The power of individual experiences to move the human spirit is great--statistics can impress us and even shock us, but they don't begin to tell what each person involved in that percentage has gone through. The US Department of Justice tells us that every two minutes, a woman in America is sexually assaulted. What it doesn't tell us are the details--how old the women are, who their assailants are, if the attacks are recurring, and most importantly, how each woman's assault has affected the rest of her life. I have a close friend who was a victim of incest, and another who was the victim of statutory rape, so I can fill in some of these details for myself. Starting in the eighth grade, I listened to their painful stories. I witnessed their lowered self-esteem, their difficulty with other romantic relationships, their resentment towards their parents, their dependence on men, their internalized self-hatred. Nearly five years later, the problems haven't gone away. The most frightening aspect of my friends' situations, though, is that they're not so unusual. According to the World Health Organization, in a study from 1993, about 62% of sexual assault victims in the United States are aged 15 or less.**

An estimated 1 in 3 women worldwide will become the victims of sexual or physical assaults in their lifetimes. These women will be beaten by their husbands and fathers; have their genitals mutilated as part of religious or cultural rituals, primarily in African countries; be brutally raped, purposely impregnated, or forced into military sexual slavery as a strategy of war and genocide; be forced into sex by a date or friend; suffer severe rights restrictions, public beatings, and executions, which include stonings, as a result of gender apartheid in Afghanistan; be molested or coerced into sexual acts by religious leaders, teachers, and other adults in positions of trust. This list has no end.

According to the World Health Organization in 1997, "six separate investigations suggest that 14 to 20 percent of women in the United States will experience a completed rape at least once in their lifetime."*** The US Department of Justice predicts that only 31 percent of such rapes are reported. Rape is a serious threat in our society--possibly even more scary, though, is the fact that we fear telling others when we have become a victim.

I remember sitting in a seminar in 9th grade, listening to a classmate say she would rather be killed than raped. "When you are raped," she explained, "your honor is taken from you." I disagreed passionately with this statement then, just as I do now, but we can find support for such a belief in our own cultural history. Consider synonyms, or euphemisms, for the word "raped"--ravaged, pillaged, spoiled. These words can also be used to describe a looted town, bereft of all its value. It is a tragic sight, a shell of something that used to be--it is often deserted to complete its decay alone.

Concerning such views on the recovery of sexual assault victims, Eve Ensler, herself a victim of incest, said in an interview: "Either I'm going to spend my life at the mercy of this depressed half-life . . . or I'm going to change that story and make a decision that I'm going to enjoy sex and work through this and not be at the mercy of what happened . . . But it does require that you go back and go through the fire and really deal with the pain so you can be done with it. What you resist persists."****

And, unfortunately, so do all kinds of violence against women. But the more we talk about it, the more we understand it and begin to speak out against it. By remaining quiet and passive, we allow our assailants to achieve in dominating and oppressing us. Breaking the silence is the first step.