Abstract
More than 20 years after Katie Roiphe (1993) published The Morning After, minimizing college sexual assault and fueling a backlash against campus prevention programs, campus sexual assault remains a common experience. Just how common is contested, due to many factors, including low levels of reporting. Recently, the topic has resurfaced within mainstream public discourse, likely due to a convergence of factors. Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town, by critically acclaimed author Jon Krakauer, is an effort to understand what keeps victims/survivors of campus sexual assault from reporting these crimes, and to understand the repercussions of sexual assault from the victim/survivor’s perspective.
Krakauer examines these questions through the stories of five women who were raped or otherwise sexually assaulted in the college town of Missoula between 2010 and 2012. Through extensive research, including interviews and review of police reports, court and university hearings, e-mails, texts, and so on, he delivers a gripping narrative, peppered with psychological research and theory, offering poignant insight into why so few women (he states no more than 20%) report rape to the police. Moreover, he provides a serious indictment of the legal system, especially in Missoula County, in its adjudication of sexual assault crimes.
There are several topics addressed in Missoula that are informative and interesting. Krakauer reviews the history of Title IX and provides an explanation of the unique role legal discourse plays in the adjudication of sexual assault cases in university, versus criminal, proceedings. Krakauer also addresses the nuances involved in the provision and withdrawal of consent, the influence of Internet pornography on men’s sexual imagination, expectations, and notions of “normalcy,” and the topic of false rape allegations. One of the more disturbing discoveries highlighted by Krakauer is the role of the prosecutorial discretion to pursue a case, and the ways that victim blame and rape myths can shape those decisions, subjecting women to a trial and possible case dismissal before the trial. For example, Krakauer illustrates how women’s relationship status was often factored into prosecutorial decisions, with the assumption that for some women, regret over an extrarelational sexual encounter, rather than rape, was a common reason for women to report rape. The Missoula County prosecutor, a woman, described one victim’s account as “no big deal;” she characterized the incident not as an assault but rather a “hookup that failed to live up to [her] expectations,” which reminds us that rape myths transcend gender.
Krakauer makes effective use of psychological trauma literature throughout his book, often citing the classic text Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman (1997), eminent researchers such as Bessel van der Kolk (1989, 2014), and, most extensively, the forensic consultant David Lisak (2011; Lisak, Gardinier, Nicksa, & Cole, 2010). Notably absent is work on the epidemiology of rape by feminist psychologist Mary Koss (see Koss et al., 1987). Krakauer’s review of the literature is most helpful for lay audiences in understanding not only the sequelae of interpersonal violence, including posttraumatic symptomology, but also how trauma impacts memory function, which is often evaluated in adjudication.
Krakauer is a master storyteller, who knows how to create suspense and how to make these narratives powerfully captivating. Therein lay our caveats. While intriguing and well written, the highly detailed accounts can read in the same enticing and sexualizing manner as an episode of Law and Order: SVU. His accounts are valuable in highlighting the violence of acquaintance rape, and dispelling “he said, she said” notions that often portray the issue as a matter of interpretation. However, the retelling of these stories is written from the privileged position of a White, cisgendered male storyteller. While the women and their stories are laid bare, missing from the book is a grappling of Krakauer’s own sexual privilege, vulnerability, or growth through his research and writing. We wondered how these survivors might write their own stories. The challenge of working with sexual assault is to sit in close proximity to unformulated pain without imposing one’s own organizing principles onto it. It is, of course, tempting to organize an experience for the survivor—there are many reasons we feel this impulse: in order to feel effectual, like we are “doing” something, even to end our own empathic suffering. But rejecting that temptation is what allows a survivor to find her own words and voice to speak. Missoula exposes how sexism seamlessly infiltrates the legal system. The book is accessible and may be a useful introduction to clinical and social psychological issues related to rape and sexual violence for undergraduate courses in psychology of women and gender, violence, or trauma. Moreover, it may help clinicians, especially those new to work with sexual assault, understand clients’ experiences with the legal system, regardless of whether they report these crimes. However, its detailed accounts of sexual assault may be inappropriate, and potentially retraumatizing for students who are victims/survivors. And while not completely ineffective at conveying the repercussions of sexual assault, it ultimately fails to holistically capture the women or their experiences.