Reddit reviews Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town
We found 10 Reddit comments about Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Doubleday Books
If the Brock Turner case (and, really, the way rich, white, male college kids are treated when they do anything, much less rape someone) is starting to piss you off, read Missoula. https://www.amazon.com/Missoula-Rape-Justice-System-College/dp/0385538731
The DoJ had to intervene in Missoula because the cops were believing the guys, not the girls, mostly because of college athlete culture.
Fuck this BS. At least my state said they are keeping the "preponderance of evidence" rule because that makes the most sense. You are being expelled not fucking sent to prison. Just like they use that standard of evidence in civil trials. Which is why O.J. lost at civil trial but won at criminal trial.
But I guess those rules are okay when we are taking your money but not kicking you out of school. Fuck them thinking due process applies to schools, but only in rape cases. Not in plagiarism or cheating or vandalism or the dude I know who got kicked out for smoking weed. Did he get a trial of a jury of his peers that were asked if he was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt? Fuck no.
I might be biased because the city close to me was a big impetus for this letter and a bit of a precursor. They were doing so bad with rape (both the school and the sheriff's office) that the Feds basically came in and changed things. Before if you had been raped outside the city you were told not to go to the sheriff unless you wanted to be victimized more. Wrote a book about it.
If you worried about rape in Missoula you should start arresting the football teams.
http://www.amazon.com/Missoula-Rape-Justice-System-College/dp/0385538731
You’ve decided that your friend is a liar. So just stop being her friend. You value this guy more than her, so just cut her loose.
Then please read https://www.amazon.com/Missoula-Rape-Justice-System-College/dp/0385538731. Your understanding of acquaintance rape is dated and inaccurate.
Personally, I read for fun in my spare time and usually learn about other things (which inevitably I manage to relate back). I've also found that audiobooks are awesome for law school. I have to cook, I have to do laundry, I have to clean the house, walk to the grocery store, and all of those things can be done while listening to an audiobook. Some of the below were listened to, others were read traditionally.
That being said, this book on the Warren Court was "recommended" in Con Law and I found it short and revealing about a significant era in SCOTUS history.
I adored Sonia Sotomayor's autobiography, which was more about her youth and early career but felt like listening to a bad ass Aunt talk about her life choices when she was my age.
Gideon's Trumpet (Although if, era of the book be damned, if it described lawyers as "young men" one more time, I swear to god...)
Sisters in Law also felt like a nice preview of Con Law - a lot of the cases we read in Con Law were familiar to me as I'd read that before then.
Pop-crime books that I nevertheless got me thinking about law when I read them include In Cold Blood (which I listened to while in Evidence class and found myself being like - wait, why isn't this a 403 violation or hearsay? and then looking the law up to clarify the rule I hadn't quite started learning yet) and Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town.
I also highly recommend the podcasts Radiolab: More Perfect (spin off); the Radiolab episode The Buried Bodies Case; and the podcast Stuff You Missed in History Class, many episodes of which are either explicitly about a court case (they have several on like, Loving v. Virginia, Brown v. Board, the cases about special education) or more related to lesser known policies that didn't really make it to Court (e.g., the Bracero program).
Edit: typo
Edit 2: The More Perfect episode, "The Political Thicket," which came out two weeks after I took my Con Law exam, was pretty much straight up the answer to question #3 on my exam.
I obviously can't speak for the alleged victims in this case, but rape cases in general can be pretty damned complicated with regard to:
Even in cases where criminal investigators are called (IDK if they were involved at all here), it's often pretty hard to make an air-tight case that can be taken to prosecution. "Yeah, we had sex and that's my DNA you found, but it was totally consensual, and here's my plausible side of the story..."
So, I think some significant fraction of reported cases end up being adjudicated in a kangaroo court (if at all) -- more or less so that the institution can avoid non compliance with title IX (namely the "deliberate indifference" liability).
If you're interested in more background, you may want to pick up a copy of this: http://www.amazon.com/Missoula-Rape-Justice-System-College/dp/0385538731
>I can and will say it, because despite what Tumblr would have you believe, it actually is true, for the most part. Don't confuse investigating a crime with placing blame and passing judgement.
When we're having a serious discussion about this -- and I'm going to insist that we do -- you need to accept we live in a world complicated and hairy enough where you can still point to all sorts of rape convictions and long prison sentences and still have it be true that the level of blame and complicity assigned to rape victims -- by default -- is disproportionately higher than the victim of many, many, many other crimes. Especially ones that are anywhere near the same ballpark of (psychological or physical) violence as rape.
If you can't, if you just aren't willing to wade into this with that much nuance and plastic thinking, then let's not bother.
>Not exactly, but I guess I don't understand what rape culture really is. Would you care to educate me? Honestly, I really am wondering.
