Jessica Stern had an incredible op-ed in the Washington Post yesterday. Stern is a noted expert on terrorism and national security, and is a lecturer at Harvard and served on Bill Clinton’s National Security Council. But in her piece yesterday, she talks about the violent rape she was a victim of in 1973 – and how as a result, she has spent her whole life being fascinated with terrorism and violence, so much so that she is one of America’s preeminent experts on terrorism.
For the past 20 years, I have studied the causes of evil and violence. Until recently, I never questioned why I was drawn to this work or why I was able to do it. Now I finally have an answer to the questions: How could a “girl” like you visit terrorist training camps in Pakistan? Weren’t you afraid?
I wasn’t aware that I was afraid. After a series of traumas, one can lose the capacity to feel fear appropriately.
On Oct. 1, 1973, my sister and I biked home from ballet class. We were doing our homework in our living room in Concord, Mass., when a man entered the house. For an hour, this rapist had a gun trained on my sister and me while he attacked us. She was 14, and I was a year older.
Both my sister and I went on to lead relatively happy and productive lives. My sister is a successful marketing executive, an opera singer and an actress. She is married and has two children. She feels great joy in her family and in her music, and no one would describe her as a victim. I similarly take enormous pleasure from my family and my work.
And yet, from adolescence on, I noticed changes that grew worse over time. With each passing year, I seemed to feel less and less — less pain, but also less joy. As a child, I wanted to be a writer, but bad grades in classes that required writing persuaded me to give up. I was more comfortable studying unemotional subjects. I majored in chemistry, in part because it came more easily to me, and in part because I liked that the answers were either right or wrong, unlike in real life, where emotional valences count.
I was planning to become a chemist, but then I got seduced by curiosity about violence. I was both repulsed and fascinated. I skipped the war parts in “War and Peace” but wrote a doctoral dissertation on chemical weapons that focused mainly on the mechanics of violence, with little attention to the human toll.
Ultimately, I became an expert on terrorism. I wrote my first article on the prospects for terrorists to attack chemical plants or use toxic chemicals in 1983. At the time, working on this issue wasn’t a wise career move. Very few people took the threat seriously. Still, I believed that terrorism would become increasingly important, and I continued to focus on it. I started out doing technical work related to weapons, but eventually I gave in to an intense curiosity about terrorists themselves. In that work I made use of a personality quirk, rather than my academic training. I am fascinated by the secret motivations of violent men, and I’m good at ferreting them out.
I’d highly recommend reading the full piece. Stern has a new book coming out tomorrow, Denial: A Memoir of Terror, and this op-ed is a prelude to that. In her memoir Stern explores the lasting effects of her rape at age 15 — how it shaped her, how she became obsessed with terrorism and violence as a result, and how she didn’t realize she had post-traumatic stress disorder until years later after interviewing dozens of terrorists as well as victims of terrorists. It was then that she began to piece together the connection between her own experiences and the violence she has spent every day of her career thinking about.
It’s pretty rare to see prominent women driving the conversation around terrorism and national security, typically a male-dominated field; it’s sad and unfortunate that her success in this field came out of such a traumatic, violent personal experience. But hers is a gripping story that deserves to be heard — and I for one am looking forward to reading her book as well.