Even after reading DENIAL: A MEMOIR OF TERROR by Jessica Stern (HarperCollins, 2010), my initial reaction upon hearing about a sexual assault that occurred at three-thirty in the morning was to ask, “What was she doing walking the streets alone at three o’clock in the morning?” Of course, I believe that the streets should be safe at any time of the day, and the fact that it was in the middle of the night has nothing to do, really, with what happened. If the street was clear and the same vehicle was there, and the same woman was walking at three in the afternoon, the result may have been the same. The point is that we cannot help ourselves but to place part of the blame on the victim.
Jessica Stern writes about the rape she and her sister endured during their early teens. She wants to understand, from her own and others’ experiences of trauma, what it is about trauma that makes society unable to bear victims. Stern herself, when interviewing a victim of clergy abuse, somehow wants to believe her interviewee had some flaw that made him not fight back, not report the abuse, even through three different changes in priests in his parish!
“Denial helps the bystander. We don’t want to know…would rather not know about terror or be confronted with evil” and, Stern claims this is true “about personal assaults and more private crimes, the crimes that occur inside families” (p 144). The author examines her own thoughts about victims, and admits that she has “embarrassingly cruel thoughts that are not politically correct. One feels sorry for victims, but one also feels lucky not to be one—even a bit superior, a not entirely unpleasant feeling. Victims are weak. They must be. Why else would they be victimized? Especially rape victims. Morally and physically weak. And then there is the comforting thought that victims lie. If the victim is exaggerating or has made his story up out of whole cloth, I don’t have to confront my own unattractive desire to punish him” (p 191).
This stance about denial enthralled me. I thought about the suspected abuse of my daughter that we needed to investigate when she was five years old. Once we learned my daughter had not been abused, we were quick to close the door on the topic. No more discussion was needed, right? The fact that she endured extensive and potentially traumatizing interviews and an invasive physical exam was written-off entirely. None of that was part of the assault. Thus, when I was the one who actually asked the pertinent question in a non-leading way, and got a satisfying answer, I was relieved of worry, anxiety and angst. Since it was the son of a close neighbor who was the suspected perpetrator, all the ugliness of the entire thing could be forgotten. We could all move on.
The same was true for the attempted kidnapping I experienced as a young teen. Because I was not kidnapped, and had, actually, outwitted my potential rapist/murderer, I could rest on the laurels of my trickery. According to my parents, I should feel superior. Oh, and I should immediately leave the house and start walking the streets alone again to “get over” my fears. Stern believes her family history of trauma, dating back to her family’s experiences in Nazi Germany, made her father gloss over her rape. I wonder now whether this denial of experience and emotion around even things that did not get that far is just as dangerous.
DENIAL: A MEMOIR OF TERROR discusses more than just victimhood and victimization. Stern explores the incidence of her own and others’ PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. She speaks directly to readers and lets us into the inner workings of her mind in an effort for us to confront our own humanness and the mess of juxtapositions that make up our minds and beliefs. Her examination of what makes a perpetrator, of rape or other violence, including terrorism, is an important contribution to our understanding so that we may seek to help those who (most often) were victims themselves before becoming the perpetrators we love to hate. She also humanizes victims, so that we can’t so easily write off the woman who walks alone back to her dorm in the dark.
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