

My husband disappeared and sent a rapist to attack me - notmyshame
http://itisnotmyshametobear.blogspot.com/2013/11/it-is-not-my-shame-to-bear-part-1.html

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bane
>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...](http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/monsters/drake/Lecture%20Notes/rape_statistics.htm)

