She doesn't remember its name, but there is one particular flowering bush that Megan Fallon would be happy never to encounter again. The scent of it triggers a dark memory from nearly two decades ago.

It was under the cover of one such bush, when she was a 5-year-old girl in a poor neighborhood in upstate New York, that Fallon was sexually molested by a teenage boy. It happened several times, she said in a recent interview, and ended only when her sister discovered them and told their older brother, who chased the boy off.

"To this day, if I smell that smell, that bush, it bothers me."

Fallon, who lives in West Lebanon, is 23 now, and as direct service coordinator at Women's Information Service (WISE) in Lebanon, she is well into a career helping other victims of sexual abuse and domestic violence. In spite of her own history, she says, she is doing relatively well. She is neither incapacitated in her personal relationships, nor haunted by the incidents every day. She plans to have her own family some day and doesn't foresee any problems with that, except that she might be extra vigilant about her children's safety.

The experience of Linda LaFlower has been quite different. The 51-year-old Claremont woman says she still struggles with the debilitating psychological effects of being sexually assaulted by her grandfather for several years beginning when she was 6. She hasn't been able to keep a job. She's had serious mental illnesses. She has limited contact with her family.

"I often wonder what kind of person I would have been," she said in a recent interview, if she hadn't been abused.

"Most people believe that it happened, but I get this 'Why aren't you over it?' all the time. I tell myself I should be over this. ... I just don't know how."

The common attitude toward sexual assault and abuse victims, it often seems, can be summed up in two conflicting ideas: They suffer lifelong, devastating damage because of the abuse; and they should get over it.

In fact, the long-term effects of sexual abuse and assault run a very broad gamut of the human experience. Some victims are devastated; others are not. Many sex abuse victims have life-long problems with intimacy and trust, and suffer the destruction of family relationships. In some cases, such as with severe depression lasting for decades, the connection to the abuse can be obvious. In others, such as with obesity or a tendency to engage in dangerous behavior, it can be more subtle.

Some experts have argued that sexual abuse, especially of children, is often not a major issue in the victim's life, but that position is controversial. In the late 1990s, a team of researchers led by Bruce Rind of Temple University published a report in a prestigious medical journal suggesting that in many cases, victims have no great trouble getting over the childhood trauma — and in some cases don't even view the abuse as all that traumatic. In a New Yorker magazine article a little more than a year ago, writer Malcolm Gladwell recounted the furor — which included a condemnation from Congress — that erupted over Rind's study.

"It's not as if the authors said that C.S.A. (childhood sexual abuse) was a good thing," Gladwell wrote. "They just suggested that it didn't cause as many problems as we'd thought. ... On average, the researchers concluded, the long-term damage is small."

That average might be skewed, Rind has said, by the fact that the repeated rape of a young girl by her father and sex between a physically mature teenage boy and a woman several years older are often both considered sexual abuse. The long-term impacts of the two may well be very different.

Rind's research does note that sexual abuse doesn't happen in a vacuum, and that other circumstances, such as parental neglect and other types of physical abuse, can contribute to physical and mental health problems later in life.

There are limits, though, to how much his research can be used in generalizing about the long-term effects of childhood abuse, according to Paula Schnurr, deputy executive director of the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, based at the VA in White River Junction. Rind's work focused on college students, she said, and those subjects aren't old enough to know a truly long-term impact. Plus, "you're looking at people who are sufficiently unaffected that they could get themselves into college."

Other researchers have concluded that childhood sexual abuse very often does leave a deep and lasting scar. Vincent Felitti, a physician and researcher in California, has reported a host of mental and physical problems among people with a history of a childhood sexual abuse, other abuse, parental neglect, family alcohol abuse and other "adverse childhood experiences."

Felitti's research takes a broader view of the issue than Rind's, going beyond victim reports about problems they associate with their abuse history. It looks at long-term health outcomes and finds that childhood abuse, sexual and otherwise, is closely linked to poor health years, even decades, later.

Schnurr is familiar with Felitti's and Rind's work, and said they both contribute to understanding how sexual trauma affects people. But she cautioned against giving too much weight to any generalization. "(It) doesn't tell you anything about the experience of individuals," she said.

"Another thing that can happen," she said, "is that people can be affected in one domain of their life, but not in others." Their work life might be unaffected, while their personal relationships are a mess. Or vice versa. And, Schnurr added, the extent to which people are affected can change over time, making it even more difficult to understand or measure.

