Brianna Sylvers still lurches up in bed sometimes, screaming, as memories flood her mind.

She remembers the three rapists punching her face until it was a mass of bruises. She remembers them stripping off her pants and, one after the other, raping her with increasing fury. She remembers waking up the next day, spattered with her own blood in a San Francisco schoolyard, thinking, "What the hell happened?"

Those flashbacks have been coming more frequently since Sylvers read about the gang rape last month of a 16-year-old Richmond girl. Sylvers was 15 when she was violated 20 years ago.

Sylvers and two other women gang-raped in the Bay Area as teenagers have advice for the Richmond High School sophomore who was attacked by as many as 10 young men while as many as 20 more looked on and laughed:

This was not your fault.

Believe in yourself.

Listen only to people who are supportive of that belief.

"Don't lose yourself to the traumatic experience you've been through," Sylvers, 35, said in an interview near her San Bruno home. "Find the love you have for yourself. Remind yourself of the talents you have.

"It's the way I came through it. She can, too."

This is not to say recovery will be easy, the survivors say.

It won't be.

A long climb back

Sylvers, 50-year-old Susie Chin of San Francisco and 48-year-old Susan Weeks of Malibu have had decades to recover from being gang-raped. Through years of therapy, self-reflection and the help of loved ones and organizations, they emerged healthy.

But each said the experience is never far from her mind.

Being attacked became part of who they were, and they had to work hard not to be crushed by that. The work never ends.

"I had to learn to honor my pain, realize it was OK to feel bad - and then also realize that the sun always will rise again in the morning," said Weeks, who was raped by six men in Napa County in 1979. "Every day is a new opportunity to heal. You have to never forget that."

Gang rapes constitute 11 percent of the estimated 100,000 rapes reported annually, according to national statistics. And while 73 percent of all rapes are committed by attackers known to their victims, in gang rape the opposite is true - 75 percent are committed by strangers.

The swarming assaults are more violent and leave more post-traumatic stress and thoughts of suicide in their victims than other forms of rape, said University of Illinois criminology Professor Sarah Ullman, one of the few researchers who has studied gang rape. The victims are also more subject to ridicule and condemnation than those attacked by individuals.

"It's about the worst thing that can happen to you, and some people can't talk about it at all," said Sylvers, who came to know other survivors as she got older. "But you have to talk. It's very important. You have to find people you trust, and talk it all through."

This is difficult at best.

Janelle White, executive director of San Francisco Women Against Rape, said many rape victims find that when they reach out, they are blamed for the attack - they dressed provocatively, walked unwisely into the dark alley, hung out with the wrong people. That is grievously incorrect and damaging to hear, she said.

"Rape is about wanting to dominate somebody, and sex is just the tool the attacker uses," White said. "Yes, we do want to talk about things women can do to avoid risky situations, but the thing to remember is that nobody deserves to be raped."

The risk factors in the Richmond rape were particularly perilous. After leaving her homecoming dance, the girl walked over to a darkened courtyard known for trouble, the rough young men there were drinking, and she was by herself.

But none of those factors meant the girl gave permission for what happened.

"Gang rape is a hate crime - it's about the rapists' extraordinarily violent way to establish their manhood and dominance over women," said Terry O'Neill, president of the National Organization for Women. "It's not about a victim asking for this."

Abducted and raped

All the sociological statistics and talk are comforting to Sylvers, Chin and Weeks. But at its core, recovery from rape is a solitary, lonely endeavor.

Each of the three attacks had different outcomes legally. Sylvers filed a police report, but nobody was ever caught. Weeks called police, and her attackers were sent to prison.

Chin had the more typical rape experience - she was too shaken and afraid to report the attack to police.

What they all had in common, though, was the helplessness of being swarmed by a group of men.

Sylvers lived in the Mission District in 1989. She was spraying graffiti and getting drunk on the night she was attacked.

Sleeping off the booze on a friend's couch, she was caught by surprise when three men sneaked in through the back door and kidnapped her. They drove her to a schoolyard in the Richmond District, beating her with progressive ferocity.

"I remember yelling, 'Don't kill me,' and fighting back, but there were too many of them," she said. "I woke up at 5:30 the next morning on the concrete, nude. I was beaten up so badly that as soon as I stood up, I fell right down again."

