Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town Audiobook (Free)

From bestselling author Jon Krakauer, a stark, powerful, meticulously reported narrative about a group of sexual assaults at the University of Montana ­- tales that illuminate the human episode behind the country wide plague of campus rape

Missoula, Montana, is an average college town, with an extremely regarded state school, bucolic environment, a lively public scene, and a fantastic football team – the Grizzlies – having a rabid group of fans.

The Department of Justice investigated 350 about Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College City sexual assaults reported to the Missoula police between January 2008 and could 2012. Few of these assaults were properly managed by either the college or university or local regulators. Within this, Missoula can be typical.

A DOJ record released in Dec of 2014 estimations 110,000 women between the age groups of eighteen and twenty-four are raped every year. Krakauer’s damaging narrative of what happened in Missoula makes obvious why rape is indeed prevalent on American campuses, and why rape victims are so reluctant to survey assault.

Acquaintance rape is a crime like no other. Unlike burglary or embezzlement or any additional felony, the sufferer often comes under more suspicion than the alleged perpetrator. This is also true if the victim is sexually active; if she have been drinking prior to the assault – and if the person she accuses plays on a favorite sports team. The vanishingly little but extremely publicized incidents of fake accusations can be used to dismiss her statements in the press. If the situation goes to trial, the woman’s entire personal life turns into fair video game for defense lawyers.

This brutal reality goes a long way towards explaining why acquaintance rape is the most underreported crime in America. Furthermore to physical injury, its victims often suffer devastating mental damage that leads to feelings of shame, psychological paralysis and stigmatization. PTSD rates for rape victims are approximated to be 50%, greater than soldiers coming back from war.

In Missoula, Krakauer chronicles the searing experiences of several women in Missoula – the nights when they were raped; their dread and self-doubt in the aftermath; just how they were treated by the authorities, prosecutors, defense attorneys; the general public vilification and private anguish; their bravery in pushing forward and what it price them.

A few of them visited the police. Some declined to go to the police, or even to press fees, but wanted redress from the university, which has its own, non-criminal judicial process whenever a pupil is accused of rape. In two cases the police decided to press fees and the district attorney decided to prosecute. One case resulted in a conviction; someone to an acquittal. Those females courageous more than enough to press fees or to speak publicly about their experiences were attacked in the mass media, on Grizzly football enthusiast sites, and/or with their faces. The college or university expelled three from the accused rapists, but one was reinstated by condition officials inside a top secret proceeding. One district lawyer testified for an alleged rapist at his college or university hearing. She afterwards still left the prosecutor’s workplace and successfully defended the Grizzlies’ star quarterback in his rape trial. The horror to be raped, in each woman’s case, was magnified from the mechanics of the justice program and the result of the community.

Krakauer’s dispassionate, carefully documented accounts of what these ladies endured cuts through the abstract ideological controversy about campus rape. College-age women aren’t raped because they are promiscuous, or drunk, or send out mixed indicators, or experience guilty about casual sex, or seek attention. They will be the victims of an awful crime and deserving of compassion from culture and fairness from a justice program that is obviously broken.