3.2. WHEN YOU ARE RAPED BY SOMEONE YOU KNOW. Mary’s STORY When one first meets Mary one is struck by just how small she is. The fact that she has just delivered a baby born as a result of rape is barely conceivable. Even when she is handed the baby to tend to, the mind is tempted to believe that she is tending to a sibling and not to her own child. Mary’s story is both a narrative of tragedy and a testament that captures the tenacity of hope and determination in the face of extreme pain and desperate odds. To meet with Mary and her mother, we travel for 3 hours to Guruve. The streets to her house are dusty and dry. It is late morning as we get to Mary’s home and one is immediately struck by the evidence of how hard life must be for Mary and her family. Her mother Precious was widowed young and left to raise Mary and her siblings by herself. Precious has been working and going to school during the weekends to try and better her life and that of her children. Consequently, she is away most weekends attending school and this in a perverse twist of fate is what made the rapist take advantage of Precious’s absence to rape her daughter in her home. As we start talking about her ordeal, Mary does so in a quiet halting voice as if she can hardly bear to say the words. As if by saying the words, she is relieving the trauma of what she experienced. She cannot retell the story without breaking down. Mary was raped in October 2013. Her mother had gone to Harare for school and she was alone at home. The perpetrator came to their home and raped her. He was known to the family as the son of a family acquaintance as well as being known from the neighbourhood. He normally visited their home to have his cell phone charged and on this occasion, he came in ostensibly to have his phone charged but proceeded to rape her. Mary did not disclose the rape as she feared her mother’s reaction. Some weeks later, the perpetrator went to Mary’s home again when her mother was in Harare for her weekend lessons. Mary was alone at home when accused arrived and said he wanted to have his phone charged. Mary told him that she thought that she was now pregnant but he ignored her and raped her again. He then left. In December 2013, a neighbor left her child in Mary’s care while she went away for the day. The neighbor stays at the same homestead as the alleged perpetrator and when Mary took the child back to her mother, he lured her inside his home under the pretext that he wanted to talk about the pregnancy and a possible solution to the pregnancy. Instead, he closed the door and raped her again. Again she did not disclose the rape to anyone. The issue only came to light in February 2014 when her mother’s friend intimated to her mother that she could be pregnant. Her mother then confronted her. Although she initially denied it, she later on disclosed to the neighbour that she was indeed pregnant and related how it had happened. A report was then made to the police leading to alleged rapist’s arrest. 17 13