Reviewed by Helen Huini for Readers' Favorite

When Rebecca learned about her infertility in 2012, she mourned the sexual trauma that she had undergone. Rebecca didn't talk much about the sexual assault by her maternal grandfather with anyone other than her therapist. Her subsequent attempts to tell her parents yielded nothing. She was especially shocked when she realized that her mother knew of similar assaults on other family members yet chose to be silent about them, not even protecting Rebecca from the rapist. Her maternal aunts blamed her equally for what had happened to her. Rebecca thought she had buried that part of her life until she underwent a partial hysterectomy years later, which shut her body down and led to her developing complex post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with related depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and undiagnosed dissociative identity disorder (DID). Rebecca E. Chandler's It Won't Hurt None: A Story of Courage, Healing and a Return to Wholeness will expose readers to the first-hand account of a rape survivor whose ordeals were blamed on her.

After reading the introduction to this book, I thought it was just another memoir of a rape survivor. However, after reading It Won't Hurt None, I couldn't help but sympathize with the other children who continue to be sexually abused by family members. Rebecca E. Chandler also gives shocking facts about how society is falling apart in America, such as how one in five women and one in thirteen men have been sexually assaulted before they turned seventeen. This memoir raises awareness of the silent battles fought by children put into the care of relatives, especially in situations when their parents divorce. I recommend this book to every parent, as it is an eye-opener to the evils that trusted relatives might commit against their children. This book would also serve a therapeutic purpose for rape survivors, giving them hope that not all is lost, even when they feel alone and abandoned.