Okay, fair enough.
Rape is a terrible thing. So much so that it's the Hitler of verbs. When you need to go to 'the worst person you can think of', you go Hitler. When you need to think of 'the worst verb you can think of', you don't go murder. You go rape. Right?
Rape is so heinous that when we hear that rapists (and child molesters) have a particularly unpleasant experience in prison, we think, "Fuck yeah other prisoner guys. Do that. Make it hell."
Rape, like child molestation, is so heinous that one of the many ways we as individuals deal with it, especially at first glance, is emotional distancing, denial, and minimization. This is the key point.
Surely you don't have a problem believing that the trope of familial minimization and denial of molestation is something that happens ever, right? Like, you can think of that Duggar scandal right away to summon up an example of that happening, right?
You can imagine a parent (perhaps easier if you tell yourself, a shitty parent) being in denial, in the veins of 'You're making that up', 'It wasn't that bad', 'He's sorry can we put it behind us', 'Look we'll make sure you're never alone with them, but..' I understand you can also imagine the opposite happening and someone, let's say a father, going to prison for a long time.
This is very, very similar to responses that people / groups / agencies / society often responds to rape victims with. "Are you sure it was rape? Maybe it just was ____" "Well you were walking around like that, what did you think was going to happen?" "You were walking around like that, I'm pretty sure you wanted to have sex but now you don't want to feel dirty." "Did you actually tell him no or just expect him to be a mind reader?"
I imagine you'll be tempted to say something like "Well come on!! It can be murky! It's not like other crimes! It's not like breaking someone's window, no one ever consents to having their window broken -- but people consent to having sex all the time, and rape is almost the same act as that legal activity, except a differing mental state! It's horrible if that happens to you, but cmon! Surely we should be able to ask questions to discern one from the other, since it's something so murky as to whether or not it happened!"
Well, okay. (Well. Not really okay, but..) But the problem is it it's even murkier than that, especially historically.
If you're a woman in 1930, and your husband wants to have sex with you, and you don't, and he slaps you around until you go still, and then forces himself onto you, that's pretty fucked up. Right?
But you know what's even more fucked up? It's not a crime.
Do you know what's further fucked up still? The word 'rape' doesn't even apply. I'm not merely saying, a cop won't take a report and check off a box that says 'raped'. I'm not merely saying your husband doesn't think he raped you. I'm not saying your mother or your friends won't think he raped you and it was your wifely duty.
You won't think he raped you.
You know something horrible happened, you know you were violated, but you yourself don't file it under rape.
You're a woman in 1930, and in your own mind, rape is something that a stranger does to you in an alley and that's it. Your husband raped you and you live in a society where not only is that not a crime, not only do you live in a society where you have to know most people will consider it your fault, you live in a society where you yourself don't count it as rape.
Now you're going to say 'Okay well that was 80 years ago'.
Well A) It wasn't just 80 years ago, if it was 1950, 1960, even 1970, you almost certainly still wouldn't have you yourself called it rape. Rape was, to a lesser and lesser extent, still something a strange man did to you at knife point.
And B) It was still legal in many parts of this country until 1989.
You're going to tell me that this society, where there was a giant, scotfree loophole for completely kicking-and-screaming raping a woman as long as she said 'I do' in a church at some point, as recently as 1989, has in those short couple of decades has reversed all of its inertia in terms of how shittily it treats that murkiness?
The ancestries of our civilization and society has, in its past, included times when soldiers sacking a town in the name of geopolitical manuevers considered raping the towns women to be part of their combat pay, and that was the acceptable way things were.
Slowly, through almost Sisyphean effort of moral reckoning, we got from there to the point where (again) as recently as 1989 it was no longer fucking legal to rape a woman because you paid for a marriage license.
And you think we're all good? That if anything the murkiness is now against the man's favor? You can't be.
That history, that murkiness, that eager to distance and deny and minimize, the way we supposedly-remember 'Oh hey being a victim is a powerful thing I could see why someone would lie about that' so so much more often with rape than any other crime (even though literally every crime has false reports).
Listen:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/581/anatomy-of-doubt
Read:
http://www.amazon.com/Missoula-Rape-Justice-System-College/dp/0385538731
That's rape culture.
Well, that's a step up from their most recent top google result.
Read this book if you’d like to learn more on how this is a very probable statistic. Missoula by John Krakauer, https://www.amazon.com/Missoula-Rape-Justice-System-College/dp/0385538731/ref=nodl_
Lol sure. You are a rape apologist if you refuse to believe victims who far outnumber false accusers. The right of a likely rapist to attend school is not as important as the right of students to be safe from them.
Read this and all of these so you can ignore the real evidence and continue crying tears for likely rapists.