Finding my Voice by Angela Neale
(previously Angela Hamblin)
I joined the fledgling Women’s Liberation Movement in early 1971. It changed my life forever.
After 50 years as a Radical Feminist, it’s hard to look back over so many experiences — direct actions, demos, conferences, Reclaim the Night marches, consciousness-raising groups, feminist writing groups, joining the London Rape Crisis Collective, and many more — and choose just one to encapsulate it all. However, I want to share a very special moment for me -— an exhilarating yet terrifying moment, in 1977, which took all the courage I could muster.
There had been a spate of horrendous rape and sexual assault cases in the news, in which the female victims had been publicly vilified whilst the judges had shown leniency to the male offenders. In one case, a soldier had brutally sexually attacked a seventeen-year-old girl leaving her with a lacerated vagina, torn ear lobes, and a broken rib. When we heard that three High Court judges had replaced his four-year sentence with a conditional discharge in order to save his army career, women’s groups erupted. We demanded the judges be sacked.
In protest, one of the groups I belonged to, Women Against Rape, decided to march from Lincoln’s Inn, home of London’s barristers and judges, to Trafalgar Square in Central London. Here they would hold a mock trial of the three Appeal Court judges.
That seventeen -year-old girl, whom I shall call ‘Sally’, as I have not requested her permission to use her name, had agreed to speak at the event followed by those of us who had also been raped and were prepared to speak out publicly.
This was 50 years ago. At that time, no woman willingly spoke out and identified herself publicly as a rape victim. Especially not me. I had been forbidden from ever mentioning it by family, and had carried the inner torment of nightmares, panic attacks, flashbacks, and suicidal thoughts, locked away inside me. I struggled with my demons, alone and unsupported for over twenty years.
I volunteered to speak.
Angela passed away at the age of 82. Her husband and soulmate Alan asked us to add this:
“Angela died on 20 October 2022, a year after writing this piece. It was the last thing she wrote.”
You can read more about Angela on his Substack: https://alanneale.substack.com/p/remembering-her-voice
Women Against Rape demonstration on 16 July 1977
- looking down into London’s Trafalgar Square from speakers’ plinth
4.10 p.m. on Saturday 16 July 1977 found me standing on the plinth in front of the assembled microphones in Trafalgar Square. The Square itself was a sea of banners, placards, hundreds of other women from the march, onlookers lining the pavements in front of the National Gallery, and some merely curious. My hands trembling and drenched in sweat, my throat dry, I opened my mouth and for a moment feared nothing would come out.
From somewhere deep within a strong, authoritative voice boomed out from all four speakers in the corners of the Square.
“My name is Angela.
23 years ago, when I was fourteen years old, I was subjected to repeated sexual assaults and rapes by a man who was twice my age — a trusted friend of my family.
He threatened me with terrifying warnings of what would happen to me if anyone found out. I was deeply afraid of him and of the power he had over me. I told no one.
Each time the physical pain was excruciating. I sobbed, pleaded, and begged him to leave me alone. He laughed. I lived in terror of him for several months.
Perhaps it would have been one of the hundreds of rape cases which go unreported had it not been for the fact that I became pregnant as a result.
The police were informed.
I was interrogated, on my own in a small, windowless interrogation room, by two male police officers who made me repeat my story in nauseous detail again and again. I was called a liar. I was told I was promiscuous and would be ‘put away’ in a home for ‘bad girls’, just as my rapist had predicted. They told my mother it was not rape. She believed them. She forbade me from ever speaking of it. And I felt a wall of silence engulf me. It was never mentioned again.
I was subsequently put in a religious Home for Unmarried Mothers where I was forced to do daily penance for my ‘sin’.
The first hearing of the case was at the local Magistrates Court. It was a taste of what was to follow. I was made to repeat yet again in humiliating detail everything that had been done to me. At the end of it I learnt that I would have to go through it all again at the Crown Court, the Old Bailey.
