Rape is a crime of power much more than of sexuality (some rapists cannot consummate the act unless their victim is in distress, or even dead in rare cases such as serial killers). I think that's why it has such a deep and lasting impact on the victim. I think that we are primed to believe that terrible things will never happen to us, and I don't think we can really visualize the terror of certain experiences outside of the experience itself. When something that bad does happen, we now have to deal with the realization that it can happen. And if it happened once, it can happen again. And that can become a crippling terror to have to deal with, especially in such a sudden way.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