Researchers have noted several factors known to influence how well victims cope. Abuse that continues for a long time, that includes sexual penetration and/or force, and that involves very young victims all can have worse effects over the long term. Particularly damaging — and, unfortunately, common — is abuse committed by someone close to the child, such as a parent, grandparent or sibling.

"The people doing this are really good at what they do," said Peggy O'Neil, executive director of WISE, referring to statistics showing most abusers of children are family members or otherwise close to the victims. "They're really good at building trust. ... So not only has there been a violation (of sexual boundaries), but it's also that this person's trust, this young person's trust, has been shattered."

But everyone seems to acknowledge that even under those conditions, not all victims are devastated. Some may cope better due to their own inherent resilience, an ability to move beyond major trauma, including sexual assault and abuse, some experts say. How such resilience works, how much it helps and how it might be enhanced are hotly debated topics in the field of trauma research, according to Schnurr.

"My understanding is that we still have a long way to go to determine what makes a person resilient," she said.

Research does suggest that for sex abuse victims, resilience is about nurture as well as nature; a supportive home environment plays an important role in helping victims recover in a healthy way. That becomes particularly important when a victim, especially a child, tells people about the abuse. Often, a young victim's accusation must stand against the word of a respected member of the family and community. An article in the journal Child Abuse Review from July 2004 cited research showing that sexual abuse "is most damaging when ... the child is not believed."

Linda LaFlower had several of those worst-case circumstances in her childhood abuse. The abuser was her grandfather, and the assaults involved forced intercourse over about seven years, she said. Beginning when she was 6, he would often take her to his garage, or a quiet room in his large house, she said. And he would rape her.

She has been in therapy on and off for 20 years, and she said she still isn't faring well. For nearly four decades, through motherhood, a failed marriage, other relationships and several jobs, the trauma has been a constant, unwanted companion. "Every day when I see a little girl with a man, I cringe."

She is trained as a licensed nursing assistant, but said she has had trouble holding jobs, partly because of medications she's been on, and partly because she can't focus on tasks very well. She also can't bring herself to help male patients with dressing and other aspects of personal care. She said she's been treated for significant mental health disorders, including dissociative identity disorder, or what used to be called multiple personalities.

Her grandfather died 20 years ago, she said. Her last experience with him, several years before he died, was nearly as traumatic as the childhood abuse.

She was married and in her 20s, and the family was at a church service in Claremont. Something about the priest's message led her to feel that she was at least partly at fault for what had happened, so she approached her grandfather afterward and told him she was sorry. He responded by inviting her back to his house, she said. There, in a moment when her husband was looking away, he put a hand on her breast and said, "I'm glad you're on my side."

In Megan Fallon's case, the abuser wasn't a family member, and the assaults took place over the course of months, not years. But if she seems to be managing well, she nevertheless doesn't assume she's put the matter behind her. Talking about the incidents can still bring tears and anger, and her decision to talk publicly has her concerned about how people will react.

"I put on a great front," she said. "I always have this thing in the back of my mind — am I doing enough? Because if I'm perfect, they won't ever wonder if something's wrong."

She worries that more serious consequences of the abuse could be lying just below the surface of her so-far-successful life. She never dealt with the abuse as a child, she said. Her parents learned of the molestations a few years after they stopped, when her sister revealed the secret. They tried to talk with her and suggested therapy, but she refused to open up.

She now thinks it's almost time to plumb the depths of her childhood experience. "I would say yes, now that I'm more grounded. I'm probably going to be here (in the Upper Valley) for a long time — you know, provided this article doesn't make me skip town. I see myself getting therapy."

Some of the more dangerous effects of childhood sexual abuse don't take decades to surface. VA researcher Schnurr and others report that young victims frequently engage in high-risk behavior as teenagers, including promiscuity and drug and alcohol use.

"If kids start drinking and drugging as a result of their abuse," Schnurr said, "it can set them on a pathway toward revictimization and other health effects." Those could range from sexually transmitted diseases to marrying an abusive spouse. "Intimate partner violence," studies have shown, is common among adult survivors of childhood abuse.

