The big story –on my planet, which is celebrating a forever-long moratorium on the infidelities of professional sports people, but sadly has reached its maximum capacity of 1 human, all past present and future cats, and a sauropod resurrected through a secret potion I accidentally-on-purpose swallowed– is that people are both shocked and Not Shocked over a British study that suggests that more women than men feel that rape victims should take some responsibility for their rapes. Oh these shameful dirty dumb broads ought to wear more clothing and leave the drinking to the men while making sure never to speak to or smile at them, indeed. Just like you should not keep anything you would prefer not to have burgled in your home. Or eat food you didn’t prepare yourself so that you can avoid being poisoned by Victorian villains. Or dare having a fancy yard unless you’re just asking for the neighborhood dogs to defecate all over your prize petunias. Oh, some teenagers in distant lands used your credit card to have every game ever made overnighted to them? You don’t keep all of your money divided between an odd number of mason jars scattered over several locales devoid of any paper-trail connection to you and determined by a complex system incorporating the entire history of cartography and color-coded darts? Well. Shame on you.
Look, I said it was the big story, not news. Also not news: the comments are a grab bag of upsetting, disturbing, and infuriating. But it’s still a sucker punch every time this comes up.
You know what is surprising? Finding the They’re All Dirty Liars Myth being perpetuated on a site focusing on young adult literature. In her review of a biography of Claudette Colvin, Colleen Mondor writes:
The other issue I had was with her pregnancy. The fact that Claudette became an unwed mother was a big part of why she was apparently deemed too unpredictable to be the face of the bus boycott. Her explanation of that pregnancy – that it was an older young man who took advantage of her, that she had no idea how to even get pregnant, and that he abandoned her, all read as….well, forgive me but it’s a story I have heard dozens of times. Every teenage girl I’ve known in my life who got pregnant always had a variation of the virgin rape story to share. This indeed could be what happened to Claudette but there is no corroborating interviews – no friends or relatives who say yes, she was an innocent who was taken advantage of. There is instead another round of silence. Claudette was a blameless victim yet again.
Being critical of sources in nonfiction is a valid endeavor, of course, and I have picked up what Colleen has put down –as the kids say– except in the above passage. The problem here is that stating matter of factly that every pregnant teen you’ve encountered was falsely crying rape in a book review that will likely be read by teenage ladies is irresponsible. I mean, seriously? And this doesn’t make that statement less gross: “This indeed could be what happened to Claudette but there is no corroborating interviews.” Interviews to corroborate a common situation so rarely taken seriously, and the victims scrutinized and judged so harshly –say perhaps even casually, like in book reviews of biographies of teen mothers and sexual assault victims– that even today they hesitate to come forward?
RAINN’s site states that 7% of girls in grades 5-8 and 12% of girls in grades 9-12 said they had been sexually abused, sourcing a 1998 Commonwealth Fund Survey of the Health of Adolescent Girls. One out of every 6 American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime and college age women are 4 times more likely to be sexually assaulted; numbers that ought to be considered when blithely shaming large swaths of your audience.
So, well, that’s the first time I’ve felt really uncomfortable reading a YA book review that wasn’t written by an over privileged teenage boy who resents being tasked with reading something he wouldn’t choose for himself, or someone insisting the material be burned in a pit in some backwoods town square. (Like the exact opposites of Colleen Mondor!) It’s mostly unsettling because I truly like what she’s been doing with Chasing Ray, one of my favorite YA feeds in my reader. But then, that’s the only reason why I would even say anything.
Links that discuss false accusations:
- False Rape Accusations and Rape Culture, and
- Victims vs Sluts, Hofstra’s False Rape and the Media by Amanda Hess at The Sexist
- Don’t Just Blame the Victim; Prosecute Her and
- L&O:SVU by Melissa McEwan at Shakesville
- The MRA Mirror by Sunless Nick at Shakesville
- The Horror! by Lesley Plum at Shakesville
- This is What Rape Culture Looks Like and
- Why the Charges are Civil (and Why That Doesn’t Mean She’s a Lying Golddigger) at Yes Means Yes
Link that explains why I have trouble making friends:
- Questioning Victims by me at Surplus Cats
Okay – wait!!!!! I wasn’t reviewing Claudette in this post. IT WAS 100% NOT A BOOK REVIEW! In fact at the beginning of the post i mention that I was a judge for the Cybils, the book was one of the final five and this was whole post was about the questions I had about the book as a reader.
So, PLEASE – do not think for a moment that this was a formal book review in any way, shape or form. I thought I made it clear in how I was so informally discussing the subject matter. As a judge for a book I had to look at how the book was written and the pregnancy issue was just one more event in the book where only Claudette’s voice was present. My entire post was about the lack of corroborating voices – the lack of friends and family members who shared how Claudette was feeling throughout the entire period after she was forcibly removed from the bus. Further, Claudette brought up the pregnancy in her interviews with the author as a reason why she felt Civil Rights leaders did not support her. As a reader (and a judge in this case) I would have appreciated the voices of someone else from that period who could agree with what Claudette was saying. (In other words, if she was going to bring this up as something that was not her fault and used against her in such a historic matter, then I needed someone else to comment on what was going on back then.)
Claudette in fact never states explicitly that she was raped. She says they were friends, he was older – it’s all very subtle. My point was that Hoose seemed to take many of her statements on face value (about the boyfriend and a lot of other unrelated events) and didn’t seek out other witnesses who might be able to add more.
I think you misread me here, big time. My read on the entire book was that Claudette perceives herself as a victim in many ways who was never appreciated by the Civil Rights leaders. That was how either she sees herself or Hoose present her (or both). To carry that off, I think you need more than the words of Claudette herself. (And the pregnancy is actually only the smallest part of that sequence of events.)
Colleen, replace “review” with “discussion of” or “post about” then, because that has nothing to do with what I’m saying and doesn’t address my point at all.
My issue is with this: “Every teenage girl I’ve known in my life who got pregnant always had a variation of the virgin rape story to share.” Which is a shitty thing to say, and needed to be called out. My point is not about the book, or Claudette, but about how women who talk about their rapes are doubted, shamed and blamed from all sides, even unexpected places like blogs about YA books written by women who making sweeping generalizations about the motives of teens who become pregnant.