One can only imagine what terror flashed through the mind of CBS journalist Lara Logan the moment she was torn away from her producer and bodyguard by an angry mob while on assignment in Cairo.
One minute she was reporting on the fall of Hosni Mubarak's government in Tahrir Square, the next she was encircled by as many as 300 men who tore at her clothes, beat and subjected her to unfathomable sexual torture.
'There was no doubt in my mind that I was in the process of dying,' she said in a US 60 Minutes interview which aired in the US earlier this week. 'I thought not only am I going to die, but it's going to be just a torturous death that's going to go on forever.'
Logan estimates the attack went on for an unbearable 40 minutes before she was rescued by police and a group of civilians. As she told The New York Times in a separate interview, what struck her most about her attackers was how her 'pain and suffering' egged them on to further violence.
Logan's account makes for harrowing reading. To find yourself at the mercy of a pitiless crowd is the stuff of nightmares. Coming forward and talking about such a terrifying episode is courageous, but her nerve doesn't stop there. As she told the Times, she was adamant that 'this' not 'define' her.
It's fair to say Logan chose her words carefully. Rape is insidious and its effect, long-lasting. Survivors often speak about feeling disconnected; cut off, at least for a time, from those who can, and desperately want to, help. The act not only takes away free will. Its legacy is to strip away a person's defences and build around them a wall of connotation and innuendo.
Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2008 on the aftermath of her rape at knifepoint in 1999, Sydney woman Helen Kauppi said she was 'called a slut, whore, prostitute, c-nt, dog, bitch and any other word of abuse you can ascribe to a woman'. Worse, she felt incredibly vulnerable and, to her eternal despair, struggled on silently.
It's no surprise that victims of rape were once so conspicuously absent from public debate. Indeed, our constitutional law suppresses their identities to protect their privacy, but this does little to remove the stain of their shame.
Certainly, this is one reason why women such as Logan are now entering the fray and