Missoula by Krakauer
Ref: Jon Krakauer (2015). Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town. Doubleday Books.
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Summary
A college football star drunkenly rapes a lifelong best friend while she sleeps on the couch. The University, Law Enforcement, Prosecutors, and even the Rapist and mutual friends, dismiss the victim and refuse to take the crime seriously. Jon Krakauer conducts an in-depth analysis of rape in the Justice System including the demographics, psychology, stigma, and myriad concerns throughout this process.
Women don’t get raped because they were drinking or took drugs. Women do not get raped because they weren’t careful enough. Women get raped because someone raped them.
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Rape Demographics
No more than 20% of rapes are reported to the police.
Between 5% and 20% of forcible rapes in the United States are reported to the police; a paltry 0.4% to 5.4% of rapes are ever prosecuted; and just 0.2% to 2.8% of forcible rapes culminate in a conviction that includes any time in jail for the assailant.
The odds that any given rape was committed by a serial offender are around 90%.
>80% of Rapes are non-stranger rapes.
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Rape Myths- Busted
What is a Rapist?
When people hear the term ‘rapist’, many think of a guy in a ski mask, wielding a knife, hiding in the bushes, breaking into a home, however the vast majority of rapes, >80%, are actually non-stranger rapes.
Psychological Damage?
Many people think that non-stranger rape is less damaging, however research shows that victims of non-stranger assault are equally affected as victims of stranger assault.
Being raped is often profoundly traumatic to the victim. There has been a great deal of research about how traumatic experiences affect the brain at a neurobiological level and why people sometimes react to being sexually assaulted in ways that are very different from what we would expect intuitively.
Traumatic experiences impact the brain so profoundly that memories associated with trauma “are categorically different from what we think of as normal memory.
Victims are likely to suffer from depression, PTSD, substance abuse, and academic problems.
‘Yes, what he did was wrong. But he seemed like a nice guy. Maybe it was just a misunderstanding.’
Many traumatized people expose themselves, seemingly compulsively, to situations reminiscent of the original trauma….Freud thought the aim of repetition was to gain mastery, but clinical experience has shown that this rarely happens; instead, repetition causes further suffering for the victims or for people in their surroundings.
Can you identify rapists?
There’s no profile of a rapist that you can use to say either somebody is or that somebody isn’t.
Rapists can be likeable, sociable, kind, even timid.
How do victims react?
There is an enormous variability in how victims react to sexual assault.
It is a common assumption that any woman threatened with being raped would do everything in her power to physically resist, but it’s not what we find….In fact, most women who are sexually assaulted do not resist. The fear is overwhelming. They often feel helpless. Sometimes they make a conscious choice not to resist because they are afraid if they resist, they will be hurt even worse. Many victims report afterward to the police that they actually tried “to placate the assailant as a strategy to avoid further harm.” One of the things that is difficult for most of us, frankly, to understand about a rape, is that there doesn’t have to be a gun to the head, there doesn’t have to be a knife present, there doesn’t have to be a verbalized threat for the act itself to be enormously terrifying and threatening….There is a difference between sexual violence and other forms of assault. Sexual violence is so intimate.” When your body is penetrated by another person against your will, it often induces a uniquely powerful kind of terror. According to many peer-reviewed studies, a large percentage of the victims of non-stranger rapes “actually feared they were going to be killed,” even when “there was no weapon and no overt violence.”
How do Victims React afterwards?
There are many different kinds of responses; victims of non-stranger rape are often very confused about what happened. They may be very upset. Distressed. But they don’t automatically label what’s happened to them as rape. In fact, there’s a lot of research about this.” It’s not uncommon for victims to “go back and forth between feeling like something really bad happened to them, and being very confused, and even trying to deny that something bad happened to them…as a way of trying to essentially tell themselves that, no, something bad didn’t happen to me.”
It’s quite common for a victim to ask if they were just raped….If somebody is experiencing something very traumatic, it’s scary but it’s enormously confusing. It’s overwhelming. And one of the first reactions for many people is to try to undo it, to try to pretend like it didn’t happen.
Victims and their perpetrators?
It’s common in the aftermath of a rape to see the victim have “quite extensive interaction with the person who’s alleged to have committed the assault” as an “attempt to try to undo it….You know, if I interact with this person normally, then I can tell myself that…what I feared just happened to me didn’t really happen.”