The trial at the Old Bailey lasted four days. For two of those days, I was interrogated. On the second day I was required to give evidence for two and a half hours without a break. I was fifteen years old and six months pregnant. In cross-examination by the defence, I was accused of lying. I was accused of having ‘led him on’. I was accused of wearing lipstick and high-heeled shoes. I was accused of promiscuity even though I had no sexual experience whatever other than being raped by this man. I was asked scornfully why I hadn’t physically fought him off. The fact that he was male, weighed five stone more than I did, was fourteen years my senior and a figure of authority in my life whose power over me reduced me to paralysed terror, was considered irrelevant.
Under this unrelenting onslaught, I began to tremble and shake all over, just as I had when I was being raped. I know now I was having a flashback, but as a child in that courtroom it was utterly terrifying. I put my head in my hands, my body heaving with sobs. They would not let me leave the witness box. They gave me a chair to sit on and a glass of water to drink and then they continued. I sat in that witness box staring out at the all-male jury, at the male prosecutor, at the male defence lawyer and at the male judge - and I felt like a cornered animal.
Today I see women,
I see an all-female jury,
I see a female prosecutor,
And I see a female judge —
And I am no longer a child.
And I am no longer that cornered animal.
Two weeks after my appearance at the Old Bailey I gave birth to my son — ten weeks before he was due.
Somehow, he survived.
And when he was strong enough, they took him away from me, against my wishes, and gave him in adoption to a woman they considered ‘more fit’ to be his mother.
My rapist was sentenced to four years imprisonment.
He appealed and his sentence was reduced to eighteen months by the Appeal Court.
With remission for ‘good behaviour’ he finally served one year.
Even before the final papers had been drawn up for the adoption of my baby - my rapist was walking the streets again, a free man.
Mine — has been a life sentence.
I have never and will never recover from the experience I suffered at the hands of my rapist, from the police, the Courts, the Church, and a society that gives men the right to rape and regards women’s suffering as unimportant.
Like many other rape victims, I have been unable to speak about my rape. For over twenty years the feelings have been bottled up inside me — silently tearing me apart.
Last month I read in the newspapers that a soldier, Tom Holdsworth, had been freed by three Appeal Court judges, after a savage and brutal rape attempt on a seventeen-year-old girl, ’Sally’.
The judges freed him because they considered his career prospects were more important than her suffering.
And suddenly my anger surfaced.
On 28 June this year I went with other angry women, who are here today, to the High Court. We found Lord Justice Roskill, one of the three judges in the Holdsworth case, and we invaded his Court.
Once again, I was in a Court.
Once again, I found myself confronted by these men in their black gowns and faded white wigs - these pillars of society whose job is to dispense justice.
But this time I wasn’t silent, and I wasn’t sobbing.
This time — twenty years of anger and injustice poured out of me, and suddenly in that Court Room I found my voice.
At a given signal all hell broke loose. Along with all the other women I shouted and yelled like I’d never shouted before: “ROSKILL OUT! ROSKILL OUT! ROSKILL OUT!”
I pulled out the WOMEN AGAINST RAPE banner I’d been concealing under my jacket and passed it to the front. One look at that banner and Lord Justice Roskill gathered up his robes and fled through a side door.
Stamping female feet reverberated around the ancient building. Whistles blew, some women sang, but most of all we shouted.
And along with my sisters, I shouted.
I shouted at those judges.
I shouted for myself —
And for ‘Sally’ — and for all the other women who have been raped and abused for centuries by men and by male institutions.
And this time — it was the judge who ran from the Court.
This time it was the judges who were driven out —
By the anger of women.
Daily Mail 29 June 1977
The following day the story made it into all the national papers, and I had to smile when I saw the headline in the Daily Mail:
‘Judges in retreat as rape demo women hit court’.
As the echo of my words faded from the speakers, the women in the Square whooped their support. I had spoken my truth. And I had been heard. The relief was overwhelming.
I’m 81 years old now.
I’m still a Radical Feminist.
And I’m still angry.