She wrapped newspaper around herself and hailed a man in a car, who drove her home. Her mother took her to the hospital.

Filing a police report took a day. The healing took years.

"Some family members just couldn't talk about it, so I got my support from my boyfriend at the time, my mother and my four closest girlfriends," Sylvers said. "At first I was just angry at the injustice of what happened to me, but then I used the event to help direct myself."

After six weeks of rape counseling, Sylvers went to stay with relatives at a tribal rancheria in the North Bay for six months. There, she contemplated her Indian spiritual heritage and her direction in life, and came out stronger.

When she moved to Daly City with her mother for her final two years of high school, Sylvers stopped tagging and getting drunk. She played on the Westmoor High School basketball team, acted in school plays, brought her grade average up from 1.2 to 3.6 - and upon graduation won the school's "Unsung Hero" award.

Today, Sylvers is an accountant and a licensed massage therapist. The mother of a teenage daughter, she says she sees nothing but clear skies ahead in her life - despite the occasional flashbacks.

"I got a clean slate," she said. "I learned to love myself."

Chinatown attack

Most rape victims - 61 percent - are so ashamed, afraid, or just plain traumatized that they never report the crime, statistics show.

Susie Chin was one such victim.

When she was gang-raped at 16 in her Chinatown neighborhood 33 years ago by at least eight men, she felt she had no family or peer support. Only fear and shame.

It was 15 years before she finally grappled with the residual trauma.

Chin's face tightened last week when she recalled that night in 1976 when she was at a hotel visiting with friends and out-of-town visitors. At one point she found herself alone in one of the rooms, "and the next thing I knew the lights were off and there was a swarm of dark images coming in, all men."

"I screamed, because there were people in the next room and I thought they would save me," she said. "But one of the men smashed a bottle and said, 'Shut up or I'll cut up your face.' I could see there was no use fighting, so I pretended I blacked out, and they just came at me one after the other."

By morning, she lost count of how many raped her. They finally left, and she took herself home.

"I was afraid to say anything to my family, or to even report the rape to police," she said. "I thought the group that attacked me would find me, stalk me, make my life miserable. So I never talked about it."

Getting help years later

After 15 years, Chin found she had stuffed her pain so deep inside, "I couldn't cry, couldn't express negative or positive feelings."

She went to a rape crisis center - and there, getting counseling among women with similar experiences, her emotional dam burst. She spent several years in therapy, and as she healed she spoke at rape survivor gatherings and wrote a song about her recovery, called "Charlene."

Today Chin is a singer and writer, and finds that her experience is still not something she can just blurt out to anyone.

"But I no longer have shame," she said. "It was never my shame to begin with - it was someone else's."

Weeks was 17 and driving home to Napa after a night shift working as a chef in 1979 when her life changed.

"My car broke down in Highway 29, and this car came along filled with six men," she said. "I got in, which was really stupid. That doesn't mean you can blame a person for doing something like that - but it was stupid."

While the group was starting to rape her in a vineyard, a car drove by. "I tried to get away and go to it, but they all jumped me, suffocated me, and I was afraid they would kill me, so I stopped struggling," Weeks said.

Leaving family behind

Fortunately, the rapists were the opposite of cunning. They dumped her in Yountville and then went drinking at a local bar. Weeks called police, and within half an hour all six were in custody.

Two attackers fled to Mexico after making bail. The other four were convicted of rape and sent to prison.

But seeing the rapists disappear behind bars was just the beginning of her recovery, Weeks said.

"A lot of my family blamed me for what happened, and today I have no contact with most of them," she said. "They looked at me as damaged goods.

"I did a lot of therapy, and the therapist said, 'You need apples, and they are oranges, so you have to ditch those people. They are not helping you,' " Weeks said. "So that's what I did."

While taking time off from school, Weeks found comfort in watching one movie after another. It turned out to be prophetic.

She went on to earn a master's degree in film production at UCLA and is now a movie visual effects artist. She was nominated for Academy Awards, with the rest of her team, for her work on "Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones" and "Pearl Harbor."

"My advice to the girl in Richmond is to do like I did: If you feel too bad to go to school, don't go," Weeks said. "Feel too bad to work? Don't go. Give yourself time to heal.

"I would tell her to get a whole fresh start. It works."