From a human standpoint it is terribly important because one side effect of rape is a personal sense of hopeless degradation, having been forced to be the effect of unwelcome physical action of the most intimate sort. The way out of this deep despond of debasement and self-loathing is to take personal responsibility for how one ended up where one ended up. Because even though one cannot change the mind of the perpetrator one can certainly examine the assumptions, decisions, and computations one used to walk the path leading up to it and decide, once one has viewed those things, how one might change them going forward in order to re-assume a sense of deciding one's own life.

That's about as simple as I can make it. It has nothing to do with culpability or legal action. It has to do with recovering some integrity and your own soul.


A