ABSTRACT
It is almost regarded as a truism today that rape is traumatic. But this understanding, which we now accept as so evidently true, has a very short history. The turning point came only in the 1970s. Before this time, women’s experiences of rape3 were largely hidden from public view. A woman’s suffering-her sense, quite possibly, of having been “run over by a truck”— was a form of experience and knowledge banished to the private domain. Representations of rape and its impact in the public domain were instead restricted to those knowable from what could be considered a man’s point of view. In places such as the United States and New Zealand, both popular cultural and legitimated professional knowledge about the nature of rape were sharply limited by assumptions that fundamentally dis-identifi ed with the victim. Rape was often portrayed as sexy, or invited by the woman, and any suggestion of negative consequences was just as likely to be attributed to preexisting weakness in the woman’s character, just as the rape itself was likely to be seen as at least in part her fault.4 As Sutherland and Scherl noted in 1970, not only had little attention been paid to “the victim’s adjustment following sexual assault” in the medical and psychological literature, but “specifi c references to the young woman most frequently discuss the possibility of her conscious or unconscious participation in the incident.”5
