What's in a Name

There's a theory that when you know the true name for something, you take away any power it has over you. If only it were that simple. We know the names of many things that continue to haunt and torment us: greed, poverty, child abuse, racial prejudice, war... the list, unfortunately, seems endless.

Nevertheless, identifying something - giving a particular area of human experience a name - does enable us to address the problem, to begin examining and discussing it. It's an essential, positive first step toward solving it.

Naming is perhaps the most important part of our blueprint for a rape-free society. The main purpose of this book is to identify emotional rape: to bring it into the open, examine what causes it, and learn how to take away any power it has over us.

In earlier chapters we looked at emotional rape and the individual. Then we discussed how the macro forces at work in society - specifically, in the mass media, the medical profession and the education and legal systems - sanction and promote emotional rape.

What follows is a, far from exhaustive, list of suggestions as to how we might act to eliminate this trauma from our society...