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.