"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.