Serving Proudly As The Voice Of Valley County Since 1913

Nonfiction Book Uncovers Campus Dangers Facing Montana Students

If they moan, you're good. That's the tact taken by defense counsel when representing a college male accused of attacking or raping a co-ed. That little noise symbolizes "consent," indicating that the woman is enjoying the rough sex emerging from a drunken night at a frat house or a football celebration.

The joke used to be that one went to college to learn to drink, have sex, and become an atheist. Now, there's an addendum: what women learn in higher education is gender betrayal.

Jon Krakauer is the former outdoor sports writer (Into Thin Air) who has turned to religion and politics in recent years. Now he has focused the cross-hairs on Montana, specifically on Missoula, that bastion of liberal thought and open mindedness, that haven of creativity and forward thinking, delineating its alleged culture of rape. The statistics are hard to argue: 350 assaults during the 52 months that Mr. Krakauer covers, roughly 2008 to 2012.

It's a shocking book, if accurate, as the subjects of its criticism claim it isn't. The text covers a handful of minor and major cases as examples of how local prosecutors and some police dealt with charges of rape by students and officials at the University of Montana: the trial of Grizzly quarterback Jordan Johnson for rape, the case of Allison Huguet, who accused a childhood friend of rape, and the situation of Kerry and Kaitlynn, attacked by the same man, but who butted heads with the university process. In some cases the system worked, in others it didn't, with county attorney Kirsten Pabst at the center of much of Krakauer's ire, given that she has a habit of switching sides from defense to prosecution with suspicious abandon. In her defense of Johnson, Pabst introduced the moan defense. But in Krakauer's view she is simply a symptom of a judicial system that is weighted against accusers.

The story that Krakauer tells is complicated and requires careful reading (in fact a timeline would be a helpful appendix, allowing the reader to sort among conflicting or confusing dates). Falling under the book's oversized umbrella are the consequences of Department of Education guidelines for colleges in dealing with attacks; the emotional reaction to the accused to the charges; the symbiosis between sports, college, boosters, and government; the ambiguities of the law. But among the most interesting sections of the book are Chapter 8, which explores the psychology of college rape through one of its serial practitioners, the pseudonymous "Frank," and which portrays attitudes that suggest why supporters of football players and their frat brothers have a hard time seeing rape from the victim's vantage, and Chapter 10, which reports on the findings of clinical psychologist David Lisak, whose research unveils the disturbing fact that acquaintance rape is much more prevalent than stranger rape.

At UM, enrollment is down, there is a $16 million dollar shortfall, and a new athletic director after his predecessor was canned for punishing Johnson. Has the school sought to change, or has the justice system, or even the students? And what else goes on down there that we haven't heard about, and from which guys escape with impunity? Fights? Drunk-driving? Drug trafficking? Mothers, don't let your children – at least your girls – grow up to be Grizzlies.

 

Reader Comments(0)