I stopped liking Bill Cosby 25 years ago. Here's the story.

[JDPriestly]

96. Sexual harassment and rape are crimes that leave the victim with a sense of shame and the fear

of being viewed as complicit and at fault in inviting the sexual attack. This is especially true if the person who was harassed or raped actually liked or admired the harasser, the rapist.

People who are harassed or raped are often very normal people, sometimes very attractive people who just don't want to admit to themselves or others that they were harassed or raped.

It has to do with the nature of the crime. Sexual abuse is an attack on a person's most private, most intimate feelings and also on the victim's confidence in his or her ability to say not just "no" but "yes" to the attacker who is often a person in authority, someone feared or respected. After being harassed, the victim asks him- or herself, "What could I have done differently?" And the victim's feelings are confused.

Sex crimes are complex in that they may or may not leave any physical markers of loss or injury. The losses or injuries are done to parts of us that are deeper than our conscious, thinking selves. And sometimes it takes only a small movement or gesture for a perpetrator to cross the line from an innocent, joking or simply affectionate gesture, even a sign of respect and friendship to harassment and then in some horrible cases actual rape. In the case of harassment, the victim may wait and wait hoping for an apology. That is especially true if the harasser or rapist is a co-worker, a boss or someone in authority. "Maybe he just made a mistake but he really does respect and like me" is the victim's inner conversation and hope. But the truth is that harassment and rape are perversions of acts of affection and love, perversions of acts of respect, admiration and concern.

The damage is done not just to the physical person of the victim but to the victim's spirit, sense of individuality and ability to be a person capable of dealing with life especially with physical threats.

A lot of attractive women are the victims of harassment and rape. You would be surprised. But sexual abuse, harassment and rape are not just reserved for attractive women.

Many victims try to recover by attempting to forget the crime. Of course, that effort to try to forget often does not work. It makes things worse. The memory of something which might sound so trivial to a third person stays with the victim and remains in his/her secret thoughts. It is very hard to talk about harassment or rape because the physical acts involved are very personal and because they are actions that within the child that is in you are associated with good feelings, positive emotions, affection and acceptance and even the love of your parents or your husband or wife or siblings. That is why we use the word "pervert" or "perversion" to speak of sex offenders. Because so often their physical movements or gestures mimic the most basic movements of a baby trusting its mother, nursing, loving, being touched and comforted. Suddenly those comforting gestures are twisted by the harasser or rapist into movements of ridicule, of disrespect, of harming and endangering, of embarrassing, of threatening, of harming, of hurting, and often of holding the horrible possibility of a repeated attack or a ruined reputation over the victim.

So that is why victims of sexual abuse from simple harassment, perhaps a gesture that the perpetrator thinks nothing of, to actual rape, are haunted by their memories but unable to speak to others about them.

Harassment and rape are crimes (and legally, harassment is not generally considered a crime although it could be classed as an assault in some cases, an unwanted touching, an unauthorized touching) that are not reported until the victim has suffered the torments of secret memories for so long that silence is no longer possible.

As an aside, years ago when I worked for a homeless project and was seeking money for homeless women, I discovered that (of the small sample I dealt with) nearly all of them reported having been harassed or raped in their early teen years -- usually by a step-father or someone they trusted. The damage to the victim can play out over many years.

The victims of the sexual predators in the scandal about the Catholic church also sometimes did not come forward for many years. It is because we are in our deepest feelings and memories confused between the affectionate nature of intimate touching (Mommy changes our diapers and bathes us as infants) and the physical actions involved in harassment and rape. This is bound to be more confusing to some of us than to others.

One child will immediately respond to the unwanted touching of a classmate with a slap or a sharp look or a report to the teacher. Another will wither, wilt and never dare to admit to having been harassed. A third will tell mother or father. It depends on the child's nature. But every one of them will be harmed.