Female journalist looks to be raped

Mac McClelland

Journalist stages her OWN rape to cure trauma of witnessing sex attack on woman in Haiti
By Rachel Quigley

Last updated at 6:43 PM on 5th July 2011

People deal with stress in different ways.

For journalist Mac McClelland, it gripped her body and her mind in such a severe way that she had to simulate a violent rape to get over it.

The Mother Jones civil rights reporter, was on a job in Haiti in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake when she met a woman she called Sybille - who had been raped at gunpoint and brutally mutilated by a gang of men.

After Ms McClelland, 31, accompanied her to the hospital - where the surgeon who performed reconstructive surgery on her told her she was a slut and deserved what she got - they were on the way back in a taxi when Sybille saw one of the men who raped her. Ms McClelland recalls that she went into a 'a full paroxysm - wailing and flailing in terror, screaming with her eyes rolling in abject terror'.

It was at that point that something snapped in Ms McClelland too. Despite the fact she has seen the impact of sexual violence all around the globe having reported from the Congo and Burma, this incident was more than she could take.

According to ABC, she became progressively enveloped in the classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress - avoidance of feelings, flashbacks and recurrent thoughts that triggered crying spells. There were smells that made her gag.

She couldnt get out of bed in the morning and had nightmares and daymares about rape.

The 31-year-old went to see a therapist in her home of San Francisco and despite getting treatment for post traumatic stress disorder, she told her therapist that all she wanted to do was have incredibly violent sex.

Her therapist suggested it was a good idea and told her to find someone who she trusted enough to do it with.

Ms McClelland believes that it was this staged violent rape with a close friend that cured her. She even wrote an article about for the online magazine Good.

In it she explains how her sexual partner mercilessly pinned her, beat her about the head and brutally violated her.

She wrote about the rape: 'I did not enjoy it in the way a person getting screwed normally would. But as it became clear that I could endure it, I started to take deeper breaths.

'And my mind stayed there, stayed present even when it became painful, even when he suddenly smothered me with a pillow, not to asphyxiate me but so that he didn't break my jaw when he drew his elbow back and slammed his fist into my face. Two, three, four times.

'My body felt devastated but relieved; I'd lost, but survived. After he climbed off me, he gathered me up in his arms. I broke into a thousand pieces on his chest, sobbing so hard that my ribs felt like they were coming loose.' She told ABC: 'I was not crazy. It was a way for me to deal in sort of a simulated, but controlled situation. I could say "stop" at any time. But it was still awful, and the body doesn't understand when it's in a fight.'

The controversial article drew as much disgust as praise from readers, some who accused her of taking the attention and focus away from the real victims of Haiti and real rape victims.

Others were more supportive and congratulated her on her bravery. She said: 'I got an email every ten minutes from a total stranger, thanking me for saying they felt a lot less isolated and they appreciated someone starting the conversation.'Some of them were incredibly intense and emotional.'

Many experts don't recommend self-treatment as a way to alleviate post-traumatic stress, but some say that reliving the experience that triggered the mental breakdown, referred to as 'mastery', can be effective.

Elana Newman, research director for the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma and a professor of psychology at the University of Tulsa, said: 'People want to feel better and have the tendency when they are feeling terrible to attempt some way at mastery. People try to make sense of the experience in any way they can with the resources they've got.'

Ms Newman told ABC that she thought Ms McClelland was 'brave' as a journalist to address her struggle so openly, but she does not recommend that those with post-traumatic stress 'put themselves at risk without controls'.

'I don't know her so I can't assess her,' she said. 'But mastery needs to be done in a safe, structured environment.'

Ms McClelland lived among Burmese rebels for her 2006 book, For Us, Surrender is Out of the Question. She has also written about genocide survivors in Uganda and the Congo.

Since her experience, and after the CBS News Correspondent Lara Logan was molested in Cairo in February, Ms McClelland took to task the Committee to Protect Journalists for not once mentioning sexual harassment in their manual.

They subsequently added an 'addendum on sexual aggression' after interviewing almost 50 journalists who have experienced sexual violence - from groping to rape - while doing their jobs.

She said: 'If the handbook had a section detailing "symptoms of a journalist who really needs counselling and should probably go home", I would have fit the description.'
Ms McClelland - who returned to Haiti in January for two weeks - said she doesn't think of herself as a 'fragile' person and said she feels compelled to continue her reporting.
She said: 'Whether people say I'm insane or not, it's tough enough to do this job. If I didn't have any feelings, that would be scary. It's a human response to duress.'

MS MCCLELLAND'S REPORT OF HER SIMULATED RAPE

'And with that he was on me, forcing my arms to my sides, then pinning them over my head, sliding a hand up under my shirt when I couldn't stop him.

'The control I'd lost made my torso scream with anxiety; I cried out desperately as I kicked myself free.

'But it didn't matter how many times I managed to knock him over to the other side of the bed. He's got 60 pounds on me, plus the luxuries of patience and fearlessness.

'When I got out from under him and started to scramble away, he simply caught me by a leg or an upper arm or my hair and dragged me back.

'By the time he pinned me by my neck with one forearm so I was forced to use both hands to free up space between his elbow and my windpipe, I'd largely exhausted myself.
'And just like that, I'd lost. It's what I was looking for, of course. But my body - my hard-fighting, adrenaline-drenched body - reacted by exploding into terrible panic.

'The comforting but debilitating blanket of tension that'd for weeks been wrapped around my chest solidified into a brick.

'Then the weight of his body, and of the inevitability of my defeat, descended on my ribcage. My worn-out muscles went so taut that they ached. I stopped breathing.'
Source: www.good.is

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