TV3’s new documentary highlights what we can all do for rape survivors

A number of things might strike you while watching Unbreakable: True Lives tonight.

You might be struck by how utterly helpless victims of sexual assault are, regardless of how their attack occurs. You might be struck by how long-lasting and psychologically severe the effects of even a single incident of rape can be. You might just find it refreshing to hear a survivor’s story in their own words and at length rather than through a narrator in a short package. But most of all, it's striking how much we can all do by doing so little. This two-part series is unlike anything we've seen before from an Irish TV channel. While Louise O'Neill took on Ireland's wider rape culture in the brilliant Asking For It on RTÉ last year, Unbreakable: True Lives sits us down with rape survivors for an intimate and often uncomfortable chat. In tonight's episode, we meet two survivors; women assaulted in different circumstances but for whom getting justice was far from the end of their trauma. Trish was attacked by a relative after giving him a lift from a family funeral. Afterwards, she said, she started to feel she had "no reason to stay in the world." "The lake was covered by a low silvery fog and I just thought, 'that looks so inviting'," she says of driving home late at night after the incident. She eventually pressed charges and her attacker was later convicted but rather than things improving, they got worse. Trish was shunned in the country village she had lived in all her life. "People I knew turned their backs on me, pretended they didn't know me." After a friend of the relative who attacked her threatened to kill her one night, she decided to sell her home. Fourteen years on, she has never returned to the town she grew up in. Niamh, meanwhile, was raped by an intruder in the house she lived in in a French town. Her attacker was caught and given the maximum sentence in court but, like Trish, Niamh's life was forever changed. "People treat you differently. How can I explain it? In France you get a kiss, suddenly I was getting a handshake. "I felt contaminated. I could see people looking at me and turning away and going to another area and I thought 'Oh my God am I filthy? Am I a dirty little secret?'" As time we, she realised, people simply didn't know how to treat her. It wasn't until an elderly man in the town bumped into her and told her he was proud she hadn't left the town that she felt normal, she said. "I remember feeling valued." Rape survival is a life sentence and one that few will get through without wider support. Both of the women in tonight's were suicidal after their attacks and credit talking with getting them through. "There's no right or wrong way to treat a rape victim but silence is the killer," says Niamh. Believing rape victims might be the first step in recovery but continuing to listen to them long after the fact is perhaps even more crucial. The first episode of Unbreakable: True Lives airs at 9pm on TV3.