Rape and Redemption

A year or two into my marriage, I was invited to attend a wedding shower for a young woman. As part of the entertainment, our hostess asked if each of the married women would share how she had come to know her husband. The woman beside me, who was just a few years older than I, had introduced herself to me as Dawne. When her turn came, she told her story. She said that a nice young man had asked her out, and that as they were driving along, he reached out to put his arm around her shoulders. Her response was to recoil violently and cry out, “Don’t hurt me! Don’t hurt me!” because, she explained to us ladies, she had had a bad experience with men just a few months earlier. The young man, however, met her fears with gentleness and kindness and compassion, and he soon won her over.

A little later, as we were left to our tea and conversation, Dawne quietly told me some more of her story. When she was nineteen years old, she said, she was working in Edmonton in a department store and living in a basement suite with a girlfriend. One day at work she ran into a fellow whom she had known four years earlier at her church youth group. He told her that he was married now and had a little girl. He chatted with her only briefly and then moved on. A few days later, as she left work and walked toward her bus stop, she saw this young man again, stopped at the curb in a car with two other fellows. They offered her a ride home. She accepted.

She soon found herself being driven, not toward her place, but out of town, north of the city. She became understandably anxious. They stopped in a small town for gas, and as they did, Dawne heard a clear voice speaking in her head: “Get out of the car. Go to the ladies’ washroom, and stay there.” She had never heard of God speaking to people today in an audible voice, so she wasn’t sure it was He. Again the voice came, speaking the same words. But she was paralyzed by the fear that had come over her and she stayed where she was. The men threw some of their empty beer bottles at a stone memorial on main street as they sped out of the small town and into open country. They pulled off into a field, and they all raped her.

At one point she managed to break away, and she ran as fast as she could through the light covering of snow, the coarse, frozen stubble from the harvest slashing at her bare feet. They soon caught her again, and they treated her even more roughly after that.

She cried out to the one she knew, asking, “Why are you doing this?” He reminded her of something he had said to her four years earlier. This young man, 18 years old, had sexually propositioned this 15-year-old girl. When she turned him down, he had said, “If I can’t have you, I’m going to make it so that no one else will ever want you either.” So this was his revenge.

That was the part of the story I heard over our tea cups that afternoon, this, and the fact that the rape had left her pregnant, that she had given the baby up for adoption, and that now she was just counting the years until her boy would turn 18 and she would be able to track him down. I did the math: he must be 14 or 15 by now. Not too much longer.

I didn’t talk to Dawne much over the next many years, although we attended the same church part of that time and I would see her across the way in the congregation. And we would always smile and say hello when we saw each other here and there around town. I never stopped wondering how the rest of the story had unfolded.

More than thirty years have passed now, since that wedding shower where I met Dawne. I contacted her a few weeks ago and told her I would like to hear all that has transpired, and that I would like to write about it, if she was comfortable with the idea. She was eager to glorify God with this testimony of His faithfulness, so we got together and talked. Her voice still trembles and her eyes still tear up when she speaks of what happened to her 48 years ago, although she is quick to say that the tears are more for gratitude of all that God has done since. Her story picks up right after the assault.

As the three men dropped her off at her place, Dawne had the presence of mind to cross behind the vehicle and memorize the licence plate as she walked past. Once inside, distraught and in shock, she received the help of her friend while a young man from upstairs phoned the police.

When the officers arrived, they insisted that they needed to take her to the hospital. Dawne flatly refused to go with them alone: they had to let her girlfriend come along.

The hospital staff confirmed that she had indeed been assaulted by three different men, and then the police put the girls back in the squad car and proceeded to have Dawne retrace the route with them. She had given them the licence plate number (the car turned out to be stolen), and when they gathered up broken beer bottle glass from the cenotaph in the small town, they were able to retrieve fingerprints.

In due course, all three men were apprehended. Meanwhile, as a month and then two crept by, Dawne realized that she was pregnant. Her girlfriend had moved out, heading back to school, and Dawne could not afford the basement suite alone. She was so ill from the pregnancy that she couldn’t keep her job, so she found herself on welfare, living in a small apartment, alone and lonely and depressed. The church she was attending, because of her pregnancy, declared her to be “a member in bad standing”—even though the circumstances had been made known. (It’s all I can do to refrain from breaking in with some angry editorial comments here.) Not surprisingly, she never went back to that church. For quite some time, she quit going to church at all.

