Chapter Preface

On a summer morning in 1990, Dartmouth College professor Susan Brison was walking in the French countryside when she was grabbed from behind, brutally beaten, and sexually assaulted. Long after this attack, Brison continued to experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder commonly exhibited by survivors of disasters: extreme anxiety, depression, sleep disorders, and flashbacks of the event. Brison maintains that she found it difficult to live with these symptoms and to heal emotionally from the assault: “Even when I managed to find the words—and the strength—to describe my ordeal, it was hard for others to hear about it. They would have preferred me to ‘buck up’.... But it’s essential to talk about [the trauma], again and again.” Eventually, Brison joined a rape survivors’ support...