationship with Stranger was omitted from the TED talk and accompanying public performances helps to safeguard Elva’s ability to project an image of an ideal victim. The longer story suggests the range of ways survivors of rape respond to or process what has happened to them, and forces us to acknowledge Elva as a complex person with a desire to reclaim agency. Elva’s desire is part of the dynamic informing the TED talk, to which we now turn.

Performing for an audience: Revenge via TED talk

In this part we explore the idea that Elva’s project is not only about forgiveness or responsibility as it has been carefully packaged for the public, but also about her desire for revenge. The project with Stranger is envisaged in a sophisticated way to bring him what he deserves: the public’s (not her) condemnation by an audience ever hungry for spectacle. As Stranger says himself, ‘If you Google “Tom Stranger” a lot of the headlines include the word “rapist”’ (quoted in March 2017). This begs the question: why did he agree to participate? In their book, when Stranger confesses to Elva that he fears being publicly outed as a rapist, she says ‘in knee-jerk reaction’: ‘Well, beat them to it then’. As he ‘looks utterly lost’, she continues: ‘Instead of waiting for someone else to break the silence, break it yourself’ (Elva and Stranger, 2017: 89). She asks him whether he judges people whose stories show they regret their actions and try to make up for them, and he says no; they agree that ‘everyone deserves a second chance if they truly regret their mistakes’ (Elva and Stranger, 2017: 89). She explains to him: ‘The punishment you gave yourself was far more effective than any punitive justice the outside world has to offer, I believe’ (Elva and Stranger, 2017: 178). These arguments would have appealed to Stranger’s ego. Elva has her perpetrator on his knees: ‘Whatever I can do or offer you, I am more than willing’, Stranger tells her (cited in Lehmann, 2017). Elva has perhaps done more than law could ever do: forcing her perpetrator to acknowledge his crime, to apologize and to go viral with the label ‘rapist’ attached to his identity, perhaps for the rest of his life.

Elva is certainly not alone in taking the law into her own hands. She has joined a movement of women survivors of rape who take up ‘new media’ as a particularly powerful vehicle for political activism in response to sexual violence (Fileborn, 2014). Women across Australia are joining private Facebook groups that share stories about men who should be avoided (Cohen and Ryan, 2017). In October 2017, the grassroots campaign ‘Me Too’ (or ‘#MeToo’) spread virally on social media to denounce sexual assault and harassment, in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations against American film producer and executive Harvey Weinstein (Schmidt, 2017). Women were encouraged to tweet this phrase, coined by Tarana Burke in 2006, to publicize experiences to demonstrate the widespread nature of misogynistic behaviour (Shugerman, 2017). In this context, what Elva has done is not unusual, but she has taken several steps further by ‘working’ with her perpetrator on the same project and bringing him to the world stage. Her rapist is not just a name that goes viral, but also his face, and he is willing to do anything that his victim asks him to do. From this perspective, perhaps Elva succeeded in an act of subtle revenge by never condemning him herself, but leaving the world to do that for her.

Elva’s ‘vigilantism’ is not focused on bringing legal action against Stranger. Instead, she wants her narrative of sexual violence to be acknowledged while leaving the public to openly condemn Stranger. She is not inviting this condemnation, yet she must have known that Stranger would suffer from it once he came out into the public. Vigilantism here cannot be heard but can be felt. In the book’s Q&A that we witnessed, her desire for vengeance was expressed through her bodily language, through the lack of eye contact with Stranger and through her tone and demeanour. With all her being she has one aim: to ‘reassign the guilt’ and ‘right the past’. While her desire for revenge is never named, it is not extinguished either. Theirs is an uneasy truce. In the interview we witnessed, no questions were allowed from the audience, and Stranger immediately left the stage after the event, while Elva remained to sign books.