Someone told her that they knew of a person who would take care of the unwanted pregnancy for her. This was before the time when abortions were readily available: she paid $300 up front for what used to be referred to as a back-street butcher. The day came, and she travelled by bus to the address she’d been given. But she found she couldn’t go through with it: she stayed on the bus until it took her back home.

The horror of the violation was on her mind continually. She was so filled with hatred and bitterness that she found herself fantasizing about committing mayhem on the three men. She told her mom, and her pastor, that she imagined seeing them on the street, running them through with a large knife, and walking coldly over their corpses. Knowing that the attacker with whom she’d been acquainted had a little girl of his own, she even imagined arranging for something terrible to happen to her when she got to be Dawne’s age.

Strangely similar to the offer of help in arranging an abortion at the three-month point, now at six months a relative told her he knew someone who, for $300, would look after these men for her. In the end she told her uncle no and held on to her money. (She always assumed the proposal was to see that they all got a thorough beating; now she wonders if the offer was perhaps to have them “terminated,” and she shudders at the thought.)

She became more depressed as the months went slowly by. She found herself thinking that both she and the baby would be better off dead. One evening when she was over seven months pregnant, she opened her medicine chest and took out a large bottle of aspirin. Before she could even take the lid off, her buzzer rang. Who could that be? She never had any visitors. She pushed the button and asked, “Who’s there?”

“It’s a blast from your past,” shouted a raucous voice, which she immediately recognized as belonging to a girlfriend from back in her school years. This friend had moved out of province four or five years earlier. The young woman took the apartment by storm. Spying the aspirin, she demanded, “What are you doing with those?” She grabbed them from Dawne’s hand and stuffed them into her purse. “You’re a mess,” she declared. “Go have a shower and get cleaned up. And do something with your hair!”

Meekly Dawne complied. When she had freshened up and even curled her hair, they sat on the couch and had a visit. The friend placed a call from Dawne’s phone, apparently to her new husband. “I won’t be home tonight,” she announced into the receiver. “Dawne’s sick. I’m spending the night.”

The two of them then pulled out the sofa bed and made it up, and they both retired. When Dawne woke up in the morning, the hide-a-bed was hidden again, the bedding was neatly folded on the couch, and her friend was gone. She didn’t hear from her or see her again for another 20 years. She has always thought of the events of that evening as more of an angelic visitation than a random visit from an old friend.

The events of that night prevented her suicide, but her dark thoughts, her hatred and bitterness, were consuming her. She came to the place where she couldn’t carry it anymore. She got down on her knees beside her bed and asked God to take it all away, to change her heart, to change her thinking. She stayed on her knees until she felt in her soul that the power of the darkness had been broken.

When the time came for her baby to be born, she determined to keep her eyes shut the entire time. She knew that if she ever laid eyes on that child, she would not be able to give it away. The doctor laid the baby across her chest and told her she had a little boy. Dawne lay there praying in her heart for him, entrusting him to the Lord, and dedicating him to the plans and purposes of God. Then she spoke to the newborn infant: “I know you won’t be able to understand this, little one; I know you didn’t ask for this, but I have to give you up because I cannot look after you. I am giving you the best gift I can give you: a mom and dad who will love you. And I hope I will see you again someday.” When she signed the adoption papers, her hands shook so badly that she could hardly get her name on the documents.

Two months after the birth of her son, she married the nice young man that she had been dating since a couple of months after the assault. Another month or two later, she faced her attackers in court. The three of them had hired a lawyer; she was appointed one by the court. He knew nothing about her, didn’t seem to want to, neither did he even seem to be on her side. The wife of her antagonist was put on the stand, and she testified under oath that her husband had been at home with her during the hours in question. The proceedings became so distressing to Dawne that she stood up and walked out, with the judge shouting after her and threatening to hold her in contempt of the court. But then he followed her out and spoke with her quietly, and on hearing her misgivings on the “justice” she saw shaping up, he agreed to put her on the stand and question her himself.

The judge led her through the telling of her story and the identifying of her attackers, and then he said, “I understand you had a baby as a result of this encounter.” At her affirmative, she saw her antagonist lift his head for the first time, startled. He began to cry.

Now the judge addressed the defendants. “Is this young lady telling the truth?” All three slowly nodded their heads. Turning back to Dawne, the judge said, “The police have charged these men with rape. Do you wish to charge them as well?”

