Sue Bradford

Sue Bradford

Sue Bradford gives the appearance of being one of life's toughest customers, hardened by many an encounter with a police baton on countless protest lines before she became a Green MP in 1999.

Yet it has taken her 35 years to talk publicly for the first time about being raped as a young woman.

By her mid-20s it had happened three times, the first when she was 16. She was locked in a room by a man and made to perform oral sex on him.

It was clear as Sue Bradford spoke about the abuse to Linda Clark on National Radio's Nine to Noon yesterday that she still found it a struggle to discuss.

"I certainly did not have the courage to talk about it then. I was so devastated and ashamed and frightened and unable to deal with it.

"It has taken this long for me to be able to talk about it. I think that shows the impact that it has on the internal psychology."

The reason Sue Bradford had cause to revisit her memories was legislation that passed through Parliament last week, updating rape laws.

Without revealing her secret at the time, she tried, unsuccessfully, to change the definition of rape to include the use of objects and anal and oral rape, as well as rapes by men on men, women on women, and women on men.

Legally what happened to her in the locked room was not rape, it's called unlawful sexual connection; to her mind, there is no doubt it was rape of an innocent young woman.

"This was by force, by a man in a locked room where he locked the door and I couldn't get away. There was no question about any consent issues being involved here.

"I was totally sexually inexperienced at the time. I was really innocent.

"When you are young and innocent and something like that happens to you, that was just as devastating as the other kind of rape.

"These are experiences I know will affect me till the day I die but it seems as though I have only reached the point in my life when I can talk about it in a political way.

"Rape is rape and you shouldn't be euphemistic about it any more. It is not just an abstract crime," she told the Herald later.

She praised the courage of transsexual Labour MP Georgina Beyer who, during the prostitution law reform debates in 2003, spoke in Parliament about being raped when she was once a prostitute.

Sue Bradford said: "There has to come a time when we have Members of Parliament who actually can talk about these experiences and speak for all the other people we know who have had these kind of experiences, male or female, gay or straight, that have been through these things and actually turn our laws into something that reflects the reality of life for all people in this country."