Ten years ago, at the age of 40, I made the decision to find the man who had raped me two decades earlier.
I was on the campus of a small college in Massachusetts with my 16-year-old daughter, Zoe - we were touring colleges so she could decide where she wanted to apply. The student guide stopped at a pole with a glowing blue light and said, quite casually, "If you ever feel threatened, just stop at one of these blue lights around the campus and call. Help will be there in five minutes."
"Five minutes?" I whispered to Zoe. "You could be dead by then."
As Zoe walked on with the group, I stayed at the blue light, having a panic attack. This was followed by what psychologists call disassociation - the sensation of leaving one's body - something I'd first experienced in 1984, at the age of 30, when a stranger on another college campus raped me at knifepoint, and almost killed me.
I realised on that tour with my daughter that though I had told myself I had moved on, and I was fine - I had never truly got over the trauma of my rape. And I decided to do something about it.
I believe the origin of fear is ignorance: we most fear what we don't know or understand. So I decided to find out everything I could about my rapist, and to treat my search like a story I was reporting as a journalist. Doing it this way allowed me the distance and courage to take it on directly.
But first, I told Zoe. It terrified me that she was going to college - as if my daughter was prey. I had to tell her what had happened to me as a kind of magical insurance policy, so it would never happen to her.
I told her the story I had told so often in the hours and days after the rape: I was working, I was late for an interview, the building was empty, the guy was there, he cut my neck and raped me. I kept the worst details back.
The man who raped me had been caught, tried, convicted and sent to prison. I testified against him, but I didn't know much about him, other than his name and a few facts. It occurred to me, though, that if I were to make a list of the people who had most influenced my life, he would be near the top. When he raped me, he changed me. I had been adventurous, joyful and confident, just embarking on a career in journalism. Now I was a woman whose life was ruled by fear and anxiety, a woman who smothered her children with her worries and felt numb to life.
After I was raped, I never asked myself, "Why me?" Like a lot of rape survivors – too many of us – I thought I knew the answer to that one. Why me? Because I was stupid. Because I walked into it. Because it was all my fault.
But I did wonder, "Why him? What happened in his life that led him to violence and made him a monster?"
My search for my rapist took almost a year. I discovered that he had died in prison a few years earlier, but I tracked down two of his sisters and a brother. They told me harrowing stories of their childhood. They lived in poverty and chaos, with a monster that took the form of a father. He was a pimp, he beat his wife and his sons, and he molested his daughters. All seven of his children grew up addicted to drugs and alcohol. The sons were in and out of prison from the age of 12. The daughters became prostitutes to pay for their drugs, though by the time I met them, they had pulled themselves off the streets and out of their addictions.
These stories made me feel something for my rapist that might surprise others: empathy. He grew up knowing that nobody cared about him.
Of course, this does not make every child grow into a violent monster; his terrible childhood did not let him off the hook for that. But it began to make me think about forgiving him.
I started my search with the hope that by knowing the source of my fears I could become fearless, the way I was when I was 20. At the end, I knew I would never be without fear. I will never "get over" my rape. But I now understand that I might fear less in this world if I stop trying to bury the rape, if I let go of the shame and self-blame that I and most other rape survivors feel, if I am willing to talk about the trauma and listen – really listen – when other women talk.
I realised that this was the other good outcome of my search. I gave other women the strength to talk about their rapes - some for the first time. After I first wrote this story for my newspaper, I cannot tell you how many women confided to me that they too had suffered this trauma and never told anyone. By telling our stories to our friends, our families and our daughters though, we can start changing this culture of shame.
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Guest post: "Why I tracked down my rapist" (Trigger warning)
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MumsnetGuestPosts · 11/04/2016 16:10
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JohnRichter ·
13/04/2016 15:13
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