“No,” Dawne responded. Then turning toward the men, she told them, “I forgive you.” She didn’t want any more hurt from the situation, not for herself, not for anyone. She just wanted to move on and leave it all in God’s hands.

The judge spoke again: “The young lady may forgive you, but this court does not.” Each man was sentenced to repaying to Social Services the full amount that it had cost to look after Dawne during her pregnancy.

Once again, I’m biting my tongue here. But I suppose in Dawne choosing not to charge the men, she forfeited any right to compensation. Regardless, there is no way that any amount of money could have undone the harm that was done to her. In forgiving the men and trusting God, she did the most powerful thing she could do for her own restoration.

As I write Dawne’s story, I am reading a book on a present-day martyr, a Turkish man who was murdered for his devotion to Christ. When it talks about his widow choosing to forgive, it says something that helps clarify the dynamic of releasing someone who has hurt us.

People who do not believe on Jesus cannot understand that this sort of forgiveness is a supernatural gift of God. Forgiveness does not include the wish that these murderers should be spared earthly punishment. Forgiveness means to forgo one’s own feelings of vengeance and to bless the murderers in the name of Jesus. (Faithful Until Death, Wolfgang Haede, P. 118)

On the second anniversary of the rape, a son was born to Dawne and her husband. Dawne felt that it was part of God’s redemption, blotting out the darkness associated with that date by infusing it with new joy. Four years later they had another son. Theirs was a happy, godly family. But Dawne’s heart still ached with a lonely love for her first-born son. She prayed for him continually and yearned for the day, still many years away, when perhaps she might be allowed to meet him. She began to have a recurring dream, that she would awaken in the middle of the night to a knock on the front door. She would make her way down the hall, open the door, and there would be a young man saying, “I’m your son Allan.”

The dream came so regularly and for so many years that she finally went and told her current pastor about it. “Do you think this is God promising me that I will get to meet him some day?”

“Where are you in the dream?” the pastor asked. “What house?”

She didn’t know.

He prayed and asked God that the next time she had the dream, she would be able to recognize her surroundings. He also pointed out that it was important that she and husband tell their two sons that they had another brother and that their mom was hoping to meet him some day. After that, the boys began to pray for their other brother on a regular basis.

The next time Dawne had the dream, it happened as the pastor had asked: she was able to look around and notice the layout of the house, the position of the closets and so on, and she realized that it was the same house they were living in. The only difference was that when she opened the front door and looked across the street behind her son, there was a house opposite, whereas in actuality there was just a farmer’s field, because they lived on the very edge of town.

 Finally the day of her first son’s eighteenth birthday came and went. Dawne began her search, but immediately found a closed door. In rape cases, she was told, the records are sealed.

More than ten additional years drifted by. Then in 1999, Dawne received a notice that the laws had changed and all adoption records were now open. She placed a phone call to Social Services in Edmonton. The woman who answered the phone was rather negative, and she discouraged Dawne from proceeding: after all, would her son really want to find out that he was a product of rape? Dawne began to second-guess herself: perhaps the woman was right.

But after just a couple more weeks, she decided to try again. This time she would phone Calgary instead. And this time, from the moment the woman on the other end picked up and identified herself, Dawne was sure that God was now working actively on her behalf. The woman was full of compassion, first for Dawne’s awful experience, and second for her burning desire to find her son. She promised to check into it.

It was only a day later that the woman phoned back to say she had located the young man, living about four hours away. “Allan has been looking for you too,” she said. “He will phone you tomorrow when he’s off work.” She also told Dawne the names of the couple who had adopted her son. Dawne was rendered speechless: her son’s adoptive father was a first cousin to her husband.

That first phone call was anxious and exhilarating. Dawne was a little taken aback when her son asked right off, “Are you a Christian?”

“Yes,” she answered, wondering where this was going.

“That explains it!” he exclaimed. He went on to say that his adoptive parents were nominal church-goers, attending not much more than Christmas and Easter. “But,” he said, “from the time I was six or seven, I always wanted to be in Sunday School. There was a bus from one of the churches that went around Sunday mornings and picked up kids, and I always made sure I was on that bus.”

Before they ended the call, Allan asked if he could come for a visit in two weeks’ time, once he was on days-off again. Dawne was so excited that she forgot to give him her address. And she didn’t even have his phone number. Perhaps he’ll phone back, she thought. But he didn’t.