But in the immediate aftermath, couldn’t we at least say that no rape victim in her right mind would give her perpetrator a ride home afterwards? No, that is not that uncommon.
Self-Blame?
There’s an element of self-blame that is important in non-stranger rapes. It’s extremely common for victims, actually, of both stranger and non-stranger rape, although you see it, oftentimes, more intensely in non-stranger victims. They blame themselves almost in any way imaginable.
Self-blame becomes an irrational strategy for regaining a sense of control, because to accept that what happened was beyond one’s control is “far scarier” than blaming oneself.
Psychologically, self-blame is “much easier” and “feels better” than living in fear. Moreover, self-blame seems “to be more accentuated” when victims are raped by an acquaintance.
Non-stranger rape is oftentimes more difficult to recover from, as well, because if you have been assaulted by somebody you thought you could trust, how do you restore your sense of trust in the world or in people? And how do you trust yourself?” After being betrayed and violated by a person you were sure would never harm you, “how do you then trust your own judgment thereafter? That’s a hard thing to resolve. And it seems to feed self-blame….You say, ‘Well, it was my fault it happened, so I’ll fix the things that I did wrong, and that will prevent this from happening to me again.”
Many rape victims react by wondering if they were somehow to blame.
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Criminal Justice System
For some victims of sexual assault, engaging with the criminal justice system can traumatize them severely all over again.
1. Crime Occurs
2. Police Investigate
The purpose of an investigation is to look for evidence of a crime as well as evidence of innocence....[I]t is not until the time of trial that the defendant is...entitled to the presumption of innocence.
We need cops and prosecutors who get it that ‘nice guys’ can be serious criminals.
When law enforcement personnel believe that half or more of rape reports are fabricated…, their approach to victims can easily become more akin to hostile interrogation than to fact finding.
3. Charges are Filed
The criminal justice system gives victims no direct say in whether charges are filed or not. It’s the police, for the most part, who decide whether a suspect should be arrested, and prosecutors who ultimately determine whether a conviction should be pursued.
Throughout the US decisions about whether or not to file charges in sexual-assault cases are generally left up to the discretion of prosecutors, who enjoy nearly complete immunity from both criminal and civil liability for their decisions—especially when they decline to prosecute. If a prosecutor doesn’t want to pursue a case, she can simply state that there is “insufficient probable cause,” and the case will not be prosecuted. Although this leaves victims with no recourse when their cases are disqualified, prosecutors will argue that such wide latitude is necessary to keep the wheels of the criminal justice system turning.
When the state charges a man with rape, it must focus on what [the accused and his accuser] are thinking. Because it’s required to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that, one: The woman didn’t want to have sex; and, two: The man knew that she didn’t want to have sex.
4. Judicial Process
Police and prosecutors are seemingly reluctant to pursue rape cases unless they are absolutely certain they would prevail in court. In the decades before cops and district attorneys had the technological means to use DNA as evidence, every rape case was a matter of ‘he said, she said.’ But they were still prosecuted….Everybody likes to have a high batting average when it comes to winning cases. But sometimes you have to bring the case to court and let it be decided there, instead of deciding beforehand that the odds of winning aren’t good enough to go forward. When you have a victim who is willing to go the distance and you shut her down, what does that say to other victims? ‘Don’t bother’?” When cops and prosecutors fail to aggressively pursue sexual-assault cases, it sends a message to sexual predators that women are fair game and can be raped with impunity.
Smearing the victim is one of the most effective tactics lawyers have at their disposal when defending rapists and victim’s self-destructive behaviors are often held up as “proof” that they are unreliable and morally compromised, or that they deserved to be raped.
An accuser’s previous sexual conduct is inadmissible as evidence.
If one set out intentionally to design a system for provoking symptoms of PTSD, it might look very much like a court of law.
The mental health needs of crime victims are often diametrically opposed to the requirements of legal proceedings. Victims need social acknowledgement and support; the court requires them to endure a public challenge to their credibility. Victims need to establish a sense of power and control over their lives; the court requires them to submit to a complex set of rules and procedures that they may not understand, and over which they have no control. Victims need an opportunity to tell their stories in their own way, in a setting of their choice; the court requires them to respond to a set of yes-or-no questions that break down any personal attempt to construct a coherent and meaningful narrative. Victims often need to control or limit their exposure to specific reminders of the trauma; the court requires them to relive the experience by directly confronting the perpetrator.
