What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape

Sohaila Abdulali was gang-raped as a teenager in Bombay. Indignant at the silence on the issue in India, she wrote an article for a woman's magazine questioning how we perceive rape and rape victims. Thirty years later her story went viral in the wake of the 2012 fatal gang rape in Delhi and the global outcry that followed.

Drawing on her own experience, her work with hundreds of survivors as the head of a rape crisis centre in Boston, her research, and three decades of grappling with the issue personally and professionally, What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape is about changing the conversation around rape culture, questioning our assumptions, and deciding how we want to raise the next generation.

Abdulali asks pertinent questions: Is rape always a life-defining event? Does rape always symbolize something? Is rape worse than death? Is rape related to desire? Who gets raped? Is rape inevitable? Is one rape worse than the other? Who rapes? What is consent? How do you recover a sense of safetyand joy? How do you raise sons? Who gets to judge?

What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape is neither a memoir nor an academic study but it is deeply personal and meticulously researched. It is a rallying cry and required reading for us all.