A life slowly rebuilt

By Jan Corbett

Twenty-one years old, not long married, waiting to begin a new job, living in Devonport - life could not have held more promise for Sue Dixon. Until the afternoon a 15-year-old boy knocked on the door and asked to use the telephone.

"I let him in. It was one of the craziest things I ever did."

She heard him dial several times and started to get nervous. She was about to order him out of the house when he jumped her with a knife, punched her to the ground and raped her.

She pleaded for her life, offered him money, then began to welcome the idea of death as the only way to stop what was happening. She remembers thinking she would never see her husband again.

They were 30 frenzied minutes that changed Sue Dixon's life.

The first six months after she was raped were a blur.

"It disrupted the anchors in my life, it dragged them up. You're left with a whole new you and you have to start building again but you know you can never build who you were before.

"Being raped is not only a bodily experience. For many years it raped my mind. It penetrates your spirituality, your perception of who you are, your perception of the world.

"For everyone, home is a sacred place - you can't touch me here, this is where I come for my nurturing, solace and love. That [violation] has taken me a long time to come to terms with."

Indeed it was another decade before real anger set in, reignited by a series of other personal issues, including the house being burgled.

"You feel you're going mad. You think he's coming back. You carry around this all-consuming fear."

Becoming involved in victim advocacy work got Sue through that next stage. Working with other rape victims, she says, "was like coming home. You feel okay, you feel good and that you can let it all spill out and that whatever you say will be accepted."

Now, 26 years later, she says she has learned to live with it, to integrate the experience into who and what she is, but it was a long road to reach that point of acceptance. All along, she received significant help from the man she describes as her best therapist, her husband Mark.

"You deal with what you've been dealt the best way you can. In the end it's given me a lot of strength and courage. I have the ability to empathise and [victim advocacy work] brought me close to a lot of very special people. Yes, the rape was awful and the legacy was not nice. But that was then, and this is now and it's great. Life is great."