One of my closest friends was raped when she was eight years old. The perpetrator was a boy who lived next door to her. He was 16.
She didn't tell anyone about the attack until she was much older. Even when she confided in me, while we were students, she was still fraught about hauling an event that had occurred around 12 years earlier into the present. It was only much, much later, when she had become a mother herself, that she told her own mother what had happened when she was a child.
Such is the power that rapists and sexual abusers hold over their victims, that they can continue to silence them years after the event has occurred, and decades after they last set eyes on them. And so pervasive is the shame and blame directed at sexual assault victims rather than on their attackers that they have traditionally been dissuaded from coming forward.
It never would have occurred to me to disbelieve my friend's story. She probably couldn't remember what she was wearing that day and what she'd eaten for breakfast. It's doubtful she had any recollection of the colour of the neighbours' front door, or the name of her attacker's siblings (the neighbouring families were friends). But when it came to the attack itself, she had total recall; it was seared into her psyche in all its acute, horrific, indelible detail.
Perhaps it's this profound, personal experience of sexual attacks — or the awareness that it could so easily happen to them — that has caused such an outpouring of support among women for Dr Christine Blasey Ford.
The psychologist's allegations of sexual assault against the US's newly-installed Supreme Court justice are believable to us precisely because they are so common. If it hasn't happened to us, it has happened to someone we know. Blasey Ford's testimony is universal, her recall of the behaviour of enabled, drunken teenage boys (and men) all too familiar.
Moreover, rape is such an egregious violation that it would feel anathema to most women to falsely claim it: after all, we have fathers, brothers, husbands and sons; we weigh carefully the irreconcilable gap between the men who love us and those who hurt us. We hold a dim view of women who cry wolf, for they diminish the claim to justice of every genuine assault victim.
"The death threats and abuse Blasey Ford has received only serve to