ABSTRACT
My work on rape trauma started as a research project. Credit for any of my contributions to the science and sociology of rape trauma must include my colleague, Lynda Lytle Holmstrom. Without her, I never would have started the study. Both of us were newly hired at Boston College. Holmstrom had just finished a research project on two-career families and was searching for a topic that was relevant to women’s lives and to the relationship between men and women. She had heard many reports by women at consciousness-raising groups in the late 1960s about physical assaults that had been made on them by men. And yet, it seemed that despite the common occurrence of assault against women and its strong impact on the people involved, researchers seldom picked up on this behavior as a research topic. Thinking about this disparity led Holmstrom to the idea, initially only vaguely formulated, of studying rape and especially rape victims. Her next step was to meet with me (Burgess), with whom she had done some interdisciplinary teaching at Boston College, to discuss how one might go about such a study. As I listened, I did a memory search on what I knew about rape and its victims. I came up with a blank. Having been educated in Boston, I had learned mainly the psychoanalytic theories, so nothing Holmstrom was saying about rape matched what I was taught—which piqued my curiosity. It led me to tell her that if she wanted to add a clinical or counseling component to the study, I would be interested in collaborating with her. We then discussed how an interdisciplinary approach might be an especially fruitful way to deal with the problem, and how the academic expertise of a sociologist and the clinical expertise of a psychiatric nurse complemented each other. We became a team (Holmstrom & Burgess, 1978).
