An image of triumph inspires Karen's life these days, each year growing more meaningful.

        Each spring, she and her young daughter march in a throng that crosses a downtown bridge. As night falls, they chant: “What do we want? Safe streets! When do we want it? Now!”

        Karen will feel less afraid, more sure of herself. Her self-determined little girl, now 7, will grow into a self-determined woman, she knows. Karen gains strength.

        Karen is part of Take Back the Night, an annual march and vigil for victims of rape, domestic violence and child abuse that resumes its walk Thursday.

        A few years ago Karen felt broken and out of control. On Dec. 29, 1990, a man entered her apartment in Clifton's Gaslight district and raped her.
       

Fears come alive

        The details flood her mind now. A favorite CD, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, was blaring on the stereo. A university sophomore, Karen had always had a fear of showering in an empty house; the stranger's knife to her throat brought her fears to life.

        After he left, it was several minutes before she had the courage to run to neighbors. Police later arrested a man fitting the description she gave, but his DNA didn't match.

        Karen's fears took over. She stopped sleeping. She had “baby sitters” stay with her whenever her live-in boyfriend left the apartment.

        She tried living alone. She cut back classes from five, to two, to one. She took medication and twice-a-month therapy.

        She drank to feel brave.

        A neighbor's children befriended her; then their divorced father did.

        He made her feel human again, helped her to trust. “We just knew we'd get married,” she says.

        Then one night he punched her. Despite her fears of the night, she got out of the car and tried getting away. But he seemed so distraught, she went back.
       

New shame

        Karen says now that their relationship and two-year marriage had all the warning elements of abuse: He was much older than she, and he was controlling, isolating her from the world outside. She had black eyes periodically, a broken nose. She slit her wrists. He hit her once with a bag of bread, she hit him with a cordless phone, and he finished by cutting her eye.

        Karen says the abuse helped get her over the rape. This new shame, she says, she participated in. It was from someone she loved.

        During her pregnancy, he stayed sober and hit her only a couple of times. The week before her daughter was born, Karen's husband confessed to smoking crack. When mother and baby returned from the hospital, parts were missing from their now-disabled car and their bank account was $800 in the red.

        Karen remembers a Tori Amos CD was playing when she decided to escape the abuse. She had visited her parents in Michigan. Struck by the orderliness and sanity of their lives, she determined to give her 6-week-old baby the same thing.

        “Looking at her, there was no question she deserved better,” Karen says. “She sort of brought me around to realizing that I deserved better, too.”

        Their escape was sometimes terrifying. Police and restraining orders were involved. Karen lost her possessions.

        But she divorced, rebuilt her life and finished college.

        Now the marketing employee marches each year with her daughter in Take Back the Night. They walk without fear.

       This year's Take Back the Night walk begins at 7 p.m. Thursday at Bicentennial Commons. Denise Smith Amos can be reached at 768-8395, or e-mail damos@enquirer.com.
       

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