My Rape, and Others

Readers' Reviews and Remarks

All reviews are genuine and unbiased and not influenced by financial or other reward.

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My Rape, and Others: A book that men must read.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 October 2025
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This is a very brave book. A man in his 70s is talking intimately of his assault by three thugs over sixty years ago, and reveals how the after-effects still reverberate in his crippled consciousness all this time later. He spares himself and us none of the harrowing and demeaning details, and it's right that he shouldn't, because it's only by going through the rape with him that we can fully understand what it means to victims.

This will be familiar territory to many - too many - woman, but it's an important statement to remind us that men get raped too, in acts of revenge and punishment and to ward off the threat of incipient same-sex attraction. Forty years ago this would have been poo-poohed, and it took a pioneering series of articles in the London freesheet 'Capital Gay' to bring the unmentionable to the surface. Out of those articles came the organisation 'Survivors'.

This is a book of two halves: the first, the deeply personal account of Patrick's experiences and the aftermath; the second, a more general overview of the rape phenomenon, which reads more like a sociological account. This is the weaker half of the book, because most of the information here has been published elsewhere, though maybe not so aaccessibly. However in conjunction with Part One it certainly packs a punch.

This is an extremely important and necessary book and the courage and craft in it must be applauded.

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