CW: Mention of Rape
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I first read Sarah Dessen’s Just Listen sometime between my eleventh and twelfth birthday. I remember devouring books one after another then, finishing maybe two to three a month, sometimes sitting for days on end just reading. I couldn’t seem to put them down. And looking back through some of my notes from that time, my ideas about society, diversity, mental health, and culture were definitely shaped by the literature I was consuming. I mean, good literature should do that: reflect society back on its readers. Dessen’s young adult novel Just Listen became another one of those books, introducing me to new material and shaping my understanding of society. But it wasn’t just another book; to this day it stands out so distinctly in my memory.
The novel follows Annabel Greene, a teenager struggling with the aftermath of a traumatic event, trying to understand what she is feeling and navigate relationships with her family and friends as she feels increasingly alienated from society. It isn’t until the end of the book that we find she’s a survivor of sexual violence. While it is hinted at about two thirds of the way through when her classmate comes forward publicly as a survivor, Annabel’s own experience is described in a flashback near the end. The impact of this experience perhaps strikes the reader more as we see the contrast in Annabel’s character and tone. She spends the entire novel focussing on others, either in their own struggles or their relationship with her. So, when she finally takes a moment to feel her own pain and confront the emotions she has been running from, the reader feels empathy and relief as Annabel releases the pressure that has been building through the novel. The gravity of this moment is so evident. Dessen clearly understands how deeply-rooted an experience of sexual violence becomes in a survivor’s life, and through her storytelling and the shift in tone, she is sure to make this impact known.
For me however, this reflection and understanding of sexual violence and trauma has come with age. As an eleven-year-old, I couldn’t fully understand the bigger picture that Dessen was painting. That’s not to say I couldn’t understand the weight of the moment: I could feel Annabel holding back throughout the novel, hiding something from everyone, including the reader. I could understand that what she was holding was trauma. I could feel Annabel’s burden lift a little as she told her best friend and family. I could very clearly distinguish during the rape scene that what Annabel was experincing was a clear ignorance of consent, that the actions of another were infringing on her own sense of safety, bodily autonomy, and self-worth. I could feel her lack of control and the disarray of emotions she was feeling as a result of this violation, and it made me uncomfortable.
But I didn’t understand that it was rape. I couldn’t connect those dots. I wasn’t able to name her experience, but at the same time I had just felt it; her emotions, thoughts, physical reaction, they had all lived through me as the reader. And, as a young girl, I could feel the gender and power imbalance, the feeling of helplessness, and connect that to my own life. It’s interesting to note that Dessen was careful to omit the language of sexual violence from the novel even after she describes Annabel’s rape in detail, further leaving me unable to recognize and name Annabel’s experiences. Some might argue that an understanding of the experience itself is more valuable than being able to name it, but I would have to disagree. We as humans understand our surroundings and experiences by being able to name them. While I had just read about the journey of a survivor of sexual violence, I couldn’t name Annabel as such. Instead, I could simply describe to you some of what she had been feeling, thinking, and experiencing. In order to understand the full context of her experience, I needed this language. That way I would have been able to connect the dots between consent, sexual violence, rape, survival, and what survival had meant for Annabel. Instead, I was left with incomplete information, able to describe the book and experiences in detail, but never having been given the language to name it. I simply didn’t understand that that was rape.
And it’s not only about understanding these experiences, but also about being able to prevent them. If you know what consent is as a word, concept, and right, you know both how to say no and that consent is essential. But even moreso, armed with this knowledge and context related to the language of sexual violence, people are less likely to ignore consent when they know what it is and why it’s so important.
I’m sure the school system would argue that pre-teens are too young to learn about sexual violence. But when the literature exists outside for students to access anyway, let alone the fact that there are girls much younger than me who have already experienced sexual violence, it no longer becomes a choice that can be universally made by the education system. They have no control over events that happen outside (or inside) their classrooms. When children are exposed to sexual violence at these young ages, the education system does its students a disservice by not providing them with the language they need to understand their experiences. How can we as a society prevent or avoid sexual violence when children don’t understand what it is, that it’s wrong, and why it’s wrong? This knowledge has the power to both prevent sexual violence and, in addition, help survivors understand their own experiences after the fact.
But, as I reflect back on my later schooling, even through high school, we were never taught about consent, let alone sexual violence. My friend Dana recalls a notable test question: “Sam has a crush on Josh and they’re at a party and they kiss. Josh starts feeling up under Sam’s shirt but she doesn’t want that. What should she do?” Dana’s response? Kick him in the balls. To which the teacher responded “She shouldn’t do that to a boy she likes!” Let that sink in a little. We were never taught about consent, forms of sexual violence, what our rights are, or what rape might look like. And one of our only exposures was for a teacher to gaslight a clear lack of consent, instead explaining that the feelings of someone who ignored consent are more important than someone whose consent has been broken. On a larger scale, when schools don’t teach students from a young age what consent means, and then fail to teach them the language needed to understand sexual violence, they ultimately protect the rights of perpetrators over those of survivors.
How would my experience with Sarah Dessen’s novel have changed if I had known the proper language, if I had been able to label Annabel’s experience as sexual violence or rape? At the very least, my understanding of sexual violence would include both the language and one character’s experience, having just read the novel and travelled with Annabel. And if I push this further, by not having this language, I as a reader did a disservice to Dessen’s novel. While the intricacies of Annabel’s experience were felt by my eleven-year-old-self, I didn’t feel the wider understanding of sexual violence and its extremely personal experience until later.
To be sure, I finished the novel with many questions, mostly as a result of my enduring confusion over its events. Why did Annabel feel so uncomfortable disclosing her experience? Why didn’t any of her friends or family notice anything and continuously offer Annabel help? What had actually happened during that traumatic scene–what was the source of Annabel’s trauma? And yet I stayed quiet, not having the words needed to express these questions. They remained veiled feelings and ideas clattering around in my brain, unable to seek clarification because my lack of education prevented me from expressing my confusion. As a novelist writing young adult fiction, I’m sure this is not the ending Dessen hoped for, having just written a novel for teenagers presumably in the hopes of starting a conversation with young people around sexual violence. However, when society and its education does not mirror the intentions of writers like Dessen, her purpose and themes continue to remain veiled, silencing both those hoping to ask questions along with the voices of survivors.
Hannah Judelson-Kelly
She/Her
A beautiful quiet neighborhood street. The sounds of birds chirping. Being tucked into bed at night. Lying in the grass looking up at the sky. The gentle babble of the creek at the bottom of the yard. The warm embrace of my family. The sound of someone playing music. It wasn’t a white-picket fence, but, well, you know what I mean. And then, slowly, my once-clear vision began to blur; the edges became marred with something akin to black ink gradually inching towards the words at the centre of the page. A whisper here, someone’s sadness there. It was so subtle at first that you almost didn’t realize it. Almost. And then, like a slow-moving train, my peripheral vision gradually came into focus. All of those whispers were in front of me now, no longer whispers but screams. I started remembering the quiet stories I had heard years back of the dark and quiet park late at night, of the (not-so-safe) safety of my friend’s driveway. I started to realize the power of these stories, that my story and the stories of others bled into one another; the black ink now fully entangled with the words at the centre of the page. But these stories should never be whispers. They should never be hidden in the background or obscured. This is what I hope to do as the Production Chair of Songs of Survival, provide this blank and open space for everyone to share their voice, their experience, a space to heal through creation.