Three years ago, Pavan Amara decided to undertake an in-depth piece of research.

Amara was raped when she was a teenager, and decades later she found that she was still coping with the aftershock of the attack. She couldn’t look in a mirror, felt anxious in crowds and was terrified of being touched. This included the touch of a physician, to the point where she stopped going to the doctor.

Amara, herself a trained nurse, wanted to know whether this was an emotional trauma she was suffering on her own or if this was something she shared with a network of survivors of assault. After speaking to 30 different women from around the country, she realised that not only was she not alone, she had unearthed a silent epidemic of survivors who were avoiding basic and necessary health services after their assault. Of the women she surveyed, more than half said that they had not had a smear test since their assault because they found the experience triggering. A quarter of the women surveyed also avoided STI tests since their assault for the same reason.

“It is a hidden issue because when women experience sexual assault, they already don’t want to talk about it,” Amara notes. “Sexual assault silences women.”

Meet the woman running sexual health clinics for victims of assault