Book Review: Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town by Jon Krakauer

Rape is one of the most destructive, soul-destroying and contentious crimes of this or any other period in human history. No other crime elicits such a wide range of emotions, nor is there any other crime that is so burdened with myths, stereotypes and the views of a large percentage of the population who either genuinely don't feel rape is a serious crime, or are themselves rapists. This is all compounded by the rise of the internet and the ease with which multitudes of low-life pieces of human garbage can congregate online and validate each other's sick fantasies. In addition, an entire generation of ignoramuses weaned on the internet has acquired incredibly warped views about sex and intimacy.

The notion persists that rape is only "real" if committed by a stranger and only if it involves knives, guns or other weapons and repeated threats of harm (beyond the sexual assault itself). Also, most people have in their minds an idea of what "normal" and acceptable responses are to rape and other types of sexual assault. For example, many people believe that if a woman does not scream or violently resist her attacker, then it could not possibly be rape. In fact, researchers have found that reactions are often, if not usually, counter-intuitive to the collection of Hollywood-influenced stereotypes about how a victim should respond. Many victims freeze and are unable to do anything but wait until the horror of their assault is over. Many victims blame themselves in an attempt to push away reality and convince themselves the attack didn't occur or to lessen the psychological damage. And, yes, as hard as it may be to believe, many victims will maintain contact with their attackers (the likelihood of this is increased by the fact that most victims know their attackers).

In Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town, Jon Krakauer describes five sexual assaults against female university students that take place in Missoula, Montana and the horrible effects suffered by the victims. Krakauer also details the actions taken by the university administration in each case, as well as the shockingly inadequate response of the local police and justice system. Because all the rapists are college football players, the crimes become a rallying cry for many of the local pieces of filth who have helped construct a subculture for the roided-up piece of shit athletes who think that they do not have to suffer any consequences for their criminal behaviour. Sadly, they are often correct in such thinking. It is instructive that out of all five cases, only one perpetrator was imprisoned, and that was mainly because he confessed on two separate occasions and both times his confessions were recorded.

The county attorney's office in Missoula at the time was staffed by some class-A bags of shit whose main concern was keeping their conviction rate as high as possible. To maintain the high conviction rate, they would only prosecute cases in which it was very likely they would get a guilty verdict. Because sexual assault cases are notoriously difficult to win, the county attorney's office simply refused to take on any but the most black and white cases (such as the one where there were two recorded confessions). The following passage indicates just how shameless and inept the Missoula Country Attorney's Office was in prosecuting rape crimes:

In one case described in the DOJ [Department of Justice] report, the Missoula police obtained a confession from a man who admitted raping a woman while she was unconscious. The Missoula police referred the case to the county attorney's office with a recommendation that the prosecutor charge the suspect with rape, but the country attorney's office declined to file any charges, citing "insufficient evidence."

The DOJ report mentioned in the above passage was the result of an investigation launched by the federal Department of Justice in response to a number of high-profile rape cases in Missoula (some of which are discussed in the book) and the perceived general ineptness of the Missoula County Attorney's Office in dealing with rape cases.

In a further example of what absolute filth staffed the county attorney's office, one fleck of shit resigned so she could defend the rapist who was initially charged when she was a prosecutor! In a town where most people metaphorically eat the shit out of the assholes of all the local college football players and anyone else associated with the team, it's hard not to feel that most people involved in maintaining law and order are more concerned about remaining popular and are willing to do whatever it takes to ensure that they have the best shot at remaining in or attaining highly-paid, elected positions.

Krakauer is in top form in Missoula, equaling or surpassing his other great books such as Into Thin Air, Into the Wild, and Under the Banner of Heaven. I hesitate to call Missoula a true crime book because of the connotations that go along with that genre. In his crisp, engaging prose, Krakauer provides detailed narratives of the crimes and their fallout, and those passages are without doubt the most riveting parts of the book. But he also includes research that has been conducted about the trauma suffered by rape victims, the counter-intuitive behaviour of victims, the laws surrounding consent, the subculture of university athletics, and the criminal justice system and how the odds are stacked against victims of sexual assault. Of course, often the discussion, while not explicitly stated, is simply about ignorance, herd-mentality behaviour and most people's lack of critical thinking skills.

