Deborah Coddington: How much are we scarred by the wounds of denial

Should I live to be a 100, I'll never know why shame is a sexually transmitted disease. Is it a form of denial?

If our houses are broken into and jewellery, computers, artworks stolen, we're outraged.

Aggrieved, we report the thefts, claim insurance and complain to friends. We also feel violated. Strangers have trampled our privacy.

But we don't feel guilty for their crimes. We don't conceal the misdemeanours in shame, the way victims of sex crimes do.

Jessica Stern lectures on terrorism at Harvard University. During the Clinton Administration, she served on the National Security Council and, in 2001, was named by Time magazine as one of seven thinkers whose ideas would "change the world".

Stern is a world expert on terrorism. She's interviewed religious-extremist terrorists in the US, India, Indonesia, Israel, Lebanon, Pakistan and Palestine and places herself in extremely dangerous situations.

Yet she feels no fear. Before journalist Daniel Pearl was beheaded, Stern interviewed the same terrorists who killed him.

Why is Stern so calm, so "unfeeling" in moments of extreme trauma?

Because aged 46, she realised she was in denial over the gunpoint rape of herself and her little sister when they were 15 and 14.

The perpetrator went on to rape 40 children before being caught and, four months after the Stern crime, their father, a Holocaust survivor, told police his daughters had "recovered".

I've just read Stern's breathtaking book, Denial, A Memoir of Terror, her take on some causes of terrorism and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Her experience sharpens her interest in how those who are tortured can, if they choose, go on to terrorise others.

She writes: "How much of what we think of as an admirable response to trauma - the 'stiff upper lip' - is actually disassociation, the mind's attempt to protect us from experiences that are too painful to digest? It happens to a lot of women. I survived. Most women do. I am 'strong' but, in those moments of strength, I don't feel. I will admit that I am afraid of one thing. Not just afraid. Ashamed. I am afraid that I am incapable of love."

But Stern's revelations are not just an examination of her own vomit. Sneering at her shrink's diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, she interviews an Iraq veteran with just that and finds society treats soldiers with the same denial as men and women who've been raped and tortured - the soldiers who risk their lives on our behalf, returning with psychic wounds so excruciating that they and we cannot bear to admit that these wounds exist.

And this is the puzzle for me: why does the crime of sexual abuse stigmatise the victim?

It's not right. I'm not saying we should identify the victims of sex crimes, but I do know there are millions of people such as Stern who spend their lives in denial, shutting the hideous details away in a cupboard.

Then, like Stern, they remain ashamed of their bodies, ashamed they are unable to love, forever clenched inside.

And those know-it-alls who airily denounce sex abuse victims who, they say, "conveniently" remember under therapy details any "normal person" would find impossible to forget, should read the first lines of Stern's book: "I know that I was raped. But here is the odd thing. If my sister had not been raped, too, if she didn't remember ... if I didn't have this police report right in front of me on my desk ... I might doubt that the rape occurred."

This book should be required reading by everyone concerned with national security. The military should read this book, and so should judges who sit on rape cases. It's a book for those with the equanimity to handle Stern's honesty, but she points her finger at the faint-hearted - society's deniers.

Rape victims and traumatised soldiers don't want your denial. As she concludes: "Denial corrodes integrity - both of individuals and society."