The performance of the moral authority of the victim, and the public shaming of the perpetrator, are key parts of restorative justice, understood as a process that implicates an audience. To witness this performance is to perceive that Elva is obviously, at one important level, enjoying herself, as she occasionally admits (Elva and Stranger, 2017: 197). She often falls back on the idea that her story doesn’t apply outside herself, and that it is hers and hers alone to tell: she is both narrator and subject. What empowers survivors of sexual assault at speak-outs is not the process of reclaiming a unified self so much as the production of narrative itself (Mardorossain, 2014: 65). Yet as Alcoff and Gray (1993) cautioned long ago, ‘speaking out’ may not necessarily be socially or politically transformative in and of itself, and may only contribute to the spectacular, relativizing way in which rape is understood in public discourse. In this spectacle of modern confession, the audience is confronted with an excess of enjoyment: Elva’s enjoyment in the spectacle, and Stranger’s enjoyment in his own abasement, packaged for our enjoyment as audience members. This investment on his part signals the power structure of the confessional because of its productive and intensifying dynamic: it is not about the outcome but about the act of excoriation itself, a trauma repeated in a manner similar to a penitent whipping himself. This may be after all a story not of restorative justice in the modern state but of older catholic habits of guilt and narcissism filtered through the modern modes of TED X.

As a media form, TED talks have wide appeal and have been highly influential; they adopt a recognizable format usually consisting of a single speaker who offers a kind of ‘sales pitch’ (Jurgenson, 2012), a self-confident narrative that aims to inform and inspire. The TED talk eschews provoking questions in favour of presenting ideas which are not meant to be challenged; they are designed to make people feel good about themselves, ‘to give them the impression that they’re part of an elite group making the world a better place’ (Robbins, 2012). Elva’s and Stranger’s TED talk, which lasts 19 minutes, begins with each recounting the narrative in turn. The narrative of the talk reflects the singular constraints of TED talks, which are time-limited and which reduce complexity for the sake of impact. The narrative has an uncomfortably rehearsed quality. It’s a scripted theatrical piece with no eye contact, dialogue or appearance of dialogue between the two of them. Stranger begins with an awkward, easy joke about falling asleep in class, and the audience laughs good naturedly. ⁸ Stranger’s narrative trades quickly on stereotypes of Australia (it’s always hot in Australia) and evokes the casual, fun-loving, privileged attitude of ‘snowboarding after school’. When he starts describing his relationship he’s looking at it from the outside in, as ‘a lovely teenage romance’, and saying ‘we’d meet at lunchtimes to just hold hands and walk around old downtown Reyjavik’ (Elva and Stranger, 2016). There is little interiority to Stranger’s narrative, and no sense from him of what Elva was like, or how he felt about her.

When asked in subsequent interviews why they decided to make their story public – or really, why Stranger decided to make his story public – both Elva and Stranger explain that they did it to help expand the cultural conversation about sexual violence. Elva makes the point that if we only hear victims’ stories, then those are the stories that become scrutinized, and that if:

[male perpetrators] who have been a part of the problem, if they have truly learned the impact of their actions, regretted it and owned up to it, and taken responsibility, and if they really want to contribute towards a solution … I think that we can gain a valuable insight from them. For example, about the toxic attitudes that drive sexual violence. (ABC Radio, 2017)

In the book she writes:

if men like Tom – who belongs to a social group that often escapes analysis and scrutiny because they conform to what is seen as the ‘norm,’ who come from stable backgrounds, and enjoy various privileges – would confess to having raped and to regretting it, it might provide the foundations for a long awaited conversation about the root causes of sexual violence. (Elva and Stranger, 2017: 186)

Throughout his public appearances, Stranger is less composed than Elva. He is not a public persona. He is fidgety, combing his hair with his hands and visibly uncomfortable, and often looks stricken with grief. He occasionally seems overwhelmed with stress and, in one moment, starts to cry. He does, however, offer symbolic reparation to Elva, first through private communication and then through commitment to public recognition and acknowledgment of her suffering. This public redress is what interests Elva, which becomes a more tangible benefit to her in the process of individual restoration of dignity. This would not be possible without Elva, as she notes herself, ‘letting go of her hatred and anger’, a letting go which he ‘benefited from’ (ABC Radio, 2017). Stranger spoke in the interview we witnessed of an absolute compulsion, an injunction to speak: he equates not going public with a furtherance of the status quo:

I think if we left Cape Town and didn’t do anything further, then that is essentially having knowledge, but not doing anything about it, and knowing that this is going on behind closed doors, if we were to be silent, or if I personally was to be silent, it would be a tacit blessing for the status quo. It would be an indifference, and an apathy that I am not willing to sit with and there is a joint investment here and I do think it’ll do some good, to put it out there. (ABC Radio, 2017)

Both of them talk about revelations: ‘deep down’, Stranger says, he knew he’d done something ‘immeasurably wrong’ (Elva and Stranger, 2016). Elva says ‘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’ (Elva and Stranger, 2016). Here they articulate a kind of unconscious knowledge which is intelligible to us, the audience, because it precisely maps ‘informed’ activist social discourse about these issues: rape is immeasurably wrong, and crucially, forgiveness is an answer. This essentially places the victim at the centre of her own narrative, but invests her with all the power to redress – and therefore the responsibility for redressing – sexual violence.

