Rape Victims Find Comfort in Cyberspace

Anne works at a university in Scotland. Brooke, in Los Angeles, is preparing to attend law school this fall. The two have never met face to face, but in some ways they are closer than sisters.

Rape, and the filthy feeling it inflicted on them, has been their bond, the Internet their refuge.

“We talk daily, Monday through Friday,” Brooke says. “We are working it out together on a friend-friend basis.”

Brooke, in a computer interview with the Associated Press, requested that her last name be omitted. Already hard of hearing from a chronic ear infection, she lost almost all her hearing last year, and now cannot communicate by telephone, when her assailant beat her severely. For similar reasons of confidentiality, Brooke spoke of “Anne” while acknowledging that is not the Scottish woman’s real name.

Confiding in someone else was almost impossible for the 34-year-old Anne after she was raped at knifepoint the evening of Feb. 17. She’d been driving to the store for milk when two men accosted her at a stoplight, got into her car and assaulted her.

Unable to tell anyone directly about the attack, Anne sought help in the more impersonal, anonymous world of cyberspace, where she stumbled onto the World Wide Web site of the Rape Crisis Center of San Antonio. She sent out a desperate plea.

“I wonder if there is anyone who would give me help through e-mail,” she wrote to the Texas center Feb. 19. “I’m too embarrassed to speak about what has happened to me even on the phone. I was raped on Saturday night by two men.

“I need to know how to get rid of this dirty feeling. I feel people are looking at me and pointing the finger. I’m scared and don’t know what to do.”

After the rape, she wrote, she “cried bitterly and spent most of the night in the shower trying to wash it all away.”

To Ron Aaron, executive director of the Rape Crisis Center, those anguished words were all too familiar. He said he has no doubt the woman’s plea was legitimate because of the emotions she expressed and the language she used.

“Her description of the emotional roller coaster she was on following the rape is exactly what victims tell us face to face,” he said.

The Rape Crisis Center went online last year and receives four or five messages a week from people seeking information or help.

Aaron wrote back to Anne, assuring her the assault was not her fault and offering the name and phone number of a San Antonio therapist on his staff. He urged her to call collect.

Anne replied she didn’t feel she could speak with anyone. “I get home from work and sit and cry. I cry myself to sleep and wake up in a cold sweat after reliving it all. . . . I don’t know how to open up and talk about things. . . . I just can’t do it!”

Then Aaron asked if Anne might want to communicate on the Internet with a Los Angeles woman, a rape victim he had been corresponding with by electronic mail. A day later, the two women were talking by computer.

“I’m thankful for e-mail and for being alive!” Anne wrote back to Aaron. “[Brooke] sounds as if she’s had a horrific time of it herself.”

In her messages, Brooke describes being repeatedly harassed, stalked, beaten and sexually attacked over four years by a man she’d dated for seven months in 1991. She reported every instance, she says, and filed charges after some assaults. But prosecutors failed to link the assorted episodes. The man who beat and raped her eventually was sentenced to less than a year in jail, Brooke says.

Now Brooke and Anne are trying to help each other overcome pain through e-mail.

“Her sister happens to be late-deafened, like me, so it is just another thing we have in common,” Brooke says. “The best e-mail I got from her was one [in which] she told me she was able to tell me much more than she could her own sister. At that point I knew we had a bond that was helping us ‘survive’ our crimes, and get out ‘the dirt.’ ”

Eventually, Anne agreed to seek help in her home country. She called a crisis line, but it was disconnected. She left a message at another number but is still awaiting a response, Brooke says.

Brooke urged Anne to report the rape to authorities. When she opted not to, Brooke didn’t press the matter.

Brooke since has joined with college friends to start an online newsletter, the RitAway News, for crime victims and others who want to help stop violence.

“I call it ‘my therapy,’ ” she said.

Helping Anne deal with her rape also is part of it.

“I feel release of my anger/frustration by reaching out to other people, like Anne,” she said via computer.

The Internet address for the newsletter is TheRitAway@aol.com.