"I didn't have normal relationships" as a teen, said Fallon. "At 14 I had sex for the first time. Drunk." She experimented extensively with drugs. That risky behavior continued for a couple of years, until her parents got her into ice hockey, which proved to be the healthy outlet she was lacking. "My aggression came out in my ice hockey."

Last month, she was home in New York for the funeral of a 21-year-old friend from her teen years, who had died of a drug overdose. She knows she was on that path herself. "I went out to dinner with my parents, and I said 'I can't thank you enough.' "

V, an Upper Valley woman who said she was molested by her brother as a young girl, and then by her father for several years, also knows she was on a dangerous track. She recalled leaving home in northern New Hampshire for foster care as a young teen, and was soon drinking, smoking marijuana and having sex with many different partners, sometime men twice her age. V, who is 29 and asked that her name not be used, was pregnant with the first of her children at age 19.

"If I hadn't been sexually abused, I wouldn't have had my kids so young, and I wouldn't have had them so close together," she said. Her children have different fathers: "I don't think that would have happened, either."

Partly with therapy, and especially with the help of supportive foster parents, she righted herself several years ago, she said. She has a good job and is now in a relationship with a man close to her age who she said is patient with the occasional displays of anger and other holdovers from her past. "He was the first guy ... who said to me, 'How can I comfort you?' "

In none of the cases included in this article did the assaults result in criminal charges. Today, Fallon says that she wishes her assailant had been reported and punished. "I would have loved to know that the person went to jail," she said, although acknowledging that his young age would have limited punishment options. She thinks it's likely that since he wasn't charged, he is still sexually abusing people.

V said that when she was a teenager, she made clear she didn't want her father charged. "I didn't want my mother left untaken-care-of," she said. Now, worried that he might have had other victims since she left, V wonders if having him arrested would have prevented that.

The question was at least as complicated for W, a Sullivan County man in his 50s who said he was molested by his father for several years during his childhood. As a young man, he married, had a family and generally gave the impression of someone in control of his life. Below the surface, he was aboil with depression and anger, and even contemplated suicide.

"It's the secret," he said. "You've always got this thing you've got to be careful not to talk about."

When he was 38, a letter from his brother sparked a crisis of awareness about something he'd kept buried for years. He told his wife about the abuse. He confronted his father. And he found solace in therapy and in talking with friends and other family members. "The more I learned, the more I realized how important it is to talk about it. ... Now that things are better, I just really hope I live to be old. And that wasn't the case when I was 20."

But what to do about his father, who admitted to the abuse but has never acknowledged its importance. When confronted, he told W that he had turned to religion and the Bible, so his transgressions should be forgiven.

W said he thought for a long time about whether to report his father to the authorities. In the end, he decided that would serve no purpose. He didn't want his father in jail.

Today, he doesn't avoid his father, despite feeling that he hasn't forgiven him and is still angry. "I still have to have a relationship with him. He's my father. ... I'm his son. I've got stuff to learn from him."

That kind of tortured family dynamic is often another legacy of sexual abuse. V said that when as a young teenager she revealed what her father had done to her, her mother was angry, telling her she didn't believe the story and that V would ruin her father's business. But, she said, her mother also declared: "I put up with it for so many years and I lived through it. So why can't you?"

She finds it depressing that she is a young mother with three kids and has almost no interaction with family. "I think he took that away from me. He took my entire family away. ... The biggest thing for me is that my kids don't have a grandfather — a safe grandfather."

She hasn't forgiven her mother, either, for not being protective, she said, but she can be more understanding of her as another victim. "I'll have a hard time if my mom passes, and we haven't been able to come to peace over this."

K is a 24-year-old Claremont-area woman who experienced many of the wide-ranging effects of sexual assault herself. She wasn't molested as a young child, but as a college student in southern New England. Three weeks into her freshman year, she said, she was raped by a fellow student after a party. To her lasting regret, officials at the college talked her out of reporting it to the police, and her assailant added pressure by stalking and eventually assaulting her and damaging her car to keep her quiet.

"He was very concerned with his image because he was an athlete."

Her health and her academic performance spiraled downward, she said. She didn't sleep much, and she developed an eating disorder. She attended class irregularly because being in class often meant seeing him.

"For three or four years, I felt it really defined who I was. It was like everything before that never happened. I was now the person who was raped."

Today, she still has frequent nightmares about the attack, and she still wonders what her attacker is doing. But she also has a career and said she is in a good relationship.