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span class="inline inline-right">JP/Mark WilsonA journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. For Wulan Danoekoesoemo the decision to take that first step and create Lentera Indonesia, a sexual violence survivor circle based in Jakarta, was driven by something as simple as a message on Twitter.

“I was running through my Twitter timeline and I saw that people were making jokes about someone who had been raped and killed,” says Wulan. “Out of rage, that night I began to post some facts about rape.”

Did people know that rape survivors carried their scars for a lifetime? Did people know how difficult it was to cope with the nightmare of rape? Did people know that 70 percent of rape perpetrators were either family members or friends? These were the questions that Wulan posed.

“Soon people were reposting my messages on Twitter,” says Wulan. “I think a lot of people agreed with what I was saying and it hit home that this wasn’t something that should be joked about.”

Encouraged by this positive response, in May 2011 Wulan, along with Sophia Hage and Driana Rini Handayani, set up Lentera Indonesia, which according to Wulan is Indonesia’s first sexual violence survivor support circle.

Today the group, which consists of seven dedicated volunteers, continues to help female survivors of sexual abuse and sexual violence through small group sessions every two weeks for a broad range of ages, with one to one sessions also being offered – all at no cost.

“The survivor circle is anonymous and is made up only of survivors, because only they can truly understand what a survivor goes through,” explains Wulan.

Given the delicacy of the issue, Lentera Indonesia treads warily in terms of dealing with newcomers to the circle.

“It’s their choice to attend,” says Wulan. “It’s the same thing with talking about their experiences. They’re the ones who choose when to do so, but we find that the more that people come back, the more likely they are to want to talk about their trauma.”

As wide and as deep as an ocean, the magnitude of that trauma is undoubtedly difficult for many to comprehend. It’s something that Wulan likens to opening a Pandora’s box of emotions.

“Survivors in the circle have kept their experiences to themselves for 15, 20, sometimes even 40 years,” says Wulan. “When they choose to revisit these experiences, they face a great deal of anger, shame, guilt and remorse, especially after having swept it all under the carpet for decades.”

But the consequences of inaction, or of not opening the Pandora’s box of which Wulan speaks, can be just as far reaching.

“The brain never forgets, it only compartmentalizes,” explains Wulan. “It can repress the things that you don’t want to remember very deeply, but in the end whatever you went through will reflect on the development of your life.”

According to Wulan, these reflections can take any number of forms: relationship issues, flashbacks, parent-child relationship issues, becoming detached from one’s sexuality, anxiety attacks and the like – all of which are made even harder to confront given the common identities of the perpetrators.

“Many survivors are abused by those who have easy access to them, like family members,” explains Wulan. “Families might not believe their claims, and then of course you have fears of how wider society will judge you.”

Lentera Indonesia bases its survivor circle on an adapted version of the Twelve-Step Program, which was originally put forward by Alcoholics Anonymous to lead addicts to recovery.

“It’s a very empowering process for the survivor,” says Wulan, who is also at pains to stress the difference between victim and survivor; the former being someone who lives in fear and who pays for something that was not her doing, the latter being someone who endures to know that the price is not hers to pay.

“It all starts with admitting what happened, assessing the damage, confronting it and then reaching some form of closure.”

For the majority of those at Lentera Indonesia, the vehicle by this process is taken forward is the survivor circle itself, which according to Wulan is an initially daunting proposition for survivors, given that they are revealing their experiences to complete strangers.

“Then there’s the issue of managing expectations,” adds Wulan. “Some survivors think that in three sessions they’ll be over their problems, they don’t understand that recovery is a life long process and, at first, they might feel worse because they’re opening themselves up to experiences they’ve buried deep.”

But the determination of survivors to persist, combined with the power of the survivor circle, are enabling survivors to find a way out of their nightmares.

“Maybe one survivor tried one way of coping and it didn’t work, but other survivors can talk about what did work for them,” says Wulan.

It is the high level of mutual understanding, the knowledge that everyone within the circle has gone through similar things, that is perhaps the most powerful tool of recovery for survivors.

“Just knowing that you are not alone changes the whole perspective,” says Wulan. “It gives survivors the courage to recover and the courage to help others recover too.”

The group is also taking forward ad hoc preventative work, which includes sensitizing journalists to the reporting of sexual violence, promoting awareness in companies and working with the Millennium Development Goals Office and Nokia to send health-related information via SMS to women in remote regions.

And all this is without mentioning the group’s future aims. Reaching out to male survivors, working with the police to sensitize officers to the issues and opening up a 24-hour survivor hotline all await in the in-tray.

But the task facing Lentera Indonesia remains one of gargantuan proportions. In a report released in November 2011, the Indonesian National Commission on Violence against Women (Komnas Perempuan) said that between 1998 and 2010, there were approximately 94,000 cases of sexual violence recorded in Indonesia.

“In our experience, only one in 10 survivors ever report what happened to them,” explains Wulan. “These figures are just the tip of the iceberg.”