Scar vs Scar

The courtroom didn’t feel real, perhaps because it was the first time I’d been in one like this.

I’d seen them on TV, I’d sat in the gallery as silent support for friends seeking to have their rights enforced. I'd argued a fine cayused by an administrative error. I’d even been selected for Jury once... but that had been different.

I wasn’t the kind of person who got put on trial.

The panelled walls slid in and out of focus, which didn’t help my questioning of reality. The judge walked in, and everyone stood, then re-settled themselves. There were papers in front of me, titled “Victim impact statement”, but the words blurred before my eyes.

So did time, until it sharpened into focus. “Why did you feel the need to maim these boys, Miss Watson?”

I frowned; from my limited experience, an impact statement was supposed to be a statement, not an interrogation. “I will carry the scars of their crimes for the rest of my life, Your Honour. Scars I never chose, wounds that will impact me forever. How is it injustice that they should do the same?”

Beside me, the prosecution stood up. “Miss Watson is not the one on trial, Your Honour. She is the victim, here to read an impact statement.”

Judges were monarchs of their courtroom, but it seemed best to push forward. “They isolated me and held me at knifepoint while they searched for any way I could be tracked. My phone, the AirTag in my school bag, my Fitbit. Even my noise-cancelling earbuds. Then they removed those items and left them in a nearby store.”

It was the fear every woman lived with, born from experience and the knowledge that you couldn’t count on others to protect you. “That is not impulse, Your Honour. That is planning. That is the kind of planning that takes deliberate thought. This was not the work of a moment; it was strategy.”

I hadn’t expected my desperate struggle to work. If anything, I’d hoped to die and have it over with. Instead, I survived, and left my assailants with scars to be identified by. “When they held a knife to my throat and took turns raping me, I did not expect to survive. I thought that when they were done, they would cut my throat and throw me in the river so I could never bear witness against them.”

There is a strange kind of clarity when you think you’re about to die, where nothing matters, and everything is vitally important, and you don’t think, you just act. “In that second, my only thought was that I needed to leave some mark on them, matching the same weapon that would end my life.”

This statement wasn’t for the Judge, or even my attackers. It was for the court of public opinion, the transcription records that reporters would demand access to. It was for the future victims, if my attackers were set free, so they would know that their assailant was not invincible. “I have relived these moments over and over again, Your Honour. In my dreams and in my waking moments. Every time I see a group of students walking home, I wonder which of them will be the next victim when my attackers are shown leniency. I wonder which ones have committed the same crime without being caught.

There is no innocence here, Your Honour. I can never return to the rosy, innocent worldview I once held, and these serial rapists lost the right to be called innocent the moment they began planning their first rape.”

I set down the papers, but the judge stopped me before I could sit down. “Do you have no empathy for their youth, Miss Watson? No compassion for their understanding of their actions?”

That was always the question, wasn’t it? What about the future of the poor perpetrator, whose face would be known as an offender? Never a thought for the future of the victim, who might never feel safe again.

Why did their future matter more than mine, when they had been the ones who chose to commit a crime?

I looked the Judge in the eye, and sat down, signalling that I was done. “I showed as much empathy for them as they showed me, Your Honour. If my scars do not matter to the jury, then neither should theirs.”

The Judge banged their gavel, “I pronounce...”

With a jolt, I started upright, blankets tangled around my legs.

I wasn’t in a courtroom, I was in my own bed, oceans away from the news that had consumed my dreams. Of course, how much that mattered when women across the world faced the same thing, and only a fraction were even deemed newsworthy, was up for debate.

I glanced at the clock; my alarm would go off in an hour. No point trying to go back to sleep. Perhaps a hot, relaxing shower would help prepare me for the day ahead.

Based on a nightmare I had, after reading too many articles about women being failedand re-victimised by the courts who refuse to hold their abusers accountable.