IS RAPE A CRIME?

The executive director of Health and Wellness Services at Tufts University tells the intimate, powerful story of how attempting to bring her rapists to justice forged her dedication to activism.

The defining trauma of Bowdler’s life took place in Boston in the summer of 1984, when two men—self-confessed serial burglars—broke into her apartment and robbed and raped her. Even though there was ample evidence at the crime scene and Bowdler dutifully completed a rape kit with police, her case languished in the system. She received no answers from the detective assigned to her case—one of “a spate of break-in and rapes in the greater Boston area” during that summer—forcing her to endure years of personal and professional trauma. It’s exceedingly depressing that so much of this work portrays the author having to undergo the repeated judgment of others, including her family. Sharply encapsulating a victim’s dilemma, she writes, “decisions on whether to report are heavily socially informed—victims worry that the rape will not be considered important, that they will not be safe, that they won’t be believed, that the crime won’t be followed up on, and sometimes they see keeping the perpetrator out of trouble as self-preservation.” Indeed, as Bowdler notes, the “strong, self-assured woman of just a few days [before]” vanished with the rape, replaced by someone filled with shame and self-doubt. Divided into three parts—“A Memoir,” “An Investigation,” and “A Manifesto”—the author moves effectively among the personal and the political. She poignantly explains how watching the 1991 Anita Hill hearings (and witnessing the despicable reactions by male senators and media to her testimony) helped crystallize her activist mission, and she consistently shows herself to be a tireless advocate. Ultimately, she has learned to ask: If rape is considered a crime, why were there no investigations into her own? And when will anything change?

An urgent, necessary, stark exploration of “one of the most horrific violations that can happen to a human being.”