According to Stranger, since he went public with his confession, he has been approached by a number of men who have examined their own relationships and marriages and questioned ‘with a flash of panic in their eye whether they overstep the boundaries’ (ABC Radio, 2017). It is worth noting, however, that the audience for the book tour was made up of approximately 80% women, and the vast majority of comments on the TED talk are from women. Elva hopes that we can learn ‘by listening to those who have been part of the problem … about what ideas and attitudes drove their violent actions’ (ABC Radio, 2017). But Stranger himself provides no great insight. The risk of a performance like Elva’s and Stranger’s is that it provides mostly-female audience members with the opportunity to valorize their own individual feelings of pain, and the few male audience members with the opportunity to identify with an ‘enlightened, reformed’ male perspective rather than question their own implication in coercive structures of power. The TED talk is a form of media that both personalizes and depoliticizes male violence through its use of ‘slick presentations by charismatic faces captured in high definition’ (Robbins, 2012). Both the format and the content of their story of rape and redemption highlight the privileged individual as an entrepreneurial agent of change, shifting the focus away from the collective action necessary to take on the systems of oppression that drive sexual violence.

Conclusion

The terms of mainstream public discourse have shifted towards acknowledging a greater need to listen to survivors’ stories of rape, the damaging impact of rape myths and the structural causes of rape, including ‘rape culture’ and ‘toxic masculinity’. In this article we analyzed the unusual project by a survivor of rape and her rapist that sparked controversy and heated debates about the ways in which rape can be encountered outside the criminal law. We teased out our discomfort at their public performance, arguing that these effects are produced by the performance’s enactment of (gendered) cultural narratives of revenge (Elva) and redemption (Stranger). Elva’s attempt to present a less complicated picture of her motivations in order to frame the project in terms of ‘restorative justice’ obscured the extent to which revenge can be an active part of such initiatives. In turn, Stranger’s commitment to this masochistic performance can be understood as an attempt to reclaim his manhood via a public excoriation.

Since Elva’s and Stranger’s performance, the #MeToo campaign, begun during the last few months of 2017, has opened up public discourse about the ways in which sexual violence exists within a widespread spectrum of misogynistic behaviour, sustained and reinforced by hierarchies of silence and domination. Although the pervasiveness of sexual violence has been well documented for some time, the power of social media campaigns such as #MeToo may be opening up a more productive and meaningful dialogue about sexual violence. Yet in other respects, and as many activists have warned in relation to online justice campaigns more broadly, such campaigns raise critical questions regarding whose justice needs are fulfilled (Salter, 2013). Participation in these campaigns is inherently performative and problematic, providing opportunities for voyeurism and pressuring victims to disclose when some would rather not (Rosewarne, 2017). In addition, online media campaigns are widely acknowledged to privilege white middle-class women at the expense of including victim-survivors from diverse groups (Fileborn and Loney-Howes, 2017). Most notably, the #MeToo campaign has not thus far engendered an outstanding response from male commentators, many of whose support appears tokenistic or begrudging, and who appear to be caught in a defensive posture rather than engaged in much-needed self-reflexive thought. Our critique has hopefully contributed to understanding the critiques and limitations of anti-rape activist initiatives and ‘restorative justice’ approaches like Elva’s and Stranger’s which, however well-intentioned, reproduce the limits of the good man/bystander approach, simplify complex narratives and provide opportunities for redemption rather than transformation. Our investigation suggests the ongoing need to pay close attention to the power dynamics surrounding public performances like these, the subjectivities of those who engage in this type of activism and the discourses that manifest in public debate. Most of all we hope that it serves as a call for thinking about the ways in which male voices may or may not contribute to moving beyond rhetoric and engendering meaningful change in combatting sexual violence.