The Haunting of Hill House And The Impact of Believing Survivors

While watching Netflix’s newly released series The Haunting of Hill House, based on the acclaimed Shirley Jackson book by the same name, I peek at the television through my fingers covering my eyes and wince. Every light in my house is on and I am looking away from the screen for about half the time. Just over the roar of the blood rushing into my ears, I hear one character say to another, “I believe you” and out of nowhere, it hits me like a ton of bricks. I don’t expect this feeling from watching a binge-worthy ghost story on Netflix, but the last time I heard, “I believe you,” I had a similar reaction. In the interest of protecting others, I was explaining to a stranger on the phone that my rapist volunteered at their counseling center and was friends with someone in their executive administration. It was a complaint I had made a year earlier that received little response, and for the first time since my rape five years prior, someone told me, “I believe you.” Emotional vertigo kicked in and my knees buckled, sending me to the floor in one of those convulsing sobs that temporarily robs you of your breath and voice. Even after reporting my rape three years after it happened and publicly naming my rapist to people who did overwhelmingly, believe me, no one ever told me flat-out, “I believe you.” This phrase was recently all over protest signs and in hashtag form since the Kavanaugh hearings, becoming more relevant by the day in our post-Me Too society. PTSD mangles your emotional reactions, but I suspect there was something more in the way that I immediately related to this fictional child — because I also experienced a terrifying thing that no one else witnessed and had to continue carrying the weight of that trauma in a world full of skeptics.

Living knee-deep in the sticky sludge of rape culture, survivors are faced with a barrage of painfully banal depictions of sexual violence in media. Producers and directors of Game of Thrones have been repeatedly criticized for orchestrating gratuitous rape scenes that never appear in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, seemingly with the intent of purposefully punishing already tortured characters. How strange is it that rape victims are forcefully humanized in media depictions, yet so often condemned or disbelieved in reality? Not only does this further the harmful and exploitive trope of the “strong survivor” who experienced the hell that ultimately led to her becoming stronger, but it also furthers the idea that specifically showing this assault to viewers will validate that it actually happened. The fact that they make us (overwhelmingly unwilling, it should be noted) witnesses when this could still be a character’s backstory without explicit depictions of the violence just furthers the idea that your trauma needs a witness to be valid.

There’s a reason that Law and Order SVU is now in its 20th season — it’s not necessarily the gripping writing, as the ripped-from-the-headlines episodes are particularly hokey — and it’s not just that Mariska Hargitay and Ice T are national treasures (honestly, true). SVU is, paradoxically, a deeply comforting show all about heinous sexual violence in which the people who are meant to protect victims end up getting the bad guy more often than they ever do in real life. Statistics show that out of every 1,000 rapes only about 310 are ever reported to the police — about 57 of those 310 reports lead to arrest — and even worse, only 6 rapists will ever be incarcerated for it. In a twisted sense, Law and Order SVU is just as much of a fantasy show as Game of Thrones. The fictional police officers are fervently dedicated to justice in a way that is sorely lacking in reality, and watching it on TV makes survivors feel safe and protected in a world that makes them feel very much the opposite.

Studies show that the overwhelming PTSD diagnoses resulting from trauma make survivors terrible witnesses. For one, we often don’t report until years later if at all due to fear of our attacker, shame, and the looming threat of not being believed. Significantly, studies also show that for some victims, the trauma of not being believed has more of a damaging effect on them than the actual assault itself. Second, we’re not usually the “ideal witness” who cries silent tears on the stand cradling a balled-up tissue, never raising their voice. Sometimes we’re overwhelmingly hysterical or completely detached due to dissociation, a common side effect of PTSD that operates as an emotional bunker you can escape into for protection. Victims seem to either care too much or too little, both of which further invalidate our credibility in the eyes of the skeptics.

In a way, the pain we carry becomes so heavy and so unwieldy that it transcends planes of reality, and maybe it’s nice to fantasize about one plane of existence on which retribution is more assured than it is here. Screenwriters and authors turn women into demonic creatures with super strength who hyper-focus on the ways they’ve been harmed and wronged, granting us power so often stolen from us in life. That must be a terrifying thought to the abusers who so often get away with it. Good. What we wouldn’t give to see you flinch for once, reluctantly looking over your shoulder at a bump in the night. That’s every night for us. Good.

Ultimately, The Haunting of Hill House is about a family that is forever connected to each other by a thin tether of shared trauma. It’s about the ways that they cope and the ways that they suffer, and the ensuing isolation that trauma forces upon them despite the tie that binds them. But in some ways, it’s also about the almost-cancerous, ravenous pain and retraumatization that eats away at the insides of survivors who are not believed. It’s not the ghosts or monsters, but the skepticism and denial of trauma and pain that end up haunting us. The scariest story of our reality in 2018 is that survivors are forever connected to each other by a thin tether of trauma, yet convinced that we’re all in this alone. We don’t need to witness your abuse to witness your pain. Your pain is enough. I believe you.

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