Resource Guide

David Confronts Bogeyman

In addition to the production, the Steering Committee created a resource guide to give families and community members a toolkit to report and prevent future assaults.

Author David Holthouse's Resource Guide Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN)

Local/Alaska Resources

Standing Together Against Rape
The mission of Standing Together Against Rape, Inc., (STAR) is to provide the best quality of crisis intervention, education and advocacy services to victims of sexual assault and sexual abuse, and their families and our community.
Local Crisis Line: (907) 276-7273
Statewide Crisis Line: (800) 478-8999

Strengthening Families Alaska

Alaska C.A.R.E.S.
Alaska CARES is a Children's Advocacy Center (CAC), and a member of the National Children's Alliance, which is the governing body for more than 450 Children's Advocacy Centers across the United States. CAC's are comprehensive, child-centered programs, based in a facility that allows law enforcement, child protection professionals, prosecutors, mental health professionals, victim advocates, and the medical community to work together to evaluate child abuse cases. The overarching goal of all CAC's is to make sure that the children are not further victimized by systems designed to protect them.
Alaska C.A.R.E.S Tips for Kids
Alaska C.A.R.E.S. – Parents & Prevention

Bikers Against Child Abuse
Bikers Against Child Abuse exists with the intent to create a safer environment for abused children. From their mission statement: "We exist as a body of bikers to empower children to not feel afraid of the world in which they live. We stand ready to lend support to our wounded friends by involving them with an established, united organization. We work in conjunction with local and state officials who are already in place to protect children. We desire to send a clear message to all involved with the abused child that this child is part of our organization, and that we are prepared to lend our physical and emotional support to them by affiliation, and our physical presence. We stand at the ready to shield these children from further abuse. We do not condone the use of violence or physical force in any manner, however, if circumstances arise such that we are the only obstacle preventing a child from further abuse, we stand ready to be that obstacle."
Anchorage, Alaska Temp Chapter
Help Line: 907-885-HELP (4357)
Email: Board@an-ak.bacaworld.org
Meetings: 6:30 p.m., the second Wednesday of the month at the Mountain View VFW Post, 3105 Mountain View Dr., Anchorage, AK 99501

UAA Campus

UAA Title IX Reporting sexual misconduct
UAA Title IX - Support and Reporting Options for Survivors of Sexual Assault

Psychological Services Center
Counseling is provided for families and individuals in an atmosphere sensitive to culture and ethnicity. People are seen for many reasons from a curiosity about one's own potential to concerns such as anxiety, depression, stress, loss, and relationship difficulties.

 Suggested Reading

Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence –from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (1992) by Judith Herman
When Trauma and Recovery was first published in 1992, it was hailed as a groundbreaking work. In the intervening years, Herman's volume has changed the way we think about and treat traumatic events and trauma victims. In a new afterword, Herman chronicles the incredible response the book has elicited and explains how the issues surrounding the topic have shifted within the clinical community and the culture at large. Trauma and Recovery brings a new level of understanding to a set of problems usually considered individually. Herman draws on her own cutting-edge research in domestic violence as well as on the vast literature of combat veterans and victims of political terror, to show the parallels between private terrors such as rape and public traumas such as terrorism. The book puts individual experience in a broader political frame, arguing that psychological trauma can be understood only in a social context. Meticulously documented and frequently using the victims' own words as well as those from classic lliterary works and prison diaries, Trauma and Recovery is a powerful work that will continue to profoundly impact our thinking.

The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (2008) by Ellen Bass & Laura Davis
Come to terms with your past while moving powerfully into the future. The Courage to Heal is an inspiring, comprehensive guide that offers hope and a map of the healing journey to every woman who was sexually abused as a child—and to those who care about her. Although the effects of child sexual abuse are long-term and severe, healing is possible.

Weaving together personal experience with professional knowledge, the authors provide clear explanations, practical suggestions, and support throughout the healing process. Readers will feel recognized and encouraged by hundreds of moving first-person stories drawn from interviews and the authors' extensive work with survivors, both nationally and internationally. This completely revised and updated 20th anniversary edition continues to provide the compassionate wisdom the book has been famous for, as well as many new features:

  • Contemporary research on trauma and the brain
  • An overview of powerful new healing tools such as imagery, meditation, and body-centered practices
  • Additional stories that reflect an even greater diversity of survivor experiences
  • The reassuring accounts of survivors who have been healing for more than twenty years
  • The most comprehensive, up-to-date resource guide in the field
  • Insights from the authors' decades of experience

Cherished by survivors, and recommended by therapists and institutions everywhere, The Courage to Heal has often been called the bible of healing from child sexual abuse. This new edition will continue to serve as the healing beacon it has always been.

Wounded Boys Heroic Men: A Man's Guide to Recovering from Child Abuse (1998) by Daniel Jay Sonkin
Wounded Boys Heroic Men is a workbook for transformation. Specifically written for and about men. This is the first book to address their issues of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse. Dr. Daniel Sonkin carefully prepares a road map for the recovery process, including insightful stories of real survivors, as well as direction and reassurance. More important, this unique book provides hope, relief, and comfort for millions of victims too proud to explore their suffering. Carefully analyzing the feelings, attitudes, and behaviors of abused men. Dr. Sonkin teaches methods that break the vicious cycle of violence, make peace with the abuser, and in return find peace within. Comprehensive and enlightening, Wounded Boys Heroic Men is also a guide to help partners, friends, and family members better understand the struggles these men face, so that they can support the healing journey. Dr. Sonkin's message is simple: With help, healing is possible.

