ABSTRACT
Susan Griffin (1979) wrote of growing up at a time when women did not speak out about rape, when it was assumed that a woman raped was a woman damaged, complicit, shamed. No one questioned this assumption then or even seemed to recognize that this was an assumption, not an inevitability, not a natural state of affairs. Griffin recalled living in a city permeated with fear as a serial rapist moved from one neighborhood to the next. She recalled the silence, so horrible and disheartening, and how each woman struggled privately with her own fear and with the shame of every woman's taintability. And then a reporter who had been raped by this man came forward, broke this silence. As Griffin said,
How can I tell you what it felt like to hear Carolyn Craven speak out about this rape. This terror, this subjection, this humiliation and torture, she said, we will not bear. I remember him, she said. I hold this man accountable. I hold this city accountable. I do not bear this act alone. We do not. We do not accept this state of being of submission and trembling and fear for our lives, of locking the door against brutality and sleeping uneasily, of our lives on edge, we do not accept this. (p. 29)