Two weeks later, with her husband out of town working, Dawne found herself waking up in the wee hours of the morning, right about the same time that the dream always used to come. She lay there thinking. He finished work last night. He could just about be here by now. How will he ever find me?

Then she heard a knock on the front door. She got up and made her way down the hall. She opened the door, and there stood her son, now 29 years old. Across the road was the same house she had always seen in the dream: over the years the town had grown and what used to be the farmer’s field was now all residential.

They embraced, and Dawne invited him in. “How on earth did you find me?” she asked.

“I stopped at a gas station on the edge of town and got a map,” he said. “Then I asked the woman behind the counter if she knew of anyone in town with this last name. ‘There’s only one family in town that I know of with that name,’ she said. I told her I was looking for Dawne, and she said, ‘She’s a good friend of mine.’ Then she took my map and drew on it the route to your house.”

Dawne couldn’t recall any friend of hers who worked in a local gas station.

The next morning, still amazed that Allan had found his way to her house, she drove to the gas station he had mentioned to find out who had been behind the counter. There she found her friend Sue. “I didn’t know you were working here,” she said.

“Nope,” answered Sue, “I’m not. Just filling in. Just last night and today.”

Back at the house, she noticed that Allan kept going over to the patio door and staring out into the neighbour’s yard. Then as Dawne was taking something out of a drawer in the buffet, he glanced inside and saw a photo, which he then picked up. He did a bit of a double-take. “You know Chris So-and-So?” he asked, pointing to a boy in the picture.

“Yes,” she said, more surprised than he was, “he used to live next door. He and his family moved away a few years ago. But how do you know him?”

Allan hardly seemed to hear her question. “I knew I’d been here before,” he said. “I knew it!”

She stared at him. “When were you ever here?”

“Do you remember one time about 13 years ago when Chris’s grandma came to visit, and she brought along another grandson, Allan, and he brought his friend, who was also named Allan, and they called us Little Allan and Big Allan? I am Big Allan. I stayed there for two days, and I played football on the lawn with your other two sons.”

Dawne was incredulous, and she was actually quite angry with God at what seemed to her at the time a cruel joke. But it would seem that God in His wisdom ordained that that was not the right time to reveal mother and son to one another. He makes everything beautiful—in His time. And in the meantime, He was composing and orchestrating a fantastic story.

Dawne’s healing was a gradual process over many years, with several significant milestones along the journey. The first was God’s touching her in the area of her hatred and bitterness and helping her to extend forgiveness to the rapists, within the first year of the assault. Then she also had to deal with the way other people sometimes made her feel. There was the policeman who, the night of the rape, when he asked for her soiled clothes, held up her dress and said, “Well, no wonder. Look what you were wearing.” It was a dress with a modest neckline and a hem that fell below the knee. Seriously! This was in 1969, the era of the mini-skirt. I remember how short I and my friends all wore our dresses back then. Dawne never wore anything like that, but however unjustified the officer’s comment and the judgement it implied, one can imagine the shame that fell on her.

And over the years that followed, there were enough little remarks from people along the way to keep throwing her off balance emotionally, innuendos that questioned her character and lay the fault of the crime at her feet. When she was pregnant with her third son, her mother-in-law said to her, “How can your husband be sure this baby is his? After all, the first one wasn’t.”

These comments caused her to question her own integrity. She searched her heart in vain for something that might have brought the assault upon her. She finally brought it all to God, like the psalmist who prayed, “See if there be any wicked way in me” (Psalm 139:24). She simply asked Him that if she had ever done or said anything to incite this man against her that He would forgive her.

Still the depression persisted. In 1984, on the fourteenth birthday of her lost son, she found herself desperately low. Sitting down, she printed the date on the inside cover of her Bible and then wrote a prayer:

Lord Jesus, I am hurting deep inside. The memories are too painful for me. I cannot bear them. I believe Your Word, which tells me that You bore our griefs and carried our sorrows (Isaiah 53:4-5). I ask You, Jesus, to heal me completely, not only of the memories but of their devastating effects upon my being. I rest in Your Healing. I accept it in Your Name. Thank You, Jesus.