Empty Playground: A Survivors Story (2015) by Callen Harty
When most people think of child molesters they think of children lured into vans or victims of creepy old men lurking around school grounds. They don't think of Josh Duggar's sisters or Irish Catholic boys from rural Wisconsin getting abused repeatedly by an older brother. They should. That is the reality. That is the untold story of untold millions. Empty Playground is a memoir that shares the journey from childhood sex abuse through the repercussions suffered and into recovery and healing. It is the story of a male survivor, an often overlooked segment of the survivor community. It is a story often lived but not often told as men, both gay and straight, are so reluctant to speak about their abuse and often stay silent about their emotions as well. It has only been in the last decade or so that male survivors have been added to the discussion of sexual assault but the topic has more recently become recognized, particularly with the revelations of several well-known survivors, among them basketball player Keyon Dooling, hockey player Theo Fleury, and actor Tyler Perry. They have all told their stories. There are countless other stories out there about ordinary people who have survived similar abuse, but most of them remain untold. Empty Playground is one such story, told with an unflinching directness and gentle honesty.

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2015) by Bessel van der Kolk
Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested;one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world's foremost experts on trauma, has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers' capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust. He explores innovative treatments—from neurofeedback and meditation to sports, drama, and yoga—that offer new paths to recovery by activating the brain's natural neuroplasticity. Based on Dr. van der Kolk's own research and that of other leading specialists, The Body Keeps the Score exposes the tremendous power of our relationships both to hurt and to heal—and offers new hope for reclaiming lives.

Our Guys (1998) by Bernard Lefkowitz
In March 1989 a group of teenage boys lured a retarded girl into a basement in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and gang-raped her. Glen Ridge was the kind of peaceful, affluent suburb many Americans dream about. The rapists were its most popular high school athletes. And although rumors of the crime quickly spread through the town, weeks passed before anyone saw fit to report it to the police. What made these boys capable of brutalizing a girl that some of them had known since childhood? Why did so many of their elders deny the rape and rally around its perpetrators? To solve this riddle, the Edgar award-winning author Bernard Lefkowitz conducted years of research and more than two hundred interviews. The result is not just a wrenching story of crime and punishment, but a hauntingly nuanced portrait of America's jock culture and the hidden world of unrestrained adolescent sexuality.

Father-Daughter Incest (2000) by Judith Lewis Herman
Through an intensive clinical study of forty incest victims and numerous interviews with professionals in mental health, child protection, and law enforcement, Judith Herman develops a composite picture of the incestuous family. In a new afterword, Herman offers a lucid and thorough overview of the knowledge that has developed about incest and other forms of sexual abuse since this book was first published. Reviewing the extensive research literature that demonstrates the validity of incest survivors' sometimes repressed and recovered memories, she convincingly challenges the rhetoric and methods of the backlash movement against incest survivors, and the concerted attempt to deny the events they find the courage to describe.

The Unsayable: The Hidden Language of Trauma (2007) by Annie Rogers
In her twenty years as a clinical psychologist, Annie Rogers has learned to understand the silent language of girls who will not–who cannot–speak about devastating sexual trauma. Abuse too painful to put into words does have a language, though, a language of coded signs and symptoms that conventional therapy fails to understand. In this luminous, deeply moving book, Rogers reveals how she has helped many girls find expression and healing for the sexual trauma that has shattered their childhoods. Rogers opens with a harrowing account of her own emotional collapse in childhood and goes on to illustrate its significance to how she hears and understands trauma in her clinical work. Years after her breakdown, when she discovered the brilliant work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Rogers at last had the key she needed to unlock the secrets of the unsayable. With Lacan's theory of language and its layered associations as her guide, Rogers was able to make startling connections with seemingly unreachable girls who had lost years of childhood, who had endured the unspeakable in silence. At the heart of the book is the searing portrait of the girl Rogers calls Ellen, brutally abused for three years by her teenage male babysitter. Over the course of seven years of therapy, Rogers helped Ellen find words for the terrible things that had happened to her, face up to the unconscious patterns through which she replayed the trauma, and learn to live beyond the shadows of the past. Through Ellen's story, Rogers illuminates the complex, intimate unraveling of trauma between therapist and child, as painful truths and their consequences come to light in unexpected ways. Like Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery and Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind, The Unsayable is a book with the power to change the way we think about suffering and self-expression. For those who have experienced psychological trauma, and for those who yearn to help, this brave, compelling book will be a touchstone of lucid understanding and true healing.

Lucky (2002) by Alice Sebold
In a memoir hailed for its searing candor and wit, Alice Sebold reveals how her life was utterly transformed when, as an eighteen-year-old college freshman, she was brutally raped and beaten in a park near campus. What propels this chronicle of her recovery is Sebold's indomitable spirit-as she struggles for understanding ("After telling the hard facts to anyone, from lover to friend, I have changed in their eyes"); as her dazed family and friends sometimes bungle their efforts to provide comfort and support; and as, ultimately, she triumphs, managing through grit and coincidence to help secure her attacker's arrest and conviction. In a narrative by turns disturbing, thrilling, and inspiring, Alice Sebold illuminates the experience of trauma victims even as she imparts wisdom profoundly hard-won: "You save yourself or you remain unsaved."