Rape, the Most Intimate of Crimes
It's a story so common, it never even made it into the newspapers. A 49-year-old woman who lives in a middle class neighborhood on one of Salt Lake City's busiest streets let her dog out one warm fall night as she always did. When he began barking furiously in the driveway, she ran outside to see what was wrong. As cars sped by, a masked man grabbed her and put a knife at her throat. Without saying a word, he pulled her by the arm, pushed her into her house and threw her on the bed. The dog ran in the house behind them, barking frantically. The man threw the dog against the wall, then raped the woman. He told her that if she screamed, he would "Nicole" her. Gritting her teeth, she focused on the small can of mace attached to her keychain on the table in the next room.
"I know that I will never, ever be the same person again. In fact, after it happened, I asked both my daughter and my sister if I looked different. Because I felt like I was so changed, it must be on my face," she says. "All women are vulnerable like I am. And if they don't realize it, they should. Because you never know what's going to happen. You never ever know when it's going to happen. And you always need to be checking your back. I have mace on my keychain, but you don't run outside to see what your dog's barking at with your mace in hand. And maybe you should. Maybe you should go everywhere with it in your hand."
While her attacker remains at large, the Salt Lake City woman struggles to get over what happened to her. "I will always feel like I'm not safe," she says. "That's my big issue -- trying to continue to feel safe in my own house. I will always be looking over my shoulder and checking the back seat of my truck and always trying to second guess where somebody could be hiding."
- Rape, the Most Intimate of Crimes - PBS
http://www.pbs.org/kued/nosafeplace/articles/rapefeat.html - 45k - Cached - Similar pages
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