Yesterday I joked about
blog-writing as therapy. Today, though, I want to share a very serious -- and moving -- essay about one rape survivor's journey toward healing and understanding by writing publicly about an assault she had kept secret for decades.
Joanna Connors, a writer for the Cleveland-based
Plain Dealer newspaper, was raped in the summer of 1984. Though she told her family and friends about the attack and immediately reported it to the authorities, in the years that followed she discussed her ordeal less and less until it became a secret she harbored from everyone who knew her. Recently, though, she came to realize that true healing only could be achieved by writing about and sharing her experiences with others.
The
six-part story that ran in a special section of last Sunday's
Plain Dealer offers an emotional, honest, and extremely powerful analysis of many of the issues we deal with as criminologists: violent crime, sexual assault, victimization, and career criminality. It also offers a sociological analysis as well. Connors is a white woman who was raped by a Black man; accordingly, her essay addresses issues of race, class and gender; of privilege and power, poverty and disadvantage. Perhaps most movingly, it chronicles the restorative power of the relationships Connors forged with her attacker's relatives all these years later, and of the understanding that resulted from learning about his life and deciphering how and why their lives collided in such a brutal way more than two decades ago.
I hope that folks will take time to read this essay and share their comments about it here. It is extremely well-written and could be useful for facilitating in-class discussions, especially surrounding issues of race, class, power, and privilege as they relate to violent crime. One important warning, though:
the description of the attack is graphic and could potentially serve as a trigger for sexual assault survivors.