Three months went by. Dawne had just been released from a second stint in the hospital for depression. Six older women in the church, “spiritual mothers” to Dawne, invited her to go with them to a retreat in Calgary. A woman would be speaking there, they said, on deep emotional wounds. When Dawne said she couldn’t afford to go, these dear and determined ladies pitched in and paid her way. At the retreat, she was able to talk with the guest speaker shortly before a session.

“God is going to reveal to me the root of your depression,” the woman told her. “He will show me while I am speaking, and I’ll say your name so that you’ll know the next part refers specifically to you.”

In the middle of the session, the woman suddenly said, “Dawne. Now I’m going to talk about grief. Grief is the loss of anything that was precious to you.” She went on to speak on the subject, but Dawne had already heard what she needed to hear. She had never grieved, never really affirmed and validated the pain she carried, for two very great losses: first, her virginity, stolen in such a violent, heartless, and ungodly way, and second, her first-born son, whom she loved with all her heart in spite of the terrible way he’d been conceived. She came home from the retreat knowing that she needed to somehow let God help her grieve.

It was the following Sunday in church. She went up for prayer, which was nothing unusual for her. Two of these “spiritual mothers” came to stand with her. The first woman just reached out her hand and touched Dawne lightly on the forehead. The power of God hit her so hard that she fell to the floor. A consuming grief was released in her; she said later that it felt like someone had just died. Sobs wracked her body and tears coursed down her temples as she lay flat on her back. The first woman knelt beside her and prayed: “And now, Lord, I ask you to heal Dawne completely, not only of the memories but of their devastating effects upon her being.” She used the exact words that Dawne had written secretly in her Bible three months earlier.

Meanwhile, the church service stood still and waited for God to do His work.

When the grief finally abated, the other woman knelt down, laid her hand over Dawne’s heart, and asked the Lord to fill her with an overflowing joy. And then Dawne began to laugh. She laughed until she cried; she rolled from side to side; she laughed until her sides ached. She laughed a crazy, contagious laugh until the entire congregation was laughing along with her.

When it was over, Dawne knew that she was finally free.

When I think about Dawne’s healing, it brings to mind something the Apostle Paul said in explaining what really was accomplished through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ: “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” (1 Corinthians 15:55, KJV). The enemy of our souls, whose continual intent it is to rob, kill, and destroy (John 10:10), tries to keep us in bondage all our lifetime through fear—ultimately the fear of death and the grave (Hebrews 2:15). Jesus triumphed over all the power of death, the grave, and the devices of the enemy. Sexual abuse is one of the most painful ways the enemy stings us with the venom of wickedness, but Christ won an absolute and all-time victory over this and every other evil.

Some experts (Fred and Florence Littauer) estimate that three of every four women have been victims of some sort of sexual abuse, though often the painful memories are necessarily repressed, and one in four boys also has been a victim. This puts the numbers at a staggering fifty percent. Some of this abuse may be “minor,” and some major, but even the so-called mildest cases generate trauma that can last a lifetime. The walking wounded are all around us.

Recently I was talking with a young woman, a believer, who suffered abuse in her childhood. “God tells us that His grace is sufficient,” I said, “and that Christ took every pain, sorrow, grief, and wound to the Cross. In doing so, He broke their power over us. If His provision is not fully sufficient for this scourge also, then Christ’s sacrifice falls short for half of humanity.” My point was rhetorical: anyone who walks with Jesus comes to know increasingly that His provision is not only sufficient but exceeding abundant above all that we ask or think (Ephesians 3:20, KJV). Dawne would certainly agree.

There have been several opportunities lately for Dawne to share her story with local youth groups. Some might wonder how she could talk publicly about such a thing. But the power of an evil deed, though it flourishes in darkness, is exposed and stripped of its influence by bringing it out into the light. And where we’ve been badly wounded, once we receive God’s healing, He gives us authority and power to impact others with the overcoming truth of God.

She tells her story in the context of the power of forgiveness. She talks about scars; she shows the young people one that she has on her hand and tells them how she got it. “When the wound was fresh,” she tells them, “it was very painful, but it finally healed and only left a scar. The scar reminds us of what happened, but there is no longer any pain.”

It is forgiveness and faith that bring God’s healing into our emotional wounds.

As I finished writing her story, I phoned Dawne to check a few of the facts. She was just putting up her Christmas tree. “I’ve found this ornament in the decorations that has something written on it,” she said, “and I’ve just been sitting here looking at it. It says, ‘Without faith, miracles can’t happen.’”