South Africa’s number-one rape victim does not get treated so shabbily. These days my invitations to speak come complete with a return air ticket, accommodation at a three-star hotel, all meals provided, and a respectable honorarium. As a former colleague of mine remarked, it was almost worth getting raped for. He grinned as he said it, looking sideways at me, sure I would enjoy his edgy humour. I almost grinned back. My cheek muscles wanted to stretch into their reflexive man-pleasing smile. I stopped them just in time.

People say stupid things—things they don’t necessarily mean. If they publish them on social media, it can cost them their jobs. My colleague would have been fired if he had tweeted that remark instead of saying it out loud. The public shaming would have ruined his life.

I am immune to that kind of disgrace. There is nothing I can say that is bad enough to cancel out the horror of what happened to me. My words and my behaviour can always be excused as a symptom of my PTSD.

I know this because I’ve tried. I’ve pushed the envelope so far it has fallen off the table. Take the last conference I went to. It was a colloquium on sexual violence convened by the well-meaning people of Rape Awareness South Africa (RASA). I was invited to take part in a panel discussion on victim blaming. It was called, “She was wearing a short skirt—seeking a discourse beyond patriarchy for rape survivors.”

My fellow panellists included a medical doctor who had a lot of experience treating rape victims in state hospitals, an academic who wrote about sexual violence, and another rape victim like myself. The panel was facilitated by a member of RASA. We were all educated women, capable of speaking at the most sophisticated level about this topic. RASA hadn’t wasted its time with your common or garden rape victims who don’t know Derrida from a hole in the ground. We were talking the same language and we were fluent in it.

Well, most of us.

I caused a stir at the beginning of the session by refusing to call myself a rape survivor. I insisted on referring to myself as a victim instead.

“They didn’t try to kill me,” I explained. “I didn’t do anything heroic. I couldn’t escape or fight back. I was a victim. They made me into a victim and refusing to acknowledge that doesn’t change the truth.”

The survivor next to me shifted in her seat, and managed not to say anything. The facilitator nodded earnestly and spoke about the plurality of experience and the need to allow rape survivors to craft their own narratives. I got a pass. For the time being.