Krakauer - Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town

Rape is a much more common crime than most people realize, and women of college age are most frequently the victims. According to a special report issued by the U.S. Department of Justice in December 2014, For the period 19952013, females ages 18 to 24 had the highest rate of rape and sexual-assault victimizations compared to females in all other age groups. The report estimated that 0.7 percent of this high-risk cohort are sexually assaulted each yearapproximately 110,000 young women. This survey was primarily concerned with documenting crime rates, however, and relied on a relatively narrow definition of sexual assault. Notably, respondents to the DOJ survey were not asked about incidents in which they might have been incapable of providing consent while incapacitated by drugs or alcohol.

A different federal agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, released a report in September 2014 that examined the problem of sexual violence from a public health perspective, rather than a criminal justice perspective, and paid more attention to sexual assaults involving drugs and alcohol. It generated quite different numbers. Using data gathered in 2011, the CDC study estimated that across all age groups, 19.3 percent of American women have been raped in their lifetimes and that 1.6 percent of American womennearly two and a half million individualsreported that they were raped in the 12 months preceding the survey.

As the dissimilar results from these two government surveys suggest, it is impossible to state with certainty how many women are raped each year. Quantifying the prevalence of sexual assault is a highly speculative exercise because at least 80 percent of those who are assaulted dont report the crime to authorities. This book is an effort to understand what deters so many rape victims from going to the police, and to comprehend the repercussions of sexual assault from the perspective of those who have been victimized.

To that end, I have written about a rash of sexual assaults in a single American cityMissoula, Montanafrom 2010 through 2012. The victims of these assaults happened to be female college students, but young women who are not enrolled in college are probably at even greater risk, and its not just young womenor just women, for that matterwho are in danger of being raped. The CDC report cited above estimated that approximately two and a half million American men alive today will be raped in their lifetimes, 1.7 percent of the male population.

The research for this book included interviews with victims, their families and acquaintances, and, when possible, the men accused of assaulting the women I wrote about, but I didnt speak with every victim or every alleged assailant. To learn as much as I could, and to corroborate what sources told me, I spoke at length with eminent psychologists and lawyers; attended court proceedings; read thousands of pages of court transcripts, court filings, e-mails, letters, police reports, and documents generated by university disciplinary proceedings; listened to recordings of police interviews and university disciplinary proceedings; and reviewed newspaper articles, the findings of government investigations, and scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals.

Whenever dialogue appears between quotation marks on the pages that follow, it is a verbatim quote from the person speaking; a verbatim quote from a source recounting what he or she heard the speaker say; a verbatim quote from a recording of an official proceeding; or a verbatim quote from a transcript of an official proceeding.

Parts of the book may be difficult to read. Some of the events I describe are extremely disturbing. Additionally, there is a sprawling cast of characters, several of whom have been given pseudonyms to protect their privacy. To help readers keep track of whos who, individuals whose names appear more than once or twice are listed in an alphabetized dramatis personae at the end of the book, on .

J ON K RAKAUER , F EBRUARY 2015

PART ONE

Allison

Now, should we treat women as independent agents, responsible for themselves? Of course. But being responsible has nothing to do with being raped. Women dont get raped because they were drinking or took drugs. Women do not get raped because they werent careful enough. Women get raped because someone raped them.

J ESSICA V ALENTI
The Purity Myth