How Essential Is the Female Perspective to Rape Discussion?

            In case you harbor any doubt that humiliation, domination, and perpetrator self-aggrandizement, not sex, is the motive behind rape, check out Unbelievable, a Netflix series that began Fri., the 13th. It’s the dramatization of real case reporting done for ProPublica by T. Christian Miller & Ken Armstrong.  More importantly, it was directed by Susannah Grant, who did not succumb—as Hollywood men can’t seem to resist—to the temptation of casting pretty women as rape victims.

            While Unbelievable is a more-satisfying-than-average police procedural with Toni Collette and Merritt Wever playing the intriguingly contrasted lead detectives, the authencity of the rape victims is key to its plausibility. Here, Unbelievable goes above and beyond brave and true: one is a 50-going-on-60 gray matron, working in a food service; another is a plumpish, retiring 20 or 30-something, living in a strange city away from any support network, if she even had one where she came from. I surmised she left because she didn’t.

Make no mistake, that is a victim hallmark, or so the literature I read on the topic, when I got drafted onto the Rape Task Force in the 70s as a National Organization of Women (NOW) member in my Denver days.

            The quintessential victim is Marie Adler, attractive enough, but so cowed by the foster care system, which has never stood by her or helped her stand up for herself, that the minute police detectives doubt her, she begins to doubt herself.  So thoroughly undermined by the system, Marie is incapable of outrage till the thing turns around, but before that, she can’t mobilize even her natural allies. No less go looking for any! (In feminist organization or…)

Of course, to get good drama, you need “bad guys,” and  in this film they are a couple “desk sergeant” types who refuse to believe Marie, (hence the title) and extend her foster-care-victimization right through the rape investigation up to filing a complaint against her for a false reporting of a crime. The viewer can get outraged if she isn’t—part of what makes this so satisfying, I suspect.

Most of the time, though, the police dealing with rape victims if it is a special unit, are savvy and sympathetic—at least in the early 70s Denver NOW Task Force believed they were in the victim’s corner. The attitude of the courts/public was the problem.

Which, of course, brings us all to the scary place of knowing a guy like Brett Kavanaugh is sitting on a court, any court.