SAN DIEGO — The night she was raped, Kim Caldwell wanted to die.

A serial rapist broke into her Pacific Beach home at 3 a.m. and put a knife to her throat as she lay in her bed. For an hour she was violated and terrorized by the masked attacker.

After she reported the rape to police and was taken to a hospital for an evidence-gathering pelvic examination, she returned home confused and in pain.

"For three days I couldn't sleep," she said. "If I thought about what happened, I vomited. My emotions were a mix of fear and rage."

Rape counselors say Caldwell's initial reaction was a common one among sexual assault victims. But her reaction in the weeks and months that followed the Aug. 17, 1993, rape has been anything but common.

Against the wishes of her friends, her family and the police, the 33-year-old airline sales agent has become one of a tiny but growing number of women who are willing to break one of the oldest and strongest cultural prohibitions that still exist in a tell-all society: the taboo against publicly identifying a woman as a rape victim.

Some women have shed their anonymity to decry date rape or spousal rape. Lyn Miller, a former radio show host from Pasadena, revealed in December that she had been a rape victim as she rallied public support to keep her attacker from being paroled.

But rarest of all are the women, such as Caldwell, who allow their names to be used and their faces to be shown by the media in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, while their attackers are unidentified and at-large.

Charles G. Brown, a Virginia lawyer, former West Virginia attorney general and author of the book "First Get Mad, Then Get Justice: The Handbook for Crime Victims," applauds Caldwell and believes there is a lesson in her story for other victims.

"I think victims have to realize that in order to get their crime at the top of the list of law enforcement--and this is especially true in urban areas like San Diego--there is an advantage in cooperating with investigators and making the crime a public issue," Brown said.

Diane Alexander, an official with the Virginia-based National Victim Center, said the importance in what she called Caldwell's "tremendous display of courage" is that it may help dispel the sexist notion that women who are raped have done or said something to provoke the attack and that "nice" women are not raped.