IT IS difficult to think of a more crass and insulting question to put to a rape victim than “Is any part of you glad that you were raped?” But this is what you find yourself asking Heather Gemmen. She seems to know the question is coming and does not take offence, because in the context of her quite remarkable experience it is not as monstrous as it seems.

Heather, 33, was raped by an intruder in her own bed nearly ten years ago while her husband, Steve, was out at an evening meeting. It was a filthy, petrifying ordeal lying in the dark, a knife at her neck, not knowing if the rapist had already killed her children who were in the next room.

She remembers retching at the stench of his beer breath and whimpering at his threat to kill her if she told anyone what he had done. She remembers burying her face in her hands afterwards, which meant that she never saw his face. She remembers relief and gratitude flooding through her body when he finally left and she staggered next door to find her two young sons sleeping unharmed.

In the weeks afterwards as police hunted for her attacker, Steve concentrated on loving and comforting his traumatised wife. Neither of them imagined what was coming next. The rape had left Heather pregnant.

Though she had taken a morning after pill on hospital advice, it hadn’t worked. Heather is fervently anti-abortion but even she couldn’t countenance having her violator’s baby. Her husband wanted her to have a termination and after days of agonising, she agreed. But privately she couldn’t bear the thought of killing the innocent by-product of a terrible crime.

This didn’t stop her feeling miserable, angry and trapped. Secretly she wished the baby would die inside her so she would have no decision to make. She felt furious resentment that a few years earlier one of her own much-wanted babies had been stillborn at five months while she could feel this one fluttering alive inside her. In desperation she and Steve, an electrician, asked some friends, a married couple who they knew were infertile, if they wanted to adopt the child.

But it was the thought of another couple carrying her own flesh and blood away that brought the thunderbolt realisation that she had to keep her baby. When she told Steve he put his arms around her and, with extraordinary tenderness, said: “It’s our baby.If we’re keeping it, we have to start talking that way.”

Today Rachael is a stunningly beautiful nine-year-old who is quite obviously adored by both her parents. She is an energetic, caring child. “She is very compassionate and sociable . . . she loves other people,” says her mother.

Heather says she fell passionately in love with the baby before she was born. The one person she says had a right to question Rachael’s presence, Steve, has never done so. A few days after the birth she watched Steve rocking her to sleep. “Thanks for being such a good dad to her,” said Heather. “She’s my girl,” he said. “What else would I do?”

The courage of their decision to keep her is underlined by the fact that, because Heather’s attacker was black and she is white, Rachael is mixed-race, which has prompted endless prurient questions when they go out as a family near their home in Colorado Springs. Heather is so overwhelmed by what she calls the healing power of Rachael’s existence that she has written a book, Startling Beauty, about the experience.

A committed Christian, she says she wants to tell other victims that rape need not be the end of their life and that beauty can come from ugliness.

Which brings us back to the original question. Looking at Rachael now, can she go as far as saying she is glad that it happened? “I struggle with that one,” she says after a pause. “I cannot imagine my life without her but I can’t say those words ‘I’m glad I was raped.’ I can say, though, that I’m glad about what I’ve learnt from this.

“(Rachael) makes joy tangible when we look at her. If I had never had her I wouldn’t have known that. I have gained more than I have lost.”