After decades if not centuries of silence about the crime of rape (Sanday 1996), the 1970s feminist movement encouraged people who were raped to speak up about such:

truth that violence occurs (Brownmiller 1975). Since friends and family of rape victim­survivors are in the process of developing coping strategies, we still don't know what to say or how to act toward or as a victim-survivor (Winkler 1991, 2002).

As I experienced people's ambiguity to the attack against me in the United States, I longed for the support of my friends in the rural town of Olinala in the state of Guerrero, Mexico, where I did my research (1980-1982) (Winkler 1987). There I studied a situa­tion of institutionalized rape. Their practice of mountain marriages was the precursor for rape, and in the 1950s and 1960s as in the United States, the crimes of rapists were hid­den and silence was a victim's blight.