After Silence
Nancy Raine's personal experiences as told in After Silence: Rape & My Journey Back expose the traumatic effects rape can have on a woman. Lynn Freed, author of The Mirror, highly praises the writing because "It will change the way we consider the `we and they' of rape."
In 1985 while Nancy was moving into a new apartment, she was grabbed from behind by a man who taped not only her hands behind her but also over her eyes before sexually attacking her numerous times in a three hour period. She was only aware of his violence, not the sexual act, and his repeating the words "Shut up!" These became terrible words when she realized that, "The real shame, as I have learned, is to consent to them."
After the rape, Nancy left Boston and lived nearly six weeks with her parents. She was 39 years old, yet slept with her mother at night and listened to her father's threats to kill the rapist during the day. But her parents couldn't be of much help to her, even though they wanted to be. She became aware that people were defining her "...in terms of a shameful sexual encounter." And in time she discovered, "The rape distorted not only what came after it but all that went before it as well."
Nancy finally rented what she hoped was a safe attic-room at a rural home in Concord, Mass., but she became frightened by even ordinary sounds she'd hear. She thought that burying the under-clothes she had on when she was raped would help her forget the whole thing, but it didn't. She also tried to find a psychiatrist in Boston or Concord who could understand her trauma, but that also failed. It became clear to her that "...it would be I, not the rapist, who would be given the life sentence."
Through her reading, Nancy soon learned about PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder. This originally was directed towards Vietnam veterans after they had returned home. But she found that for either sex, "Overwhelming terror, even a single instant of it, can physically alter the brain forever."
Nancy met Steve, her husband-to-be, through a girlfriend who had also been raped, but years before. After Nancy and Steve's first night together, she told him about her rape experience. But that did not delay their marriage, and they soon moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. They enjoyed several happy years together before Nancy's trauma began to surface again. She was referred to a psychiatrist in Palo Alto, Dr. Deborah Rose, who was a rape specialist. After more than a year in therapy, at a cost of $15,000, she settled down to write After Silence, which she then dedicated to her husband, and her psychiatrist.
Early in this book, Dr. Judith Herman is quoted as saying in Trauma and Recovery, "...when the traumatic events are of human design (rape), those who bear witness are caught in the conflict between victim and perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander (society) do nothing...The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander (society) to share the burden of pain..." This is the reality Nancy Raine's faced and fought for nearly 10 years of her life.
But it probably was the publisher of After Silence, not the author, who on the book's jacket listed words of praise for this book from six prominent women. If this is to imply that After Silence is a book for women, and that men have nothing to learn from it, then Raine's message is being poorly advertised.