The book
Missoula is basically about the town of Missoula and the University of
Missoula and the rape crisis at the University, mainly perpetrated by football
players from the UM school team. Most of the cases seemed to not even be
brought to trial. The abysmal way the justice system in Missoula treated
victims lead to a Department of Justice investigation into Missoula’s justice
system and the University. This also lead to both the police and University
reworking their routines and trying to make things better for victims. The book
focuses on a couple of different rape cases involving football players. One
case where a female student was gang raped was not even prosecuted, one case
went to trial but the man was acquitted and in one case the rapist went to
jail.
Thoughts
So I… it’s. I have all the feelings. It is so heartbreaking to hear
about these cases. The case that actually went to trial involved some absolutely
lovely defense lawyers who spent most of the time trying to undermine the
prosecution’s witnesses and to make the rape victim sound like a desperate
attention seeker. I realize they have to defend their client to the best of
their ability, but sometimes it felt like they were relishing making this young
woman into a woman scorned who only wanted attention and was angry her rapist
didn’t cuddle her. There is a moment during the trial where one defense lawyer
has a cardboard cutout of the victim and he demonstrates one of the situations
she had to endure on the cutout. Which I assume was delightful for the victim
to go through. Not only did she have to be raped, but she also got to see a
lawyer demonstrate the act, ridicule it and call her a liar. It is in such bad
taste that I am surprised it was allowed. Defense lawyers get to re-victimize
rape victims in the “search for truth.”
It’s a harrowing insight into how rape is perceived, and how many myths
there are about rape, and how rape is seen as this thing that happens when a
stranger attacks and pulls women into a bush. According to the book something
like 80 percent of rapes are acquaintance rapes, and there is no one way for
victims to react. The problem is that we assume victims of rape would all fight
back, would all scream, would all fight to the death and would all stay away
from the rapist forever. This isn’t the case and a lot of reactions by victims
might seem strange, and counter-intuitive, but which make sense to the victim. There
is one rape in this book where the victim drives her rapist home afterwards.
This probably seems a bit weird, but to her it was something she had to do to
get him away, and to feel like she could go back to normal. But because this
didn’t sound like something a rape victim would do it sort of counted against
her.
There is a lot of research into acquaintance rape, but the research
doesn’t seem to get out to the people, so myths persist. It was fascinating,
and awful, to see how the idea that innocent until proven guilty applies to
rapists, but apparently not to rape victims.
There is a completely awful segment of the book where Krakauer
references a study into rape where young male college students were asked about
sexual activity. They were careful about not using the word rape, but asked
questions like if they would have sex with women who were sleeping. One man
described frat parties where they invited young women, got them drunk,
particularly freshmen, since they were young and inexperienced. He scoped out a
girl early and plied her with drink, took her to his room, held her down,
ignored her muttered protests by giving her more alcohol, then, in his words;
fucked her. And left her. He didn’t seem to know this constituted rape, and
apparently did it quite often. Since it was a scientific study the researchers weren’t
allowed to tell the interviewees that what they had done was rape, so
presumably these men could go onto rape more 18-year-olds. It was so disgusting
how they seemed to think they were entitled to sex, and that the girls were
just there for their pleasure.
The victim blaming that went on, and the support of the rapists in
Missoula was so disheartening. Because the men were football players they were
presumed to be telling the truth. They couldn’t possibly have raped these
girls, because they wouldn’t need to. Because that’s logic.
I don’t know that I can seriously review this without being too angry or
passionate, but I feel like this was a very important read. I don’t know that I
can say I liked it because it made me feel too sad and too like I wanted to
throw up, so at least it has stirred up some emotions. It feels like something
that we should have figured out by now. No other victims are under so much
scrutiny as rape victims. They have to be a certain kind of victim and portray
themselves a certain way. And if they aren’t pure and clean and virginal and if
they didn’t fight back to the death they aren’t good victims and it can’t have
been rape really.
Finally
I have to wrap up, or I will talk about this book forever. It was hard,
and it was sort of painful. But I think it was really important that Krakauer
wrote about this, and the more books we have on acquaintance rape, the better.
The narration was also really good. They chose to use a woman to read it, which
I think was pretty smart. So yes. It was good, and important, and all that.
The book