“He got on top of me and I silently counted the seconds on my alarm clock. Ever since that night I have known there are 7,200 seconds in two hours.”
‘That night’ was the night Thordis Elva, then 16, was raped by her boyfriend, Australian foreign exchange student, Tom Stranger, then 18, in the bedroom of her home in Iceland.
Now, more than 20 years later, Elva and Stranger have shared their remarkable story of pain, healing and recovery on the TED stage. They have co-authored a book together, South of Forgiveness, telling the “story we needed to hear when we were young.”
‘That night’ was 1996. The pair had been to a Christmas ball together. Before this, they had a shared a “lovely teenage romance”. They would meet at lunchtimes. Walk around the town holding hands. Stranger met Elva’s family.
“I was 16 and in love for the first time… Going to the Christmas ball was a public declaration of our love. I felt like the luckiest girl in the world,” Elva said. She felt like a “girl who had become a woman”. And, because of this feeling of maturity, she decided she’d try drinking rum for the first time.
The alcohol made her ill. She was vomiting and convulsing. She needed to be taken home.
“It was like a fairy tale, his strong arms around me, laying me in the safety of my bed,” she said. “The gratitude I felt towards him soon turned to horror as he hopped on top of me.”
“My head had cleared up, but my body was still too weak to fight back, and the pain was blinding. I thought I’d been severed in two.”