Presumption of innocence: A rule of evidence for the courtroom that defines a part of the accused’s due process rights….It does not control the pretrial functioning of law enforcement officials, commanders, or magistrates.
5. Sentencing
Plea Deal: In return for a guilty plea from the defendant, the prosecutors recommend a sentence that the defendant and his attorneys are willing to accept as the maximum punishment; the defendant’s attorneys recommend a sentence that the prosecutors are willing to accept as the minimum punishment; and both sides agree to let the judge determine a sentence that falls somewhere within the range of their differing recommendations. After the terms of the plea deal are agreed upon and submitted to the judge, a sentencing hearing is held to allow each side to argue the merits of its recommendation in court. At the conclusion of this hearing, the judge issues a ruling and the sentence is imposed. Although prosecutors are required to consult with victims of rape about plea negotiations, they are completely free to ignore a victim’s entreaties at their discretion. A rape victim has absolutely no right to veto a plea deal if he or she finds it objectionable.
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Misc Quotes
“Trust, but verify.”-Pres. Ronal Reagan on International Politics.
It is morally impossible to remain neutral in this conflict. The bystander is forced to take sides. It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering…. In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens. To this end, he marshals an impressive array of arguments, from the most blatant denial to the most sophisticated and elegant rationalization. After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies: it never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it upon herself; and in any case it is time to forget the past and move on. The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail.-Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery.
Rape is the only crime in which the victim is presumed to be lying. If a person was mugged in an alley, would we be skeptical of the victim’s testimony…because there weren’t any eyewitnesses? Would we doubt the victim of a burglary because they left the door unlocked? The victim is the wrong person to blame, whatever the crime. It’s the offender who needs to be held accountable.-Boylan.
I have learned that despite the constitutional presumption of innocence, the vast majority of criminal defendants are in fact guilty of the crimes with which they are charged. Almost all of my own clients have been guilty…. I am not unique in representing guilty defendants. That is what most defense attorneys do most of the time. The Perry Mason image of the heroic defender of innocent victims of frame-ups or mistaken identification is television fiction…. Once I decide to take a case, I have only one agenda: I want to win. I will try, by every fair and legal means, to get my client off—without regard to the consequences…. There’s an old story about the lawyer who has just won a big case for his client and cables him: “Justice has prevailed.” The client fires off a return telegram: “Appeal immediately.” The story underlines an important point about the realities of our legal system: nobody really wants justice. Winning is “the only thing” to most participants in the criminal justice system—just as it is to professional athletes. Criminal defendants, and their lawyers, certainly do not want justice; they want acquittals, or at least short sentences…. The courtroom oath—“to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”—is applicable only to witnesses. Defense attorneys, prosecutors, and judges don’t take this oath—they couldn’t! Indeed, it is fair to say the American justice system is built on a foundation of not telling the whole truth. It is the job of the defense attorney—especially when representing the guilty—to prevent, by all lawful means, the “whole truth” from coming out.-Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law School Professor.
It is often the case that assertions are made without reference to research data, undermining rational discourse.
“All presumptive evidence of felony should be admitted cautiously; for the law holds it better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent party suffer.”-William Blackstone (18th Cent).
The Dear Colleague Letter: Decreed that schools must use a burden of proof known as “the preponderance of evidence standard” when adjudicating sexual-assault complaints. To find a student guilty, a school needed only to determine that, after a review of credible evidence, it was “more likely than not” that the accused individual had committed the offense.
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Chronology
2011: A CDC study estimated that 19.3% of US women are raped in their lifetimes.-Missoula by Krakauer.
2005: The US Violence Against Women Act is passed requiring that all victims of sexual assault be given free access to an evidence collection kit (rape kits).-Missoula by Krakauer.
1990: The US Clery Act is passed; a consumer protection law that aims to provide transparency around campus crime policy and statistics.-Missoula by Krakauer.
1957: US Court Case State (Montana) v. McLeod; “Every presumption in favor of the defendant’s innocence shall be indulged until the evidence establishes his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”-Missoula by Krakauer.
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