The most harrowing, despair-inducing, difficult passages to read involve the trauma suffered by rape victims. In this passage, Krakauer writes about a woman's self-destructive behaviour after being raped, which unfortunately validated many people's confirmation bias about what is an acceptable way for a victim to behave:

Laura suffered intensely for many years from being sexually assaulted. And her misery she said, was magnified by the stigma attached to the unhealthy compulsions that tyrannized her existence after the assaults. In this regard she was like many other rape victims. Their self-destructive behavior is often held up as "proof" that they are unreliable and morally compromised, or that they deserved to be raped.

Later in the book, Krakauer further discusses the research about rape victims and the fallout they experience:

When I mentioned this to Trisha Dittrik, the therapist who supervised our group, she told me she wasn't surprised. Rape and war, she explained, are among the most common causes of post-traumatic stress disorder, and survivors of sexual assault frequently exhibit many of the same symptoms and behavior as survivors of combat: Flashbacks, insomnia, nightmares, hypervigilance, isolation, depression, suicidal thoughts, outbursts of anger, unrelenting anxiety, and an inability to shake the feeling that the world is spinning out of control. 

If you're looking for just-the-facts reportage from Krakauer, you likely haven't read any of his books. He doesn't shy away from editorializing, or more accurately, he makes it clear exactly where he stands on the issues. That's not to suggest that Krakauer doesn't provide nuanced, balanced narratives of the events and people involved. He includes both sides of every account, interviews alleged rapists when they are willing, and delves into the topic of false accusations of rape. Yes, it does occur, although statistics and research indicate that it is a very small percentage of the vast number of sexual assaults that take place. Of course, that doesn't stop apologists from advancing the lie that false accusations are just as common as rapes. Strangely, the handful of high-profile cases in the past few years in which innocent men have been locked up for rapes that never happened, somehow resonate with most people in a more fundamental way than even the most brutal of sexual assaults in which the rapists are proven guilty beyond any doubt.

It's interesting that when trying to elicit understanding from the segment of the population who live confidently with the belief that they will never be victimized and who perpetuate the litany of myths about rape, it is often necessary to appeal to an imaginary situation in which their sisters, daughters or mothers are assaulted. Instead of direct empathy with victims, it's necessary to frame the issue in terms of loss of face, honour and a vague sense of male ownership regarding the people who suffer. Sure enough, in Missoula, a character witness who goes to bat for Beau Donaldson (the rapist depicted in the book who actually went to prison) only stops to ponder the seriousness of the crime he is essentially defending when a lawyer asks him if he would feel differently if his daughter had been the one who had been raped. When comparing the words of rape victims and rape apologists, it's also interesting to note that victims essentially focus on details of what happened while apologists use generalizations, cliches, logical fallacies and constant references to the invisible sky daddy.

Implicit in any discussion about rape is power, and Krakauer's book is no different. Rape is a crime of power. Unfortunately, the institutions tasked with providing assistance to rape victims and making rapists pay for their crimes, are part of the power structure in society. It's fair to ask: Is there some kind of affinity for rape (and all sorts of other crimes) within many of our institutions? Well, in any institution in society, a certain number of people with power seem to be rapists. Think of the Catholic church, residential schools, the military, police forces, university sports programs, and professional sports teams, to name a few. At the very least, institutions never do anything that will undermine themselves or reduce their power, and that often means a subculture in which predators can get away with their crimes without any concern for repercussions.

For example, in Canada, the federal police force, the RCMP, is currently facing a number of class-action lawsuits by current and former female officers who faced years of harassment and sometimes sexual assaults. A recent report bizarrely indicated that nudity is common in many RCMP offices. This is is some wackworld stuff. Until you consider the fact that the RCMP is an organization largely staffed with grade-12 educated individuals who carry guns and believe that they are above the law. The point is, how can we rely on corrupt, out-of-control, often extremely ignorant people who apparently embrace the misogynistic, sneering-at-rape-victim culture, to do an effective job of taking rape victims seriously and locking up rapists?

Whether people are attracted to power because of the impunity they know it will provide them, or whether power has an effect on some people in such a way that corrupts their character, is not completely clear. What is clear is that as human beings we have not come far enough in our understanding of power and how to more effectively monitor, regulate and sanction powerful people and institutions when necessary. What is also eminently clear is that few people adequately understand rape and the horrible effects suffered by its victims. Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town is not only extremely well-written and engaging, but is also a very important book that should be read by anyone who believes in justice, empathy and the importance of doing all we can to help victims of sexual assault.

