>I had gotten myself raped. I had allowed it. And I just needed to get over it.

No, nobody should just "get" over it. This was a powerful outpouring over a very difficult, and very complex, issue.

I'm going to make a possible unpopular series of statements but first I want to get the following out:

What happened (over and over again) was horrible and should never have happened and there's no excuse for it. All of those responsible should be punished severely. I mean this in the strongest possible way. Nobody has the right to do this to another person and no victim should ever be to blame. It is critically important for any victim of rape and physical or sexual abuse to report it to the police.

Now on to the possible unpopular part, which I think I should motivate a little lest it seem I'm being callous.

Some select statistics [1]:

- According to the National Victim Center, 683,000 women are raped each year. (1992)

- Sexual assault is reported by 33-46% of women who are being physically assaulted by their husbands. (AMA 1995)

- 6 out of 10 rapes are reported by victims to have occurred in their own home or home of a friend, relative or neighbor. (US Dept. of Justice 1997)

- In a study of 6,000 students at 32 colleges in the US, 42% of rape victims told no-one and only 5% reported it to the police. (Warshaw 1994)

- Only 2% of rapists are convicted and imprisoned. (US Senate Judiciary Committee 1993)

- 77% of rapes are committed by someone known to the person raped. (Bureau of Justice Statistics 1997)

- In a 1999 longitudinal study of 3,000 women, researchers found women who had been victimized before were seven times more likely to be raped again. (Acierno, Resnick, Kilpatrick, Saunders and Best, Jnl. of Anxiety Disorders 13, 6.)

Now the possibly unpopular part:

When I was growing up, there was a popular radio show on called Loveline (it might still be on) hosted by Dr. Drew Pinsky (an addiction medicine specialist) and Adam Carolla. As a teen it was fun to listen to people calling in with various oddball sex and relationship questions. But about once a show, some poor girl would call in with a sad story about all the abusive boyfriends they had had. Every Single Time Dr. Drew would ask the question "who abused you when you were little?" and every single time there was somebody in the girl's family who had physically, emotionally or sexually abused her.

Dr. Drew would then patiently explain that she needed to get some very serious psychiatric treatment and that, something about that experience seems to fundamentally break a person's ability to find and form functional healthy, intimate, relationships. They'll continue to seek out abusive relationships and it'll keep happening until they properly deal with it or they find themselves at a very sad end.

Something about that hit me and stuck with me, and over time I've noticed that my friends and family who seem to have the worst repeated relationship problems all have had abusive (on some level) childhoods -- men and women. It wasn't just that it was surprising, or paradoxical, but that Dr. Drew answered it almost on autopilot. It was such a common pattern that, even when the caller tried to avoid answering it, or coyly tried to redirect, eventually it always came out at something like near 100% of the times I heard the story. It somehow slotted into an addictive behavior pattern that people who suffer from it are not really even aware of -- even if they can talk at length about it and sound quite lucid.

As I read this story, those episodes came back to me: the abusive childhood, the rapist husband, continued assaults, and I kept reading, hoping to see that "notmyshame" had sought out such help. But it never came.

Coming out about being raped is an incredibly brave thing, writing about it and sharing it is one of the most difficult things a person can do. But moving on and getting the right kind of professional help is just as important. I hope that the next post I read from "notmyshame" is that she went and found somebody professional to not only help her with the pain of the rapes and the abuse, but for the possible relationship issues that she may continue to have unless it's properly dealt with.

1 - http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/monsters/drake/Lecture%20Note...