Book Review: Nightmare in Pink by John D. MacDonald

In the second Travis McGee novel, Nightmare in Pink, McGee heads to New York at the request of one his former war buddies. The friend, now bed-ridden and close to death because of a war injury, asks McGee to help out his sister, Nina Gibson, whose fiancé was recently killed in a mugging gone bad. After the requisite swooning of a number of females at his feet, McGee does some digging and unearths a muddled (muddled that is, in terms of what the reader ever finds out about it) scheme involving a real-estate investment firm being fleeced of millions of dollars. The boyfriend worked at the firm and started having suspicions of his own, and his curiosity appears to have cost him his life.

The first-person, detective-novel trope rears its head and McGee is captured just as he starts to uncover the details behind the scam that left his friend's sister (she quickly becomes McGee's love interest) with a dead boyfriend and an envelope full of ten thousand dollars that he, the boyfriend, had finagled as part of his own snooping around. McGee and Nina aren't sure whether the dead boyfriend was himself part of the scheme as evidenced by the envelope full of money, though McGee soon determines that he had hoped to use the money as proof of the bad intentions of his colleagues at the real-estate investment firm.

John D. MacDonald's tight writing and the relentless cynical observations of McGee really make this book worth reading. However, there is little suspense in the book, either in individual scenes or in the overall arc of the plot. As mentioned, the reader never gets any real idea how the multi-million dollar scam, apparently planned and executed by a handful of people over a period of years, is pulled off. Details like that aren't always necessary in a well-written crime novel. But the lack of anything beyond a cursory glimpse of the bad guys involved in the fraud also detracts from the book. We get plenty of second-hand comments about some of nasties who are part of the plot, and then one brief passage in which one of the masterminds encounters McGee after he, McGee, has been drugged and held against his will at a bizarre mental institution. But it simply isn't enough to engender much hatred in readers or to fuel the inevitable revenge scene.

Yet, there still are many enjoyable passages throughout. That inevitable revenge scene does come about, although there is little imagination involved when McGee gets an opening and is able to initiate his escape from the mental institution. Sure, the psychedelic drugs McGee dumps into a coffee urn in the hospital's cafeteria do result in some bizarrely entertaining results, but as McGee himself laments numerous times, the only people who suffer are innocent hospital staff.

It's fairly easy to believe that MacDonald constructed the character of McGee partly as a parody of the playboy fantasy of easy women who readily offer themselves up or only need a solid right hook to make them contrite for their manipulative ways while simultaneously turning them on. So only the most frustrated and deluded readers will take this kind of dialogue seriously:

"So let's call it a draw. I'm an acceptable stud, and from the neck down you're Miss Universe. And if there was ever any reason to go to bed, we'd probably find each other reasonably competent. But I came here to talk about Charlie." 

McGee delivers the above lines to a woman minutes after meeting her. Of course, despite the absurdity of such encounters, they can be entertaining. And MacDonald recognizes the unbelievable fantasy-world, male-female interactions he creates and offsets them with McGee's own self-deprecating analysis of himself and his usual pessimistic take on everything, especially modern relationships.

And for readers who love a noirish, bleak take on life, McGee's running commentary about the state of the world and how he loathes so much of it, is one of the best parts of the book. For example, this passage is just one of many random observations McGee makes as he starts his investigation in New York:

New York is where it is going to begin, I think. You can see it coming. The insect experts have learned how it works with locusts. Until the locust population reaches a certain density they all act like any grasshoppers. When the critical point is reached, they turn savage and swarm, and try to eat the world. We're nearing the critical point. One day soon two strangers will bump into each other at high noon in the middle of New York. But this time they won't snarl and go on. They will stop and stare and then leap at each other's throats in a dreadful silence. The infection will spread outward from that point. 

After McGee's escape from the mental institution, the bad-guy scheme falls apart and the perpetrators are caught, though readers are never witness to any of the details. As the book draws to a close, McGee's friend—Nina's brother—passes away after an operation. All that remains is for McGee to take Nina back to Florida for some therapy aboard his boat, the Busted Flush. He hammers the emotional pain out of her and she achieves the appropriate Zen state of recovery, bids farewell to her saviour and returns to the real world.